AT&T Inc.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to AT&T's third quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a 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 one and then zero. You'll be placed into the question queue. If you're in question queue and would like to withdraw your question, you can do so by pressing one and then zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference call over to our host, Amir Rozbudowski, Senior Vice President, Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter call. I'm Amir Rozbudowski, Head of Investor Relations for AT&T. Joining me on the call today are John Stanky, our CEO, and Pascal DeRoche, our CFO. 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. And as always, additional information and earnings materials are available on the investor relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to John Stanky. John?

Thanks, Amir. Good morning, everyone. This morning, we shared our third quarter results, which yet again demonstrate our strong execution in delivering critical connectivity services to our customers. Earlier this month, we saw just how vital these services truly are. In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ian, the ability to connect with others proved to be invaluable to so many people. And our teams were yet again some of the very first to arrive on the scene working tirelessly for our customers. The effort they made along with first responders supported by FirstNet to keep our network running in some of the hardest hit areas was nothing short of heroic. I'm really grateful for their sacrifices and all of AT&T is proud of their efforts. I'd also like to say thank you to our teams for their solid execution in deploying our mid-band 5G spectrum and building out best-in-class fiber-based access solutions. As you can see from our results, we continue to deliver strong customer growth on the back of our focused 5G and fiber strategy. The demand for fast and reliable 5G and fiber is at an all-time high, and our disciplined and consistent go-to-market strategy continues to resonate. In addition, as we begin to lap investments we made to optimize our networks, improve our distribution, and transform our business, we're now seeing the benefits of our growth fall to the bottom line, as we suggested they would, and as evidenced by accelerating adjusted EBITDA growth. Let me dive in a bit. In mobility, we posted another strong quarter of growth by adding 708,000 postpaid phone net ads. As I've stated in prior quarters, our consistent results are being driven by an improved value proposition, a better network experience, and our ability to meet our customers where their needs are. We're creating efficiencies where our distribution and acquisition costs are improving. This is helping us drive further gains in operating leverage. This past quarter, our teams delivered across three key performance measurements, strong postpaid phone net ads, accelerating ARPU growth, and higher mobility EBITDA. In fact, the third quarter marked our highest wireless service revenue growth year over year in more than a decade, and we now expect to achieve wireless service revenue growth at the upper end of the 4.5% to 5% range. This is about 200 basis points higher than where we expected to land at the start of the year, thanks to continued net ad strength and ARPU growth. Now, let's jump to Fiverr, where we continue to invest in building out a premium network and deliver on our stated expectations for steady customer growth. The success of our strategy is evidenced by the fact that we just posted our 11th straight quarter with more than 200,000 fiber net ads with 338,000 net ads this past quarter. We're finding success in serving more customers in new and existing markets with what is the best wired internet offering available. We're increasing share in our fiber footprint, in converting more IP broadband internet subscribers to fiber subscribers. This is driving favorable ARPU trends and profitable growth within our overall consumer wireline business. Ultimately, our fiber strategy is a long-term play centered around a best-in-class network technology with a multi-decade lifespan. When others finally decide they need to upgrade their infrastructure We will already be providing our customers with great service and sustainable technology. Simply put, where we have fiber, we win. And the numbers show we expect to keep winning. So let's step back for a minute and take a look at what we've done so far this year across three quarters. We've achieved what we expect will be an industry best. with more than 2.2 million post-paid phone net ads. Additionally, our teams are deploying our mid-band 5G spectrum quickly and efficiently, and the spectrum assets we're rolling out are performing even better than our high expectations. As a result, we've achieved our already increased year-end target of 100 million mid-band 5G POPs, and now expect to reach more than 130 million people by the end of the year, nearly double our expectations when we entered the year. This progress is benefiting our customers as well. In fact, since the start of the year, our already consistent download speeds have increased materially as a result of our mid-band deployment. We're also approaching 1 million AT&T Fibernet ads for the year, We've added nearly 2.3 million fiber locations through three quarters to bring our total customer locations to 18 and a half million. This keeps us on track to achieve our target of 30 million plus locations by the end of 2025. In summary, I'm very happy with the strong, high quality and durable customer ads, network enhancements and improving financial returns we're seeing across our twin growth engines of 5G and fiber. Moving to our next priority, it's more important than ever that we be effective and efficient across our operations. We continue to have a strong visibility on achieving more than 4 billion of our $6 billion transformation cost savings run rate target by the end of this year. As I said earlier, We're beginning to see savings start to contribute to the bottom line. We're transforming our business as the world continues to face what feels like a period of uncertainty. Many of the economic trends that we spoke about at the start of the year and the assumptions that we've been operating under are now coming to fruition. This is one reason why we focus so intently on reorienting our business, whether it was asset dispositions, investing in cost transformation, or our proactive decision to address rising inflation through a measured pricing strategy. As a result, our balance sheet has improved, our network performance continues to get better, and we're now seeing some benefits to our profit trends. This is a direct result of acting when we did and how we did it. Our third quarter results demonstrate that our business can deliver even against the challenging backdrop. The current environment is not easy to predict, but our flexibility affords us the ability to meet or surpass all of our financial commitments while investing in the best technology available. Now, turning to our capital allocation strategy. The long-term economic justification for our investments in 5G and fiber remains fundamentally sound, and we're continuing to invest through this cycle to support future growth. These investments will prove to be the foundation of AT&T over the next few decades. We feel confident our approach will prove to be increasingly beneficial with each passing year as data demand and traffic continues to grow dramatically. Our strength and focus on core connectivity is helping us meet customers' needs, and we're growing mobility and Fiverr subscribers in a disciplined and profitable manner quarter after quarter after quarter. This makes me very comfortable with our ability to continue improving the cash yields of our business going forward. Our free cash flow for the quarter was in line with our expectations despite higher third quarter capital investment spend, and we're on track to deliver on our previously stated $24 billion capital investment plan for the year. At the same time, we hope this healthy free cash flow for the quarter gives you confidence in our ability to achieve our target for free cash flow in the $14 billion range for the year. a level that is more than ample to support our $8 billion dividend commitment. Before I turn this over to Pascal, allow me to finish with this. Our results demonstrate that the strategy we put forward more than two years ago is the right strategy for not only the future of our business, but for the future of the communications industry. We're focused on creating sustainable and scalable businesses that drive a free cash flow flywheel for many years. We continue to hold ourselves accountable for earnings growth against our historic levels of investment, which you'll see through improved cash conversion moving forward. We're confident that the investments and choices we're making will benefit our customers and shareholders now and in the future, while also setting the stage for our next act as America's best broadband provider. Let me now turn it over to Pascal to discuss the details of the quarter.