Verizon Communications Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Verizon second 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 one on your touch tone phone. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself by pressing star two. 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 second 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. Discussions 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 second 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 and welcome to Verizon's second quarter 2024 earnings call. This quarter marks the beginning of Verizon's next chapter. We have launched a comprehensive brand refresh that goes far beyond the new logo. This transformation embodies our commitment to bringing choice, value, and control to our customers' lives, reflecting our evolution and vision for the future of connectivity. We refreshed our brand as our strategy continues to deliver strong results. The three pillars of our performance – wireless service revenue growth, adjusted EBITDA expansion, and increased free cash flow – remain solid, showing both sequential and year-over-year improvements. In the second quarter, we saw wireless service revenue climb 3.5% year-over-year, adjusted EBITDA rise by 2.8%, and free cash flow increased 3% compared to last year. Our improving operations and results build on our first quarter momentum, keep us on track to meet our 2024 financial guidance, and are paving the way for a sustained growth. Our progress comes from innovation that deeply resonates with customers, including the most personalized offerings in the industry. These initiatives align perfectly with our core strategy to strengthen and grow customer relationships while delivering the best return on invested capital. We launched MyPlan in 2023, and it delighted our customers. In just over a year, over 30% of our subscribers are using it. That is an incredible adoption rate, and now we're bringing these features to home internet with My Home. We're building and expanding on our strengths and successes, and you can expect that to continue. For businesses, we launched Verizon Business Complete, the industry's only end-to-end smartphone management system. We cover everything from selecting the first phone to upgrades with 24-hour service and same-day equipment replacement. These initiatives, combined with our strong network performance and extensive distribution, are reinforcing our leadership position and driving our industry forward. Turning to the second quarter. We had a strong operation performance across mobility, broadband, and our network. Our overall execution in consumer mobility has been improving quarter after quarter since early last year. And our momentum continues. Consumer postpaid phone gross ads are up 12% year-over-year, which is amazing. Total postpaid phone net ads of 148,000 is a big improvement year-over-year and sequentially. and we expect to have positive post-paid phone net ads in consumer for the year. Choice is at the core of our approach, and we're constantly working on new partnerships that give our customers more options and value. One example is our addition of YouTube Premium and Peacock subscriptions, which makes us the only provider offering our customers savings on 10 of the top streaming services. These content partnerships give our customers compelling reasons to shop with us. We also had a very strong quarter for postpaid phone net ads in Verizon Business at 156,000. This is a sharp improvement from the first quarter and shows how important we are to small, mid-sized, and large businesses. Our business customers continue to invest in mobility, and we offer them the widest range of choices. In the consumer value market, we're applying the same customer-centric discipline and rigor as we do in the postpaid market and are seeing significant net ad improvements, excluding SafeLink. We recently relaunched Total by Verizon as Total Wireless and enhanced our offerings with price guarantees, upgrade credits, and other features. In broadband, We're still taking share with 391,000 net ads in the second quarter. Fixed wireless access remains a key driver with higher net ads than in the first quarter. We continue to grow our broadband base, ending the quarter with more than 11.5 million broadband subscribers. We're also continuing to add business from large customers like government agencies. We're very proud that we were awarded a new contract from the U.S. Department of the Navy to provide wireless devices and device management, building on our previous work together. For first responders, Verizon Frontline delivers mission-critical connectivity and advanced solutions to more than 40,000 public safety agencies across the United States. serving them with everything from device and network management to digital transformation. Verizon is there when people need us most, from protecting the front lines to natural disaster response. In fact, recent FCC data show us that overall our network outperformed our peers in areas affected by the hurricane burial. I could not be prouder of that. It's one of the reasons we're so committed to the network superiority. And we're continuing to expand C-band in suburban and rural areas. Our initial C-band markets outperformed with better gross ad growth, higher uptake of premium services, and lower churn. We now have nearly half of our network traffic running on ultra-wideband, up from 36 percent a year ago. That number will continue to grow as we expand C-band reach. We're also working to enhance our network coverage by partnering with AST Space Mobile to provide satellite-to-device connectivity using the 850 megahertz spectrum. This will bring our network to unserved communities as we target 100% coverage from coast to coast. Our portfolio of high-performance spectrum, the capacity of our fiber, and our ability to deploy and support mobile edge compute make us as the backbone of the AI economy and the partner of choice for players in the space. We will power the best AI services for our customers. What sets us apart with AI is our network's mobile edge computing capabilities and deep fiber footprint. By processing data closely to the source, we enable real-time AI applications that require security, ultra-low latency, and high bandwidth. This is where our network shines, opening up possibilities that simply weren't feasible before. We're already seeing the benefits of AI in our operations. For example, we use AI to route customer support calls to agents best suited to help. We analyzed more than 800 data points per call to save our customers time and spare them frustration. It takes the best network to power these applications, and today, RootMetrics awarded us an outright win for national overall wireless network performance. Verizon also won the most national, state, and metro awards, including outright wins for accessibility, data performance, and streaming video performance. This is the kind of superior network performance that our customers deserve and expect from us. I'm pleased with our first half-year performance and how well our team is executing our strategy. I always say there's more work to do, and there always is. We are seeing improving postpaid phone net ads in consumer, performing extremely well in business, and taking share in broadband. We're achieving growth in a disciplined, balanced way and have built great momentum heading into the second half of the year and into 2025. Now, I would hand over the call to Tony for a deeper dive into our performance.