AT&T Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the AT&T First Quarter 20 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero, and an operator will assist you offline. Following the presentation, the call will be open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press 1 and then 0, and you will be placed in the question queue. If you are in the question queue and would like to withdraw your question, you can do so by pressing 1 and then 0. And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Michael Viola, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations.

Please go ahead. Thank you and good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter conference call. I'm Mike Viola, head of investor relations for AT&T, and joining me on the call today are Randall Stevenson, AT&T's chairman and CEO, John Stanky, president and chief operating officer, and John Stevens, our chief financial officer. Randall's going to begin with an overview of the COVID-19 impact on our employees, our customers, and our business. John Stanky then will discuss how we're managing our business through this crisis. And then John Stevens is going to discuss COVID-19 financial impacts, how we're managing our liquidity and capital during this time. And that's going to be followed by a brief look at first quarter results. And then we'll take your questions. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to the Safe Harbor Statement. It says that some of our comments may be forward-looking. They're subject to risks and uncertainties. Results may differ materially, and additional information is available on the Investor Relations website. And as always, our earnings materials are also available on the Investor Relations page of the AT&T website. And so with that, I'll turn the call over to Randall Stephenson. Randall?

Thanks, Mike, and good morning. We appreciate everybody joining us this morning. I want to start with a look at how we're responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it's been a chaotic few weeks for all of us, and the COVID pandemic had a significant impact to our first quarter. to the tune of 5 cents per share. But if we set the COVID-19 impact aside for a moment, the first quarter was pretty much what we had expected. We expected to produce solid wireless results that would cover the HBO Max investment. The net result would be stable EBITDA and EBITDA margins, and that's exactly what we delivered. John Stevens will explain that wireless EBITDA was up 7% for the quarter, and that largely offset the significant investment we made in HBO Max. So let's talk about how we're addressing the COVID-19 situation. We have about half of our employees working from home, and this ranges from our frontline customer support teams to our executives. For our folks who cannot work from home because they're on the front lines providing essential services, we've instituted several policies to help keep them safe. Everything from personal protection protocols and equipment to social distancing and additional cleaning. And we gave all our employees four weeks of additional paid excuse time off for a broad range of COVID-related needs. Turning to our customers, it all begins with the AT&T network, the best and fastest wireless network in the country. We're seeing unprecedented volumes of voice calls, texts, and video streaming, and our network is performing very well. And FirstNet is doing exactly what it was designed to do, provide critical connectivity to our first responders, health care providers, governments, military, police, fire, and EMS. The demand from our FirstNet customers has been tremendous. These first responders are the true heroes, and it's an honor to serve them. We understand that this crisis is putting unexpected financial pressure on many households and small businesses. So, to give them some breathing room, We've adopted flexible payment options, waived late fees and overages, and we've lifted data caps. Connectivity is more essential now than ever, and we want to do what we can to help our customers stay connected through this crisis. It's impossible to overstate the impact of COVID-19 on all of us. I expect it will have long-lasting implications for many things we used to take for granted, like how we congregate, work, travel, interact. The economic impact has been swift, and there is no consensus on how long this downturn lasts. A lot hinges on when and how we open things back up. When do we have sufficient testing and protocols in place so people feel comfortable returning to work or school or even going shopping? Bottom line, we have very little visibility into the broader economic situation, which makes it impractical to provide detailed financial guidance at this time But here's what we've done and what you can expect. As you know, we've suspended share retirements. We have a strong cash position, a strong balance sheet, and our core businesses are solid and generating good cash flow. We're sizing our operations to reflect the new economic activity level, and we're leaning into our cost and efficiency initiatives. As a result, you should expect the following. We will continue investing in our critical growth areas like 5G, broadband, and HBO Max. We remain committed to our dividend. In fact, we finished last year with our dividend as a percent of free cash flow, a little over 50%. And even with the current economic crisis, we expect the payout ratio in 2020 to be in the 60s, and we're targeting the low end of that range, which is a very comfortable level for us. And last, we'll continue to pay down debt and maintain high-quality credit metrics. AT&T has been through a lot of other crises before, and each time you've seen us emerge in a stronger position, and I'm confident we'll do it again with this one. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to John Stanky for an operational review. John?