Uniti Group Inc.

Good morning and welcome to today's conference call to discuss Unity's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings results. My name is Gigi 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's Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please begin.

Thank you, Gigi. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's conference call to discuss Unity's fourth quarter and full year of 2025 results. Speaking on the call today will be Kenny Gunderman, our CEO, and Paul Bowenton, Unity 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 2026 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 and the risk factors sections 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. 2025 was a landmark year for Unity. We successfully closed our transformative merger with Windstream, establishing us as the premier insurgent fiber provider. We have a scaled national wholesale fiber footprint that puts us in a rare company to win large scale fiber infrastructure deals. And we are first or early with fiber to hundreds of tier two and tier three markets around the country. Within a few months of closing the merger, we have established a new insurgent leadership team with recent successful experience transforming fiber to the home businesses. We've reignited the fiber builds at both Kinetic and Fiber Infrastructure and have significantly lowered our cost of capital through several landmark ABS transactions. We are well positioned strategically. We have the right assets and plan and team in place to future-proof our business. Slide 5 highlights the early success of our execution. In the fourth quarter of last year, we had a terrific year-over-year revenue growth in our core fiber business of 13%. At Kinetic, where our transformational efforts are most acute, consumer fiber gross adds of 38,000 in the fourth quarter were the highest ever, and net adds of 28,000 were the highest in almost three years. Bringing Kinetic churn down to our industry-leading levels at Unity is a big focus of ours, and we've already started to see success, posting the best consumer fiber churn since the pandemic. Importantly, we also hit an inflection point in December and have heavily ramped up the build. Our business is being fueled by twin engines right now, including the fiber to the home build at Kinetic and the hyperscaler AI build at Fiber Infrastructure. As we've previously foreshadowed, the fourth quarter was a record quarter for us in terms of new bookings, bringing the largest customer contracts ever signed in our company's history. Our priorities won't change this year. We're going to ramp our Fiber to the Home build at Kinetic, targeting 450,000 to 500,000 new homes, almost doubling last year's activity, and approximately 700,000 consumer fiber subs by the end of 2026. At Fiber Infrastructure, we're continuing to benefit from all the tailwinds driving wholesale fiber, including fiber to the home, mobile wireless, satellite, and of course, hyperscaler and generative AI demand, among others. For the hyperscalers, we expect to see even more activity in 2026 than last year. Importantly, we're now starting to show solid lease-up on these builds, demonstrating our discipline in making investments in this space. At Unity Solutions, we're beginning to cross-sell products into our on-net fiber base at Unity Fiber and Kinetic. Today, we estimate our managed services attachment rate to be below 0.1 times at Unity Fiber, and we think it could rise to be materially higher over time. Lastly, we're going to continue our track record of optimizing the balance sheet through disciplined access to capital markets, as well as through monetizing non-core assets, as Paul will discuss later. 2026 is an important inflection year for Unity, and in particular is a big investment year at Kinetic. As such, showing progress towards key goals is critical, and we previously committed to some milestones, as highlighted on slide seven. We achieved our first milestone during the fourth quarter of greater than 50% of kinetic subs now on fiber, and we are on track to achieve the other critical milestones throughout the course of this year and next. As such, we still expect to realize consolidated revenue and EBITDA growth in 2027. We are laser focused on operational excellence, customer obsession, intensely growing our fiber business, and executing on our strategy of building fiber into unique locations including overbuilding legacy networks and moving customers onto our owned fiber. All of this combined with aggressively managing out of legacy services will lead to growth. As slide 8 illustrates, we expect to show progress on key metrics every quarter, and as you can see, we continue to grow in the fourth quarter of last year. We're well on our way to 3.5 million homes passed with fiber and 1.25 million fiber subs by the end of 2029. and we're also closer to 90% of our revenue coming from our core business. Our progress on these metrics reinforces our conviction that we're creating substantial value for our shareholders every step of the way. As outlined on slide nine, in order to fully maximize the opportunity in front of us, we have to quickly transform Kinetic into an insurgent fiber provider as opposed to a traditional telecom operator. Within just months of closing our merger, we now have an insurgent leadership team in place. Led by John and Robin, we've hired over a dozen new leaders in construction, sales, operations, customer loyalty, and analytics that have relevant recent Fiber to the Home transformation experience. We've also revamped our go-to-market strategy by focusing on the customer and eliminating obvious pain points, investing in high-impact, value-added products and services, and expanding our direct sales and channel partnerships. As I mentioned earlier, we've also successfully reignited the build by deemphasizing subsidized builds and bringing in third-party crews to help us build more quickly. The metrics I went through earlier indicate that our transformation is showing early signs of success, and I'm highly confident that'll continue. With that said, we're in the early days, so 2026 will not only be an investment year, but a major inflection year on several fronts. While we fully expect to hit some bumps along the road towards achieving these goals, in the end, we will be successful in accomplishing our long-term objectives. Turning to fiber infrastructure, the opportunity in wholesale fiber right now is generational in nature, and we're extremely well positioned with the right strategy, leadership, and assets to capture our share in both dark fiber and waves. 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 our record quarter of new bookings. Although we're building substantial amounts of new fiber, especially for the hyperscalers, we're doing it profitably, and our scaled national footprint gives us terrific lease-up potential, driving our blended anchor lease-up cash yields to 34%, the highest we've ever seen. We're in the early innings of an unprecedented fiber build within our industry. This opportunity continues to grow for us, so today we're providing a multi-year view of what we believe the opportunity for unity is at this moment in time. First, I want to reiterate that our focus is on discipline strategic fiber builds and related economics, the same discipline growth we've applied in prior build cycles. The table on the right side of slide 11 shows the early returns we're seeing on the builds to date. We've chosen to use IRRs versus cash yields due to how these deals are structured with large upfront payments from the customers. With that said, you can see that we're not only getting strong economics on the anchor, but the lease up as well. We're highly confident that the lease up will continue to grow substantially, especially since we're building dense fiber networks that pass key strategic locations within our footprint. When we build fiber for the hyperscalers, we plan to build inside our existing footprint or we'll look for ways to strategically expand our connected footprint. We're not building one-off networks. We're building networks where we have the ability to lease them up for many years into the future and we see a long runway, especially when we start to hit the inference phase. We're also seeing benefits from some of these builds by using the backhaul for our own business, including and especially at Kinetic. Slide 12 illustrates over the next three years we expect to build approximately 6,000 new route miles of fiber and we expect to get close to a billion dollars of cumulative non-recurring cash revenue and up to 25 million of recurring cash revenue by 2028. Over the next three years, a meaningful portion of our economics is supported by executed contracts, including 100% of the economics included in our 2026 guidance. Beyond this three-year bill cycle, we not only expect more fiber bills to come, but importantly, we expect to really ramp the lease up. This will lead to additional non-recurring cash revenue of approximately $500 million after 2030. As a result, we expect to achieve a total return on our capital of two to four times. With that, I'll turn the call to Paul.