AT&T Inc.

standing by. Welcome to the AT&T second quarter of 2019 earnings call. At this time, all participant phone lines are in a listen-only mode. Later, there'll be an opportunity for your questions. If you'd like to queue up for a question today, you can press 1 followed by 0. If you need any assistance during the presentation, please press star followed by 0. Just as a brief reminder, today's conference is being recorded, and I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter conference call. I'm Mike Viola, head of investor relations for AT&T, and joining me on the call today is Randall Stevenson, AT&T's chairman and CEO, and John Stevens, AT&T's chief financial officer. Randall will provide an update of our key 2019 initiatives, and John will cover our operating results, and then we'll follow that up with a Q&A session. Before we begin, I want to call your attention to our safe harbor statement, which says that some of our comments today may be forward-looking. As such, they're subject to risks and uncertainties. Results may differ materially, and additional information is available on the Investor Relations website. I also want to remind you that we're in the quiet period, for the FCC Spectrum Auction 103, so we can't address any questions about that today. As always, our earnings materials are available on the investor relations page of the AT&T website. That includes our news release, investor briefing, 8K, associated schedules, et cetera. And one more item before I turn it over to Randall. We've scheduled our WarnerMedia Day for the afternoon of October 29 at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, California. We will discuss more details on the new streaming service, HBO Max, and more details will come, but go ahead and mark your calendars. And so with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Randall Stevenson.

Thanks, Mike. Good morning. The headline on the second quarter and the first half of the year is we're hitting each of our commitments we made for 2019, and you can see those on slide three. I'll start with our deleveraging plans, which are right on track. Since we closed the merger last June, net debt is down $18 billion. We expect to further reduce net debt about another $12 billion in the second half of the year, and that should get us to a 2.5 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA range by year end. And to the extent that we can overachieve on that objective, you can expect we'll take a hard look at allocating capital to share buybacks in the back half of the year. Wireless is about half of our overall EBITDA, and it continues to fire on all cylinders. Last quarter, we grew revenues, EBITDA, and phone subscribers, both postpaid and prepaid. Wireless service revenues were up 2.4% in the second quarter, and we're continuing to see the payoff on our investments with a world-class network. Our wireless network has been named the fastest, the best, and the most reliable by independent testing services. FirstNet continues to be the driver of our network performance as well as our 5G leadership. And at the end of the quarter, we were about 60% complete with our FirstNet coverage, ahead of plan, and we're now targeting 70% completion by year end. And our FirstNet build is accelerating our 5G deployment. As we deploy FirstNet, we're installing hardware that can be upgraded to 5G with a simple software release. As a result, were on track for nationwide 5G coverage by the first half of 2020. Turning to WarnerMedia, it was another strong quarter. Merger synergies remain on track, and we had solid operating income growth across all three business units. This was a record year of 191 primetime Emmy nominations for WarnerMedia, and HBO alone scored 137 nominations. That was the most in its history. So what was the result of all of this? We had very strong HBO digital subscriber growth in the quarter and were set up really well for the second half of the year. Bottom line, HBO's stepped up investment in content is working. And this will be critical as we launch HBO Max next spring. And as Mike mentioned, we look forward to sharing more about HBO Max in October. Our entertainment group continues to make solid progress. We didn't just stabilize EBITDA, we actually grew it by 1.1% in the quarter. Later this summer, we'll beta launch AT&T TV in a few markets. That's our live TV service over broadband. We have some really high expectations for this product, and we're going to learn from the pilot, and then we'll expand to more cities as we go through the year. IP broadband revenue growth remains strong. We continue to see solid growth in our AT&T fiber product. That product now reaches about 14 million customer locations, or 22 million when you include businesses. So all in all, solid, steady progress against the commitments we made coming into the year. And I'm feeling even more confident that we're going to meet or exceed each of those commitments for the full year. In fact, this morning we've raised our free cash flow guidance for 2019 to the $28 billion range. That's up $2 billion. and we have reaffirmed all of our other guidance for the year. So now for more detail on the quarter, I'm going to turn this over to John, and he'll take you through the results. So, John.