Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc.' 's 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Eileen McLaughlin, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call. On the call today are Scott Wells, our CEO, and David Saylor, our CFO. They will provide an overview of the 2024 Third Quarter Operating Performance of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc., and Clear Channel International, BV. We recommend you download the 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Presentation located in the financial information section of our investor website, and review the presentation during this call. After an introduction and a review of our results, we'll open the line for questions, and Justin Cochran, CEO of Clear Channel UK and Europe, will join Scott and Dave during the Q&A portion of the call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, we may make forward-looking statements regarding the company. including statements about its future financial performance and its strategic goals. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and there could be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs, or projections will be achieved or that actual results will not differ from expectations. Please review the statements of risk contained in our earnings press release and our filings with the SEC. During today's call, We will also refer to certain measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We provide schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis as part of the earnings presentation. Also, please note that the information provided on this call speaks only to management's views as of today, October 31, 2024, and may no longer be accurate at the time of a replay. Please see side four in the earnings presentation, and I will now turn the call over to Scott.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for taking the time to join us today. We delivered consolidated revenue of $559 million during the third quarter, representing an increase of 6.1% or 5.7%, excluding movements in foreign exchange rates, in line with our guidance and with growth across all our business segments. Our America segment delivered growth across all regions, driven in part by an improvement in national advertising. Airports continues to benefit from strong demand across all channels, and Europe North delivered another robust quarter with gains across the majority of the portfolio. We continue to see the benefits from our initiatives aimed at leveraging our technology investments and expanded sales teams to maximize our performance in the U.S. Utilizing our digital expertise and our radar data analytics resources, we're making inroads into verticals that have traditionally not relied on out-of-home to reach their target audiences. For example, our recently announced partnership with Sercana further strengthens our radar platform and provides CPG advertisers, who under-index in our industry, with the ability to effectively deliver their message via out-of-home. while measuring the impact of their campaigns on household purchasing behavior. In the pharma vertical, we've now reached a point where we can share some really compelling results from past campaigns, which is helping to open doors for us. We recently served as a sponsor at Digital Pharma East, one of the largest pharma marketing conferences nationally. This was a first for us, and the reception was promising. We are now at the table with numerous pharmaceutical companies and their agencies, discussing potential campaigns in the year ahead. With regard to our domestic footprint, we're excited about the recent award of a large 15-year contract for roadside advertising assets controlled by the New York MTA. This contract substantially expands our footprint in the New York tri-state area and elevates our ability to deliver market-wide programs for national and local advertisers in a complementary way. So we're making notable progress in pursuing our plan as we further scale our platform in the U.S. and continue to focus on expanding our revenue sources, which sets us up well as we look to close out the year and build on our momentum going into 2025. In the current quarter, we are continuing to see revenue growth in America. Our airports business remains strong, although we're now up against tougher comps, so the rate of growth will naturally moderate. Similar to the airports, Europe North is also up against tough comps and could post roughly flat revenues in the quarter. As I noted on our last call, we believe we are turning the corner on cash generation. AFFO exceeded discretionary capex in the third quarter, and we expect the same in the fourth quarter with continued improvement into 2025. We believe this creates the option to start to organically reduce our debt, a central goal in our focus on enhancing shareholder value. On the M&A front, negotiations for the sale of Europe North are continuing, and we remain committed to exiting Europe at a price that reflects the value being delivered by this business. Additionally, you may have seen that JCDecaux terminated its agreement to acquire our Spanish business after deciding to withdraw its regulatory filing with the Spanish competition regulator. Our understanding is that the regulatory commitments exceeded what JCDecaux was willing to pursue. The good news is that our Spanish business continued to perform well throughout the process, and we are well positioned to bring it back to market in the relatively near future. Lastly, our LATAM sale process is ongoing, and we will provide further updates in due course. So overall, we're pleased with the progress we are making on multiple fronts, and I'd like to thank our company-wide team, especially in Europe and Latin America, for their continued commitment to executing on our strategic roadmap and pursuing our long-term vision. With that, let me hand the call over to Dave. Thanks, Scott.