AT&T Inc.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to AT&T's third quarter 2024 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, and you'll 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, then 0. And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to our host, Brett Feldman, Senior Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to our third quarter call. I'm Brett Feldman, 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. Additional information, as well as our earnings materials, are available on the Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to John Stanky. John?

Thank you, Brett. I appreciate everyone joining this morning. I hope you're all doing well today. The third quarter showed again that our team continues to produce solid results as we efficiently grow high value wireless and broadband subscribers. Since Pascal will go through the quarter in detail, I'll share more on how our investment led strategy is helping us deliver on our full year consolidated financial guidance, creating runway for future growth, And then I'll provide a few updates on some recent developments. Our strategy remains the same to lead the industry and converge connectivity through 5g and fiber and mobility, the value of the coverage and reliability of the service we provide and our best deals for everyone approach that puts our customers first are producing solid, sustainable results. We're growing 5G subscribers in a durable way and delivered 403,000 postpaid phone net ads in the third quarter. We also grew efficiently with lower year-over-year postpaid phone churn and upgrade rates. Three-quarters of the way through the year, our mobility business has grown EBITDA by more than 6%, which is in the high end of the guidance we provided for the full year. This puts us in a solid position heading into the fourth quarter where we expect seasonally higher phone purchasing activity, upgrades, and promotional cycles. Overall, we feel great about our continued momentum and mobility. We're adding customers, increasing profitability, and expect to deliver the best postpaid phone churn in the industry for the 13th time in 15 quarters. Now, let's switch gears to Consumer Wireline, where we generated positive total broadband subscriber net ads for the fifth consecutive quarter, despite impacts from a one-month work stoppage in the southeast and from Hurricane Helene. And I think it's important to take a moment, recognize our frontline teams who continue to show up in a heroic fashion while confronting multiple devastating hurricanes. We were pleased to welcome our committed employees in the Southeast back to work on September 16th. With newly ratified agreements, a five-year contract in the Southeast and a similar four-year agreement in the West, we appropriately recognize our employees for the exceptional service and performance they provide our customers on a daily basis with annual wage increases averaging 3.6%. Our employees will maintain their position as some of the best paid professionals in the industry. While we cooperatively work with our labor partners to reposition the company around 5g and fiber is the only all union wireless and broadband provider in the US. We serve millions of individuals and businesses in the southeast region of the country and our frontline employees on the ground have responded quickly. worked tirelessly to keep our communities, customers, and first responders connected when it matters most. For context, our FirstNet organization provides a meaningfully differentiated product to public safety during events like these. Our organization dedicated to supporting our growing public safety base on FirstNet responded to more than 200 requests during the Hurricane Helene recovery. This was one of our largest emergency response efforts ever. These efforts are nothing short of remarkable. It's exactly why more than 29,000 public safety agencies and organizations, including the New York City Police Department, the Fire Department of New York City, and the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, choose FirstNet. the only dedicated communications platform for public safety. We applaud the FCC's recent decision to make available 50 megahertz of spectrum to the FirstNet Authority to facilitate nationwide deployment of 5G services for first responders, and we look forward to working together on plans that take these capabilities to the next level. Moving back to broadband, despite a 30-day work stoppage in the southeast portion of our footprint, we've now had more than 200,000 AT&T FiberNet ads for 19 consecutive quarters, which shows the strong underlying customer demand for fiber. In the quarter, consumer wireline delivered more than 8% EBITDA growth, driven by nearly 17% growth in fiber revenues. These consistent results make it clear that our fiber investment is generating attractive returns with improved operating leverage as we transition from legacy networks. Overall, the underlying momentum with 5G and fiber positions us to close the year strong. While our 5G and fiber businesses are performing well on their own, It's increasingly clear that customers prefer to purchase mobility and broadband together as a converged service. Only AT&T can offer this at scale with benefits from owner's economics. This is driving a reinforcing cycle where the success of our fiber business drives growth in mobility and vice versa. As we shared last quarter, about four out of every 10 AT&T fiber households also choose AT&T as their wireless provider. Additionally, our share of postpaid phone subscribers within the AT&T fiber footprint is about 500 basis points higher than our national average. This highlights the true benefit of owning and operating both 5G and fiber networks at scale, which is the ability to drive higher share in both mobility and broadband through converged service penetration. Over time, we expect this should drive higher returns on our invested capital in both our mobility and broadband businesses than either could achieve as a standalone operation. While our convergence strategy began with a focus on our own fiber footprint, we're also pursuing attractive opportunities to expand AT&T fiber outside of it. We're already America's largest fiber provider with the fastest and most reliable speeds. The superiority of AT&T fiber elevates the overall AT&T brand. We want more customers to experience the best wired internet experience available today. That's why we've announced plans to bring AT&T fiber high-speed internet to even more people and new geographies through GigaPower, our joint venture with BlackRock, as well as through recent agreements with commercial open access fiber providers. These fiber-driven growth initiatives present attractive capital-efficient ways for us to provide both AT&T fiber and 5G wireless services to more customers. In addition to being the largest capital investor in the U.S. connectivity infrastructure since 2019, we continue to reduce our net debt and increase operating leverage due to a combination of higher EBITDA and strong free cash flow generation. Our financial flexibility continues to improve, and we remain on pace to meet our target of net debt to adjusted EBITDA in the two and a half times range in the first half of next year. In the quarter, we also announced we reached an agreement to sell our remaining 70% stake in DirecTV to TPG in a non-contingent transaction subject only to customary closing conditions and separate from the regulatory process associated with the DirecTV DISH transaction. This sale and transaction structure allows us to continue our focus on being a leader in 5G and fiber connectivity throughout America while further strengthening the balance sheet. It also presents new optionality as we consider opportunities to leverage our significant distribution to aggregate products and services that simplify and improve our customers' lives. We will close the transaction following necessary regulatory approvals and optimal financing and tax considerations. We're confident that the company's transformation over the past four years has positioned us well for continued organic growth while also increasing our financial flexibility and capacity to support sustained investment and enhance shareholder returns. We're excited to share the details on what this all means for the future of AT&T when we speak with you again at our upcoming Analysts and Investor Day on December 3rd. So mark your calendars for an exciting visit to Big D. With that, I'll turn it over to Pascal to cover the quarter in greater detail. Pascal.