AT&T Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to AT&T's second quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero. 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 one, then zero, and you'll be placed in the question queue. If in the question queue and you would like to withdraw your question, you can do so by pressing the 1 and then 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference call over to your host, Amir Roswidowski, Senior Vice President, Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter call. I'm Amir Roswidowski, Head of Investor Relations for AT&T. Joining me on the call today are John Stanky, our CEO, and Pascal DeRoche, our CFO. Also joining us for the Q&A portion of our call are Jeff McElfresh, the CEO of our communications group, and Jason Kylar, CEO for WarnerMedia. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our safe harbor statement. It says that some of our comments today may be forward-looking. As such, they're subject to risks and uncertainties described in AT&T's SEC filings. Results may differ materially. Additional information is available on the Investor Relations website. And as always, our earnings materials are on our website. I also want to remind you that we are in the quiet period for the FCC Spectrum Auction 110. So unfortunately, we can't answer your questions about that today. With that, I'll turn the call over to John Stanky. John?

Good morning everyone and thanks for being with us. At the risk of being repetitive or I guess consistent depending on your take, the framework for what I want to cover today should be familiar to you. It's been four quarters since we articulated a simplified strategy and how we planned on evaluating our success going forward based on three priorities. First, we wanted to grow subscriber relationships through our three market focus areas of 5G, Fiber, and HBO Max. Second, we initiated an effort to transform our business to be effective and efficient in everything we do so that we could allocate increased resources to support these focus areas. And third, we committed to deliberate capital allocation to support increased investment and growth, improve returns, narrow our operating focus, and restore flexibility to our balance sheet. To achieve these priorities, we made some difficult near-term decisions to set our businesses up for success in the coming years. And that success is defined by improving our competitive position through the investment in best-in-class products and experiences for our customers. By doing so, we believe the execution of this strategy will drive better returns and profitable long-term growth. Let's look at what we've achieved in the past year on slide four. We've made notable progress on each of our priorities. In wireless, we're gaining share, lowering churn, and had our best 12 months of post-paid phone net ads in more than a decade. And we just posted record quarterly wireless EBITDA. In fiber, customers have similarly responded to the combination of a premium service at attractive prices, and we've grown our base by more than 1 million subscribers. By year end, we'll have expanded our fiber footprint by 3 million consumer and business customer locations. And just over a year after launch, we've grown our domestic HBO Max and HBO subscribers by 10.7 million. We've transformed HBO from a $6 billion business that was not growing to an $8 billion run rate business that grew at nearly 40% this quarter. We've also made solid initial progress in our cost transformation efforts, which have produced $2 billion in savings that we've reinvested into our core growth areas. We're streamlining our operations and effectively growing digital fulfillment channels. Our NPS scores have improved significantly and our fiber customers continue to rate us number one in customer satisfaction. Churn levels have dropped substantially too. Our second quarter postpaid phone churn matched a record low. And in broadband, we had our lowest churn on record and the highest second quarter fiber gross ads ever. At WarnerMedia, We continue to deliver great content. In the first half of the year, we introduced hit series such as Mare of Easttown and Hacks. And our lineup in the back half of the year is even stronger with new seasons of popular series such as Succession, Raised by Wolves, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Love Life. That's on top of the day and date movies we'll have on the platform such as Space Jam, A New Legacy, The Suicide Squad, Dune, and Matrix 4. When the Emmys were announced last week, HBO Max and HBO led the field with 130 nominations, the most of any network or platform. In total, WarnerMedia received more than 180 nominations. I'm really proud of the way the team is executing. And speaking of good execution, we're seeing indications that our DirecTV deal with TPG might close in the next few weeks ahead of what we expected. Also, We're pleased with the new management team's ability to exceed operational expectations since we announced the transaction. Our intention with WarnerMedia is the same. We want to hit a strong exit velocity for both of these businesses, at which point the combination with the right partner only expands the respective opportunities for success going forward. And we continue to invest at strong levels. more than $60 billion in the last 12 months in 5G wireless, including spectrum, fiber, and premium content. Finally, we announced or closed a number of non-core asset dispositions, supporting our path to balance sheet flexibility. At the same time, we've positioned each of our three major businesses, AT&T Communications, WarnerMedia, and DirecTV, with the right capital structure, the right assets, the right management team, and in the case of the latter two, the right partners to optimize their returns to drive material value creation going forward. These decisions were not easy, and in some cases, they compelled us to rethink how to best deliver returns to our shareholders, leading us to balance long-term value creation with an attractive dividend. As our second quarter results demonstrate, the momentum in our strategic areas of focus is real, supporting our view that we have the right business strategy and capital structure in place for longer-term success. Today, we're updating our 2021 outlook for our consolidated business, but our work's far from over. We know that consistent execution is the only way to win and keep our investors' confidence in the strategy we put forth, and I couldn't be more pleased with the progress we're making. I'll turn it over to Pascal to discuss the details of the quarter.