Vestis Corporation

Hello, and welcome to Charter Communications' fourth quarter and full year 2024 investor call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Stephan Anninger.

Thanks, Operator, and welcome, everyone. The presentation that accompanies this call can be found on our website, ir.charter.com. I would like to remind you that there are a number of risk factors and other cautionary statements contained in our SEC filings, and we encourage you to read them carefully. Various remarks that we make on this call concerning expectations, predictions, plans, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from historical or anticipated results. Any forward-looking statements reflect management's current view only and charter undertakes no obligation to revise or update such statements. As a reminder, all growth rates noted on this call and in the presentation are calculated on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise specified. On today's call, we have Chris Winfrey, our president and CEO, and Jessica Fisher, our CFO. With that, let's turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Stephan. In 2024, we managed the end of the affordable connectivity program successfully. Outside of normal churn, we kept roughly 90% of former ACP customers connected. Our Spectrum Mobile business continued to grow at a rapid rate. We added over 2 million Spectrum Mobile lines in 2024. We're the fastest growing mobile provider in the US with the fastest connectivity at the best price. Our expansion initiative continued to deliver good passings growth driven by our subsidized rural initiative and normal construction and fill-in activity. In 2024, we grew revenue by 1% while full year EBITDA growth accelerated to 3.1% driven by continued strong mobile growth, our cost efficiency initiatives and political advertising. Late last year and early this year, we had unexpected natural disasters from Hurricane Helene impacting Florida, the Carolinas, and the broader southeast, with Hurricane Milton across central Florida, and most recently, the Los Angeles fires. There are, of course, subscriber and financial impacts, which Jessica will cover. But our employees work and live in these communities, so it's also personal. Stories of our frontline employees' commitment abound, including employees helping to reestablish connectivity for customers despite losing their own homes, and countless employees traveling in from other regions to stay and to help. Really proud of how our frontline employees have responded. And from Stanford, we learned some lessons on how to put customers at ease sooner. We got better with our communications along the way. Part of our customer commitment is to always improve, and we are. As we look to 2025 and beyond, the environment for broadband, mobile, and video remains competitive. But we had better visibility than this time last year. The impact of the elimination of the ACP is now behind us. Cell phone internet net additions appear to have peaked, or at least stabilized. And we continue to compete well against new fiber overlap. In the meantime, we haven't stayed still, which sets us up well for the future. Our multi-year investment initiatives, including network evolution, network expansion, and execution, including the investment in frontline employees and tenure to benefit our service, are all delivering tangible results. And last September, we relaunched the Spectrum brand and its promise to customers through Life Unlimited. with our market-first customer service commitment and making better use of our unique assets through converged, seamless connectivity across 100% of our network and now seamless entertainment in video. The positive impacts from our customer commitment and brand refresh investments take time to be recognized, but you can already see the positive effect from our new pricing and packaging in video results. In late 2022, we launched a number of strategic initiatives and communicated a significant one-time capital investment to enhance our growth potential long-term. While the investments put temporary pressure on our near-term free cash flow growth, these were a unique set of non-recurring and generational industry investments. They include the largest broadband expansion since the 1980s, the largest physical upgrade of the network since the 1990s, market leading convergence of our wireline and wireless capabilities, and an exciting video transformation, which will help drive our connectivity business. 2025 will have a slightly higher level of investment than 2024, but this year will also be our peak capital investment. So this is a fitting time to highlight where strategy leaves us, competitively, operationally, and financially for the coming years. We have a unique set of assets in significant scale as shown on slide four. Spectrum has the fastest internet, the best wifi, the fastest mobile product, and is the leading video provider in the US with over 900,000 miles of network infrastructure buildings. Of course, we have significant competition for wireline overbuild, cell phone internet, and satellite across all of our products. The power of our network, though, continues to improve with symmetrical and multi-gig speeds, allowing product developers to create applications and use cases that require high capacity, low latency, high reliability, and edge compute. Product and software developers can rely on the ubiquitous deployment across all the major cable networks in the U.S., so we're very well positioned. In fact, it's always been the U.S. cable companies that have built the fully deployed platforms that have enabled the development of next-generation products and services, despite the handicap of being regional operators competing against national and now global competitors. The ability to provide the very best of our products across our entire footprint is unique. That includes a popular phrase amongst our competitors now. And while it's flattering to hear our own wording adopted by others, slide five of our presentation today speaks for itself. We're very under-penetrated relative to our converged connectivity capabilities. Having the best network and product capabilities by itself isn't enough. And that's why we've always focused on the ability to have the most value in our packages, combining the best products, with ways for customers to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year, whether at promotion or retail prices. And anytime you have new entrants, consumers can be enticed to try a new provider, even at lower quality and higher all-in prices. But in the long term, we believe the best products and best pricing across a package of those services will win. The slide six of our presentation is an example of that advantage across typical broadband and mobile packages. Together with our upcoming seamless entertainment offers, highlighting this value is the goal of our recent pricing and packaging under the Life Unlimited brand refresh. I spoke about the sequencing of our seamless entertainment launches on last quarter's call, and that timing in 2025 hasn't changed, so I won't repeat the steps and priorities. But we look forward to fully rolling that out in the first half of this year and delivering even more value to consumers, up to $80 of retail app value when subscribing to our video packages. That customer proposition is shown on slide seven of our presentation. And similar to mobile, taking video as part of the package now ensures a lower price for internet, both at promotion and retail. And of course, we couple all that with high quality service. We've always believed that investing in customer service and satisfaction creates a virtuous cycle in our business. Better customer service translates to fewer customer transactions. Fewer transactions produces higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. Lower churn reduces cost and increases penetration. And lower cost gives us the ability to offer better pricing, which works for customer acquisition, service, and satisfaction, and positions us for growth. Our sales and service is 100% U.S.-based, made in America, if you will, using our own employees with good-paying jobs and benefits. Employees are also Spectrum customers committed to developing their local communities and their career at this company. That is a competitive advantage, an investment we already made in wages, benefits, and real estate that's difficult to replicate. And that existing investment is also why it was so easy for us to make our market-leading customer commitments. We stand behind our commitments, service credits, but we missed the mark. As a reminder, we've provided a summary of those commitments on slide eight. For years, we've been investing in machine learning and now AI, and much of our effort is making frontline work easier and more efficient, which drives higher customer and employee satisfaction. Some of those examples include full service, network, CPE, and billing telemetry on the account, which is automatically presented to an agent now when answering the phone. In addition, AI is also listening to the conversation, providing proactive optimized solutions, customer sentiment, chat GPT style technical support, call summarization, and flagging post-call training opportunities. AI call summarization also helps the field technician assess the issue before they even get to the door, improving the customer interaction. We deal with millions of transactions every year, and honestly, there aren't millions of best outcomes. So transactions can be more effective. It can be shortened and reduced, driving higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. but also higher employee satisfaction, strives lower attrition or tenure, and therefore better service, which of course produces less transactions as a result. Taken together, that is our strategy and competitive positioning. The best network, best products, most value, with unmatched service, driving more household penetration, higher product penetration per household, lower service transactions in turn, and lower operating and capital costs per customer, which allows us to have the lowest pricing, a virtuous cycle. The financial output is high-quality revenue per home passed with free cash flow growth and high return on investment. We're not perfect, and we've always got room for better execution and speed, but I believe we have a great recipe for growth of our existing products with the investments we've already made. And we have strategic assets in our network that are fully US-based sales and service employees. Those will enable future products and revenue streams and operational efficiencies that aren't even considered in our financial plans today. In the meantime, we've positioned the company for customer profitability growth, clear visibility to free cashflow growth and improving capital allocation and return philosophy. This is a winning formula. It's with a fully dedicated and a hungry team. So we're excited about 2025 and beyond. And with that, let me hand it over to Jessica.