EchoStar Corporation

Greetings. Welcome to Echostar Corporation's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone today should require operator assistance during the call, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll now turn the call over to Dean Masson. Dean, you may now begin your presentation.

Thank you, Rob. Welcome to Echostar's first quarter 2024 earnings call. We will begin with opening remarks from Hamid Akhavan, President and CEO, followed by Paul Orban, EVP and Principal Financial Officer, Gary Shandman, EVP and Group President of Video Services, Paul Gasky, COO of Hughes, and John Swearinga, President of Technology and COO. 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 Securities 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 quarterly report, 10Q, for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, filed on May 8, 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 and free cash flow during this call. The comparable gap measure and a reconciliation for OIBDA is presented in our earnings release, and for free cash flow, those things are presented in our 10Q. With that, I'll turn it over to Hamid.

Thank you, Dean. Welcome, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. We're just over four months into the merger between DISH and ECOSTAR, and operations are progressing to plan for the year. Given the nature of earnings calls, our prepared remarks will focus mainly on the operating business. However, we understand that most of you are also interested in hearing about our efforts to refinance our maturing debt obligations and improve our cash flow position. To that end, we continue to work on a number of avenues. We have fielded a variety of offers and are pursuing those which can support our long-term objectives. and delicate nature of this process demands time and confidentiality. We will certainly have more to share in due course. As for the operating business, in the first quarter, we met our budget targets in nearly all important metrics in each of our business units. We will elaborate on some of those results during this call today. To start, as I shared on our last call, our 2024 operating plan targets a positive operating free cash flow. This includes efficiencies, optimizations, and synergies, which result in a reduction in our annual total operating expenses of $1 billion. Our first quarter results keeps us on track for achieving that objective. We have sharpened our leadership and operating business on three distinct go-to-market business units. This allows for greater accountability and profitability-focused management while providing our business leaders greater flexibility when it's needed. We have tightened our focus on selectively acquiring and retaining higher value subscribers, and our efforts are already showing up in Q1 numbers. Overall, ARPU is increasing in every business unit, while churn is down in pay TV and retail wireless. As we work to improve our operating profitability, we have not lost our focus and edge on innovation. Our teams are hard at work developing and enhancing our catalog of offerings for consumer and enterprise customers, with many first-time wins in new sectors and channels. We have a state-of-the-art open RAN wireless network, which is now serving hundreds of thousands of happy customers and demonstrating its power and speed in trials. Our new Jupiter 3 broadband satellites the largest ever in commercial operation, is attracting new customers at the fastest rate in many years, and the pay TV business unit's operational efficiency has improved year over year. We are pleased by our start to the year and plan to maintain the momentum through the rest of the year. With that, I will turn it over to Paul Orban for additional commentary on our Q1 numbers.