EchoStar Corporation

Greetings and welcome to the Echostar Corporation fourth quarter and year-end 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Dean Manson, Chief Legal Officer. Thank you, Mr. Manson. You may begin.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to Echostar's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. We will begin with opening remarks from Hamid Akhavan, President and CEO, followed by Paul Orban, EVP and Principal Financial Officer, then Gary Shandman, EVP and Group President of Video Services, John Swearinger, President of Technology and COO, and Paul Gasky, COO of Hughes. Also present with us is Tom Cullen, EVP Corporate Development. As usual, we request that any participant producing a report not identify other participants or their firms in such reports. We also do not allow audio recording, which we ask that you respect. All statements we make during this call, other than statements of historical fact, constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provided by the Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to be materially different from historical results and from any future results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. For a list of those factors and risks, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, filed on February 29, and our subsequent filings made with the SEC. All cautionary statements we make during the call should be understood as being applicable to any forward-looking statements we make wherever they appear. You should carefully consider the risks described in our reports and should not place any undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. We assume no responsibility for updating any forward-looking statements. We refer to OIBDA during this call. The comparable gap measure and a reconciliation thereto is presented in our earnings release. With that, I'll turn it over to Hamid.

Thank you, Dean. Good morning, everyone. This is my first earnings call as the CEO of the new Echostar. You may notice that we are using a format that we have been using at Echostar, which is different from the traditional dish format. I find it more to my style of providing helpful, descriptive information up front, which attempts to answer some of the questions you may have. The merger was an important milestone in both companies' shared history. It brings us closer to our goal of providing ubiquitous connectivity to people, enterprises, and things everywhere. It will enable business opportunities that we intend to realize in cost and revenue synergies as we continue to position EchoStar in the market with its superior portfolio of brands, technology, and services. This merger combined Dish Network satellite technology, streaming services, engineering expertise, retail wireless business, and nationwide 5G network with ECOSTAR's premier satellite communication solutions, enterprise go-to-market capabilities, and U.S.-based manufacturing. Collectively, it creates a new kind of athlete in global telecom, and for ECOSTAR to be a leader in terrestrial and non-terrestrial wireless connectivity and entertainment services exceeding any other company. When we merged ECOSTAR and DISH, both companies were at a crossroads, as each was transitioning from building capabilities to commercializing them. At DISH, we built the world's first standalone 5G Open RAN cloud-native wireless network. At EchoStar, we launched the largest ever commercial broadband satellite. Over the past 90 days, we have sharpened our focus on taking our newly combined capabilities to market and leveraging synergies across our diverse portfolio of products. Work is well on the way to improve our capital structure, reset our retail wireless business, and grow customer traffic on our network, taking full advantage of our unique combination of assets. For now, I would like to first comment on our efforts to improve our capital structure. Let me begin by stating that we have a value-generating business with a strong potential for growth. We have an asset-rich balance sheet with significant capacity to support additional debt. That said, in the short term, we need to provide additional liquidity to fund the growth of our business and address near-term debt maturities. To this end, we have enacted an operating plan for 2024 with the goal to achieving positive operating free cash flow, defined as free cash flow minus debt service payments. This includes a reduction in our annual total operating expenses by $1 billion between synergies and other cost measures. As part of our work towards an improved capitalist structure, including a longer maturity runway and opportunity to deleverage our balance sheet, the strategic asset transactions we conducted in January enhance our flexibility to implement various balance sheet initiatives including opportunities to raise new financing. Following those transactions, we launched two exchange offers designed to address our near-term debt obligations and to reduce our overall debt. The exchange offers we launched were not accepted by our existing investors. While discussions with some stakeholders are ongoing, we are prepared to continue good faith discussions with all of our stakeholders and arrive at solutions that are in the best interest of the company and all involved parties. With this as background, let us now address the going concern qualification noted in our 10-K, which I'll have Paul Orban cover in addition to several key financial metrics and one-time items. Paul?