Uniti Group Inc.

Good morning and welcome to today's conference call to discuss Unity's third quarter 2025 earnings results. My name is Michelle and I'll be your operator for today. Today's call is being recorded and a webcast will be available on the company's investor relations website, investor.unity.com, beginning today and will remain available for 365 days. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Participants on the call will have the opportunity to ask questions following the company's prepared comments. It is now my pleasure to introduce Bill DiTullio, Unity Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury. Please begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's conference call to discuss Unity's third quarter 2025 results. Speaking on the call today will be Kenny Gunderman, our CEO, and Paul Bollington, Unity's CFO. John Harabin, president of Kinetic, will also be joining us this morning during Q&A. Before we get started, I would like to quickly cover our safe harbor statement. Please note that today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Unity's fiber build strategy, the business's growth potential, our 2025 outlook, and other statements that are not historical facts. Numerous factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For more information on those factors, please see the section titled Safe Harbor Statement in the accompanying presentation in the Risk Factors section in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Kenny.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. Starting on slide three, we're very pleased to have closed our merger with Windstream during the third quarter, and we're now well-positioned as the premier insurgent fiber provider. We have a scaled national wholesale fiber footprint that puts us in rare company to win large-scale fiber infrastructure deals, and we're first or early with fiber to hundreds of Tier 2 and 3 markets around the country, giving us the right to win for many years into the future. Our strategy is very clear and is the same simple winning formula we've had at Unity for years. First, continue to build fiber into unique locations, including by overbuilding legacy networks and moving customers onto our owned fiber while aggressively managing out of legacy products and services. Second, providing operational excellence, and third, having an insurgent, obsessive focus on the customer. This formula has led to industry-leading churn in NPS scores and predictable mid-single-digit growth at Unity. Fiber is indisputably a superior product, and coupled with execution prowess, we're now firmly on the same path post our merger with Windstream. Even though we've not yet had one full quarter of performance to report, we're starting to see strong, improving trends. We continue to add industry veterans to our leadership team, including with experience at Frontier and Ziply, among others, And we've now fully onboarded and are ramping up key third-party partners to accelerate our fiber build and go-to-market strategy. We now have 115 active third-party crews, which is about two and a half times increased from before the merger. And we should have close to 400 by the second quarter of next year. Thus, even though we were behind our plan at the merger close, we fully expect to get caught up and beyond in the first quarter of next year. From the operational point of view, we're very pleased and focused on improving our customer experience and are seeing early progress. For example, in October, we had the highest first call resolution ever at Kinetic, the lowest transfer rate in over two years, and a record low dispatch rate, and a record low for fiber repeat trouble tickets, among other improvements. New leadership with experience building and executing on a scaled fiber-to-home strategy is focusing our field resources and go-to-market teams on what matters most to our customers in this new competitive environment. We are now an insurgent share-taker and have the right strategy, leadership, and assets to accelerate trends towards positive revenue and EBITDA growth. Turning to slide four, during the quarter, we saw a strong fiber revenue growth of 13%. the highest number of fiber gross ads ever, and the highest net ads in two years at Kinetic. Because of our historical fiber-to-the-node investment, we were also able to quickly and cost-efficiently upgrade 85% of our fiber footprint to be multi-gig capable, greatly enhancing our upsell opportunities in the coming quarters. In fiber infrastructure, we had an outstanding quarter of new bookings fueled by hyperscalers, and we were named Best North American Connectivity Provider by Capacity Media. The opportunity in wholesale fiber right now is generational in nature, and we are extremely well positioned with the right strategy, leadership, and assets to capture share in dark fiber and waves. As you can see on slide five, we're making steady progress towards all of our key goals. Almost 80% of total revenue today is from core fiber businesses, while nearly 40% of our total revenue for the entire company and at Kinetic is from fiber. We also groom grew homes past and fiber subs by 11% and 17% year over year and are well on our path to 3.5 million homes and 1.25 million fiber subs by 2029. Slide six illustrates that our path forward is not only clear, but it's also reasonably predictable as the critical fiber inflections are already beginning. By the end of this year, more of our consumer customers at Kinetic will be on fiber than legacy networks. And by the second quarter of next year, Kinetic's consumer fiber revenue will exceed DSL revenue. By the end of next year, consolidated fiber revenue will exceed 50% for the entire company. Once these important inflections happen, the flywheel starts to accelerate, leading to total revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth year over year in 2026 for our core fiber businesses. setting us up for year-over-year revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth for the entire company beginning in 2027. Turning to slide seven, a vitally important part of our growth will come from our fiber infrastructure business. There has never been a better time to be a wholesale fiber provider. Broadband trends are accelerating across virtually all categories, especially AI-driven use cases, as evidenced by another strong quarter of new bookings. Although we're building substantial amounts of new fiber, especially for the hyperscalers, our scaled national footprint gives us terrific lease-up potential, driving our blended cash yields to 34%, the highest we've ever seen. And we believe there's more to come. On slide 8, our hyperscaler funnel has grown approximately 13% since second quarter, with numerous large deals getting booked but being replenished with many more. Hyperscaler activity as a percentage of our total funnel at standalone unity has improved materially year-over-year to around 30% of MRR. Importantly, when measured on a total contract value basis, hyperscalers are an even higher percentage of the total combined sale funnel, highlighting that the benefit of these deals are not always apparent in traditional bookings metrics. Before turning the call to Paul, I want to briefly provide an update on our outlook with hyperscalers. We now believe the total addressable market for AI and hyperscalers for fiber providers is approximately 50% higher than what we originally estimated at the beginning of this year. Our conviction resonates from the strong new bookings we're seeing, our steadily growing qualified funnel, and the bespoke conversations we're having with our customers. Our customers continue to say to us both privately and publicly that investing in AI infrastructure is mission critical to their businesses. Demand constantly outpaces supply, and quarter after quarter, CapEx assumptions go up. For Unity, the next few quarters will likely bring the largest deals we've seen to date, and we have clear visibility into at least three years of strong value-accretive deal flow. With that, I'll turn the call to Paul.