Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Shenandoah Telecommunications' first quarter 2024 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.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shentel's results for the first quarter 2024. 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.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 statements. Therefore, we have provided a detailed discussion of various risk factors in our SEC filings, which you are encouraged to review. Your caution 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 this morning, and I hope everyone is well. I will start the call with an update on the recent transactions and our strategy execution. As listed on slide four, we announced and closed on the sale of our towers during the first quarter. The $310 million sales price represents a multiple of approximately 31 times 2023 tower segment adjusted EBITDA when considering the expected T-Mobile revenue churn we had previously disclosed. We're very pleased with the sale price, especially when considering the publicly traded tower companies are trading at multiples in the high teens. This transaction is a good example of the market value of our assets and businesses exceeding the implied value in our stock price. We also closed on $356 million in new financings on April 1st, including $275 million in incremental credit facility capacity and $81 million in preferred equity. We had strong interest from both lenders and financial sponsors during the financing processes, which reflects well on our track record, management team, and Fiber First strategy. These financings will provide growth capital to continue to invest into new Glow Fiber expansion markets. On April 1st, we closed on the acquisition of Horizon Telecom for $385 million, which included issuing 4.1 million common shares to a selling shareholder of Horizon. Horizon's fiber-rich network will open up new Glowfiber expansion markets in Ohio while doubling the size of our commercial fiber business. We recently announced our plans to expand the Glowfiber network to Greenfield, Hillsborough, Jackson, Johnstown, and Zanesville, Ohio. We're excited to welcome our new Ohio colleagues to Shentel, and I'm pleased to report that Glenn Lytle has joined the senior management team to lead commercial sales for the combined company. Glenn brings over 25 years of commercial fiber sales experience, including the last five years successfully growing the Horizon commercial fiber business. I'll now turn to slide five to give an update on our strategy execution and our Horizon integration efforts. Although we've only owned Horizon for about five weeks, we're off to a fast start with our integration efforts. We announced a brand change from Horizon to Glowfiber in mid-April and implemented a new Glowfiber rate card in Ohio. Similar to the plans we use in the Mid-Atlantic states, we focus on easy, straightforward pricing with no long-term contracts. We expect the new rate card will enhance customer additions and reduce churn. We also identified another $1 million in annual run rate expense synergy savings, increasing our target to $10.6 million. We began to implement plans to achieve these synergies in April, realizing about $4.8 million annualized, or about 45% of our target as we enter May. We expect to complete the integration and realize the full energy savings target by the end of the first half of 2025. In parallel with our sale, acquisition, and financing activities, we've reported a strong quarter of operating results in our mid-Atlantic markets. We added 5,000 Glow Fiber customers, setting a new quarterly record. We also constructed and released to sales almost 26,000 new Glow Fiber passings. With the 260,000 passings constructed in the Mid-Atlantic markets and 15,000 passings acquired as part of the Horizon merger, we now have 275,000 Glow Fiber expansion market passings, or 46% of our year-end 2026 target of 600,000. Moving to slide six, we now have over 15,000 route miles in our super regional fiber network spanning seven adjacent states. The combination with Horizon has been well received by our commercial customers. We now have 25 low fiber markets as reflected on slide seven. We have started engineering, permitting, and or construction in another eight markets, including the five new markets in Ohio. With the Horizon acquisition closed and most of the underwriting of new markets complete, we have good visibility into the future state of our Glow Fiber network and markets. The next 32 months will be focused on execution of our build and sales plan. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.