Verizon Communications Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Verizon First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for questions following the presentation. To ask a question, press Star 1 on your touchtone phone. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself by pressing Star 2. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to your host, Mr. Brady Conner, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.

Thanks, Brad. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter earnings conference call. I'm Brady Conner, and I'm joined by our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Hans Vestberg, as well as our Chief Financial Officer, Tony Skiadis. Before we begin, I'd like to draw your attention to our Safe Harbor Statement, which can be found on slide two of the presentation. Information in this presentation contains statements about expected future events and financial results that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Discussion of factors that may affect future results is contained in Verizon's filings with the SEC, which are available on our investor relations website. This presentation contains certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the financial materials posted on our website. Earlier this morning, we posted to our investor relations website a detailed review of our first quarter results. You'll find additional details in the earnings materials on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Hans.

Thank you, Brady. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm pleased to report that we have started the year with a solid momentum, building on the progress we made throughout 2023. Our results this quarter further validate that our strategy is working and position us well for a profitable growth this year. Our execution in the first quarter keeps us on track towards our full year 2024 guidance as we continue to deliver against our key financial metrics. We grew wireless service revenue and adjusted EBITDA and generated solid free cash flow. Operation excellence is our priority. Our team is delivering. We have the right strategy, and we're working to keep this progress up quarter by quarter. It has been a busy quarter across our business. We produced big moments at the Super Bowl, published our first consumer connections report, achieved milestones in our C-band rollout, added new members to our leadership team, published our annual ESG report, accomplished many goals with Citizen Verizon and completed a pension transaction that increases our financial flexibility. Verizon has a differentiated position in the industry. We have the highest quality customer base in consumer and business, the largest adjusted EBITDA, and a great team that knows how to execute our strategy. Turning to our first quarter results. Wireless service revenue growth climbed to 3.3%. Our revenue performance combined with our work on cost efficiency programs translated to a 12.1 billion adjusted EBITDA. That's a year-over-year growth of 1.4%. We generated 2.7 billion in free cash flow, and we expect free cash flow to build throughout the year, similar to 2023. Our core products, mobility, broadband and private networks, are at the center of people's lives and businesses. Connectivity is only becoming more vital with each passing day, and our investments and world-class networks ensure that our customers can depend on us to deliver the reliable, high-quality experience they deserve. Now, let me go into some specifics about this quarter. Our consumer team is executing extremely well. Despite taking further pricing action this quarter, our postpaid phone net ads performance improved year over year, evidence of how our differentiated value proposition is resonating with customers. Our net loss of 158,000 is more than 100,000 net ads better than our first quarter performance in 2023. This achievement was fueled by continued momentum in postpaid phone gross ads, which grew more than 5% year-over-year. We mitigated churn impacts from pricing actions through laser-focused retention efforts and the strength of our value proposition. These results represented Verizon Consumer Group's strongest first-quarter postpaid phone net ads performance since 2018. Our targeted and segmented go-to-market approach, combined with MyPlan and its exclusive perks, is clearly working. With MyPlan, we're building a recurrent revenue stream out of perks and services. These incentives, like our popular Netflix Plus Max Bundle, add value and deepen our customer relationships. We know our customers extremely well and tailor our offerings to their needs. We're bringing the same proven approach to our prepaid business. Within the quarter, we established our new value market leadership team, bringing in experts to execute our plans with speed and discipline. While there is still work to be done, we're seeing early signs of progress, invisible and totaled by Verizon. In February, we stopped processing new affordable connectivity program activations. which caused headwinds for our SafeLink brand. The ACP may shut down, but Verizon is committed to providing households with access to high-quality connectivity and reliable home internet without data caps, and does not believe that income should be a barrier to access. Since 2020, we have offered high-speed home internet to qualifying customers for as low as $20 a month through our Verizon Forward program. And we have other plans to reach households who rely on ACP. For business mobility, post-paid phone net ads were $19,000. The team continues to put up subscriber growth as the market share leader in a competitive environment. even while implementing pricing actions within the quarter. More businesses rely on Verizon than any other provider to deliver mission-critical support for their day-to-day operations. In total, First quarter post-fade phone net losses were 68,000, a 59,000 net loss improvement versus prior year. We're exiting the quarter with both consumer and business delivering their strongest performance in March, a good sign for the year ahead. Our broadband business continues to be a key growth engine, now serving more than 11 million subscribers. We have grown our base 18% over the last year and our network is a critical part of the infrastructure that homes and businesses rely on. Fixed wireless access has turned out to be a large and growing opportunity. This is now a meaningful piece of our business. We knew that fixed wireless access would be a hit with consumers who like its quality, reliability and easy setup. Businesses are showing similar excitement as this was our biggest quarter to date for the net ads in business fixed wireless access with 151,000 setting our new high. Fios remains extremely popular with one of the highest third party net promoter score in the industry. And as we already know, Fios is the best pure broadband offering in the country. Together, our total broadband portfolio delivered a strong quarter with 389,000 net ads. As with mobility, we saw good momentum with the broadband net ads as we exited the quarter, and we expect that to continue. We also had a great quarter in private networks, signing transformative deals across industries. Xerox selected our network as a service solution as its framework for modernizing its information technology system. We're also signed a new private network deal with the global power solution leader, Commons Inc. And iconic American sport leagues are turning to us for the networks that serve their fans, players, and coaches. We're on the field, on the ice, and in the stands, and in the parking lots. During the quarter, we held a partner summit where we unveiled our sports and entertainment strategies. We are at the center of the cultural moments that matter the most to our customers, from concerts and performance to athletic achievements and competition. We're already in every National Football League stadium in the country. We're now expanding services with NFL teams, including the installation of a private 5G network at the LA Chargers training facility. We also renewed our partnerships as the official 5G network of the National Hockey League in the United States, and are expanding services throughout its arenas. As you may have seen in our consumer connection report during the 23-24 NFL season, the average fan used more data than the year before. These live moments matter to our customers, and they want to share them by text, by phone, and by video. We are a vital part of their experiences. Our private networks business is growing and full of long-term contracts with the best partners around the world. All of this is supported by the infrastructure we have built and are building. We operate the nation's most reliable and robust network for all customers, from households to global enterprises. Recently, we passed 250 million POPs covered with CBAN, achieving our targets almost a year ahead of plan. The pace and quality of our build-out is spectacular, and most importantly, our customers love the C-band experience. In the first 76 markets where we rolled out C-band, we see a higher premium mix and reduced churn. Our strategy from the start was to build a network once to meet the needs of the present and to optimize it for the future, and we're doing just that. We have been working with AI for several years and our powerful network positioned Verizon to lead the AI revolution. In 2023, we released a set of responsible AI principles to guide our efforts to leverage new AI technologies in ways that positively impact our stakeholders and establish Verizon as a trusted brand and partner with respect to AI. Enabling AI at scale for improved customer service is a key. We're also aggressively driving AI transformative potential with our businesses, something our network was built to support. We've already had several generative AI projects going live. Our AI strategy focuses on three priorities. First, optimizing internal processes and operations through machine learning, such as creating efficiencies in fuel consumption. AI is already central to our cost transformation program and will become even more important over time. Secondly, enhancing product experiences with AI capabilities like the personalized plan recommendation on MyPlan, which is producing good early results. And thirdly, establishing an AI-based revenue stream by commercializing our network's unique low latency, high bandwidth, and robust mobile edge compute capabilities. Generative AI workloads represent a great long-term opportunity for us. As we expand our network and increase our performance advantage, we're also making Verizon a more efficient organization. We are back to business-as-usual level on Capex Spend, as we had promised, and we have struck a balance between profitable growth and free cash flow that supports both our dividend and a stronger balance sheet. This gives us greater flexibility to accelerate the leveraging throughout the second half of the year, bringing us closer to our long-term leverage target. Our dividend is healthy and secure, and our free cash flow dividend payout ratio continues to improve. We are focused on putting our board in a position to continue to raise the dividend each year, building on our current industry record of 17 consecutive increases. Now, let me turn the call over to Tony to discuss our financial and operational performance in more detail. Tony.