Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

21 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Kirk Andrews, Director of Financial Planning and Analyst for Shentel.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shentel's results for the first quarter of 2021. Our results were announced in a press release distributed last night, and the presentation we'll be reviewing is included on the investor page at our website, www.chentel.com. Please note that an audio replay of this call will be made available later today. The details are set forth in the press release announcing this call. With us on the call today are Chris French, President and Chief Executive Officer, Dave Heimbach, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Jim Volk, Senior Vice President of Finance and CFO. After our prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. As always, let me refer you to slide two of the presentation, which contains our safe harbor disclaimer, and remind you that this conference call may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties. These may cause our actual results to differ materially from the statements. Therefore, we have provided a detailed discussion of various risk factors in our SEC filings, which you are encouraged to review. Your caution is not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Chris. Go ahead, Chris.

Thanks, Kirk. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning and hope everyone is staying healthy and safe. I'm pleased to report that we started 2021 with a strong quarter of growth in both our operational and financial results. I'd like to start with the leading indicators for our financial growth. As reflected on slide four, we added approximately 13,000 new passings in the first quarter, with total passings now just under 260,000. Our diversified last mile broadband networks grew an impressive 48,000 passings year over year. Our Glow Fiber branded fiber to the home business added 5,800 new passings including the launch of service in the Virginia markets of Salem during the first quarter and Roanoke and Lynchburg in April. We also added approximately 5,800 passings with our beam service during the quarter, with service now available in five counties in Virginia. Lastly, the completion of the acquisition of Canaan Cable on December 31st added over 1,000 homes passed to our incumbent cable network. Turning to slide five, broadband data net additions increased by over 4,200, or almost 62% from the first quarter 2020. With the tailwinds from COVID slowing, our incumbent cable net additions of 2,500 have returned to pre-COVID growth levels. However, Glowfiber and Beam now make up more than 40% of the broadband data net additions, keeping our organic penetration growth rates among the industry leaders. We believe that we have a superior value proposition relative to our competitors in all markets we serve, as reflected by the outstanding broadband data churn results across all our services. Construction pace of our edge-out network expansion and our hyper-local marketing and customer service are critical components for driving sustainable double-digit revenue growth that Jim and Dave will provide more details on later in the call. Moving to slide six, I'd like to transition now to provide a brief update on the pending sale of our wireless assets and operations. The Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period expired on April 26th without the Department of Justice taking action, thus allowing the transaction to be consummated pending regulatory approvals from the Federal Communications Commission and the Public Service Commission of West Virginia, which we expect to secure in the next 60 to 90 days. The asset purchase agreement with T-Mobile is expected to be executed during the same timeframe, and we expect to close on the sale in early third quarter. Related to the pending wireless sale, on April 5th, we announced an organizational restructuring plan that will reduce our workforce by approximately 340 employees, or 30% of our total base. About 90% of the reductions are employees who support wireless operations and who will not automatically transfer to T-Mobile as part of the transaction. We're coordinating with T-Mobile to assist in transitioning to them as many of the affected employees as possible following the closing of the sale. We're also proactively providing career transition services and severance pay and benefits to those not hired by T-Mobile to assist with the disruption uncertainty for the affected employees and their families. The first wave of employees will exit in May, and we have recognized restructuring costs in the first quarter results for continuing and discontinued operations of approximately 600,000 and 200,000, respectively. Most of the employees impacted by the workforce reduction will exit following the closing of the sale and any required transition services. We expect to realize annualized run rate operating expense savings for continuing operations of approximately 4 million. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.