Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Shenandoah Telecommunications' third quarter 2022 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 Shentel. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shentel's results for third quarter 2022. Our results were announced in a press release distributed this morning, and the presentation we'll be reviewing is included on the investor page at our website, www.gentel.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 Bulk, 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. With that, I'll 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. I'd like to start with a couple observations on how Shentel is well positioned in the current environment and how we're differentiating ourselves from our peers. Please refer to slide four. First, as we reported this morning, we continue to grow our broadband data subscribers and top line revenues. Our Glowfiber product continues to take share as our fiber to the home symmetrical speeds, outstanding local customer service, and fair static pricing gives us a sustainable competitive advantage over our cable and DSL competitors. Second, we ended the third quarter with approximately 131,000 fiber passings with clear visibility to an additional 326,000 passings over the next four years. Unlike some newer entrants in the fiber to the home space, We have had the same network leadership team in place since we launched our glow fiber strategy in 2018. We have longstanding relationships with our outside plant contractors and the local power companies that are critical for aerial construction and access to poles. We were able to get ahead of the supply chain constraints and have six to nine months of fiber and network equipment inventory on hand. All these factors are valuable contributors to the strong construction momentum that we expect to continue into 2023. Third, we have over $400 million in liquidity as of the end of September. Our business plan is fully funded and we have no material debt maturities until 2026. We're in the fortunate position to be able to continue to invest aggressively in our Fiber First strategy without having to access the capital markets to fund our plan. Lastly, we delevered our balance sheet last year when we sold our wireless business. We currently have $25 million in outstanding debt. In a period of rising interest rates, we feel this provides a financial advantage over many of our peers who are highly levered and therefore more sensitive to the increasing cost of capital to fund their expansion. We also feel our low leverage and non-core tower assets uniquely position us to be opportunistic if the right opportunity should come along. In summary, the economic conditions have changed dramatically over the past year with higher inflation, rising interest rates, tightening of the credit markets, and decline in the equity market's perceived value for cable companies. But the fundamentals of our business and prospects have largely remained the same. I'll now provide an update on Glowfiber results in the third quarter. As noted on slide five, we had another record quarter with Glowfiber data net additions of approximately 4,000, increasing sequentially almost 19% as our fiber network expanded and our brand awareness grew. We expect net ads to trend up as we continue to expand our network and build the Glowfiber brand. Turning to slide six, We added over 18,000 new Glowfiber passings in the quarter and ended the third quarter with approximately 131,000 passings. Our government relations team continued its progress in securing new Glowfiber franchises and government grant agreements, bringing our total franchise and grant award passings to 457,000, or 95% of our 2,026 target fiber passings. We executed all the Virginia grant agreements during the third quarter, and engineering construction planning is now underway. We expect to have our first fiber passings and subscribers in these unserved areas in the first half of 2023. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.