Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

Welcome to Shenandoah Telecommunications' second quarter 2021 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 Analysis for Shintel. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shintel's results for the second 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, Ed McKay, 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 statement. Therefore, we have provided a detailed discussion of various risk factors in our SEC filings, which you are encouraged to review. you're cautioned 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. With that, I will now turn the call over to Chris. Go ahead, Chris.

Thanks, Kirk. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning, and I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe. It took three years since Brent announced their merger with T-Mobile, but we're very pleased to have completed the $1.94 billion sale of our wireless assets and operations to T-Mobile on July 1st. The sale successfully completes a 25-year chapter in the history of Shentel and allows us to temporarily de-lever our business, return significant value to our shareholders, and fully focus on our rapidly growing broadband business. Immediately following the sale, we've repaid all of our outstanding term loans, totaling $681 million, and our board of directors approved an $18.75 per share special dividend, totaling approximately $937 million. The special dividend will be paid on August 2nd. As we look forward to growing our broadband business, we closed on a $400 million new financing facility, that will provide growth capital to expand our broadband networks from 279,000 homes and business passings to 730,000 passings. Jim will provide more details on the financing shortly. During the second quarter, we also began to transform our cost structure around our broadband and tower businesses. We announced workforce reductions in April that will allow us to realize $1.7 million in annual run rate cost savings and continuing operations as we exit the second quarter. As we complete these previously announced reductions, we expect the annual run rate cost savings to grow to $3.3 million as we exit the third quarter and $4 million as we enter 2022. Shifting now to our broadband network expansion on slide five, we continued our strong construction momentum in the second quarter, with 19,000 new passings being added, with the total passings now just under 279,000. Our Glow Fiber branded Fiber to the Home business added 12,000 new passings, doubling the pace of the last two quarters, including the launch of service in the Virginia markets of Roanoke and Lynchburg in April. Our beam fixed wireless network added over 6,500 passings during the quarter, with our beam service now available to over 21,000 homes in seven Virginia and West Virginia counties. We expect our integrated broadband network to reach approximately 329,000 passings by the end of 2021. Turning to slide six, broadband data net additions were over 3,900, despite a seasonal bump and churn due primarily to college student move outs in several of our markets. The second quarter was a pivotal turning point in the mix of our net additions with Glow Fiber and Beam now contributing over 50% of our net ads. We anticipate this trend will continue over the next several years. DataNet's additions over the last several quarters and reduction in corporate expenses were the primary drivers in the outstanding revenue and adjusted oil to growth during the second quarter. Before turning the call to our financial results, I'd like to introduce Ed McKay, who was recently promoted to Chief Operating Officer on July 2nd. Ed has been with Shentel for over 17 years, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations. Ed is an outstanding leader and has been instrumental in the launch and growth of our Glow Fiber and Beam new services, making him a natural successor to lead our operations into the next chapter of our broadband-centric business. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.