Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Shenandoah Telecommunications' fourth 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 Analyst for Shentel.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shentel's results for 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 Volt, 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 may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties. These may cause our actual results to differ materially from the statements Therefore, I 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. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Chris. Go ahead, Chris.

Thanks, Kirk. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning and trust that you're staying healthy and safe. As summarized on slide four, 2021 was truly a transformative year for Shentel. We successfully divested our wireless business, our largest business segment at the time, for $1.94 billion and used the proceeds to pay almost $940 million in a special dividend to shareholders and to pay off all of our debt. Simultaneously with the divestiture, we raised $400 million in growth capital to fund our ambitious Fiber First growth plan. We invested $82 million in 2021 to grow the Glow Fiber network and customer base, achieving a record year for Glow Fiber construction and net additions. We also secured franchise agreements for 175,000 new passings and were announced as the winner of over $54 million in state and local grants that will subsidize construction to 16,000 unserved homes. We start 2022 with a fiber construction backlog of over 255,000 passings in addition to the 75,000 Glow Fiber homes and businesses passed as of the end of 2021. We now have franchise approvals to build over two thirds of our 2026 goal of 466,000 fiber passings. We expect by the end of 2023 to pass more homes and businesses with fiber than our incumbent cable network. We're very excited about the creation of this platform that will provide sustainable growth for the next several years. Additionally, as we resized our organization to reflect our smaller broadband-focused business, we obtained $4 million in annual run rate expense savings. We continue to take opportunities to drive non-employee costs out of our business through changes in procurement practices, software automation, and lower facility costs. We have now identified an incremental $5 million in annual operating cost savings that we expect to achieve by the beginning of 2023. Shifting now to our broadband network expansion on slide five, we ended 2021 with over 75,000 glow fiber passings. We've increased the pace of construction each year since our first year of construction in 2019. We added over 46,000 new passings in 2021, a 73% improvement over 2020. We expect to add 75,000 passings in 2022, as we continue our strong construction momentum. As we announced in October, we have stopped expansion of being fixed wireless with passings now likely to stay steady at approximately 27,700. In total, our integrated broadband network ended 2021 with approximately 314,000 passings, and we're well on our way to reaching our 2026 target broadband passings of 730,000. Turning to slide six, 2021 was another strong year for broadband data net additions of approximately 15,900. We had a record year for glow fiber net additions of 7,200 driven by our network expansion. Our incumbent cable business added approximately 7,300 net data additions below the elevated additions in 2020 when the pandemic stimulated additional demand. but 15% higher than Net Additions in 2019. In our first full year of operations, we had approximately 1,400 Beam Net Additions. The underlying theme across all three of our branded internet products is high-quality broadband services, outstanding local customer service, and fair pricing. This approach drove a record year of broadband data turn of 1.5%, We expect modest growth in our incumbent cable and beam data subscribers in 2022, with the majority of our growth expected to be driven by another record year of Glow Fiber additions as we enter new markets and double the reach of our network. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.