Shenandoah Telecommunications Co

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Shenandoah Telecommunications' fourth 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 fourth quarter and year ending 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 shentel.com website. 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. You are 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'll now turn the call over to Chris. Go ahead, Chris.

Thanks, Kurt. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning, and I hope everyone's doing well. We're very pleased with our results for 2024, which was a pivotal year for our company as we successfully expanded into Ohio through our acquisition of Horizon, and set new records for construction and sales in our Glow Fiber business. Slide four lists the highlights for our Horizon integration. We completed the integration of the remaining two back office systems in the fourth quarter. In all, we integrated six separate systems in nine months, which was three months faster than our original plan. The successful integration, along with identifying new opportunities for improved productivity, allowed us to upsize our annual run rate synergy savings from our original estimate of $9.6 million to $13.8 million. We realized $4.5 million of these savings in 2024 and expect to realize an additional $8.5 million in 2025, with the remaining amount expected to be realized in the first quarter of 2026. I'll now turn to slide five to give an update on execution of our Glowfiber expansion plan. 2024 was the fourth consecutive year we increased both our construction pace and customer net additions. New passings released to sales were approximately 97,000, and customer net additions were over 21,000. We remain on target to complete Glowfiber's seven-year construction phase by the end of next year. Moving to slide six, since Glowfiber's first full year in 2020, we have increased customers and revenue at compound annual growth rates of 99% and 135% respectively. While the construction phase of Glowfiber is projected to be substantially complete in 2026, we expect Glowfiber customer net additions and revenue to be an engine of growth for the next six to seven years with penetration levels expected to increase from the current 19% towards our projected terminal penetration rate of approximately 37%. We anticipate the Glowfiber expansion markets will be our largest line of business in terms of customers by 2026 and revenue by 2029. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jim to review the details of our financial results.