Verizon Communications Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Verizon's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode and the call will be open for questions following the presentation. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Brady Conner, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.

Thanks, Brad. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2025 earnings call and customer value update. I'm Brady Connor, and on the call with me this morning are Hans Vestberg, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Tony Skiadis, our Chief Financial Officer, and we have our Consumer Group CEO, Sam Path, who will provide an update on our consumer strategy. Before we begin, I'd like to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement, which can be found at the start of the investor presentation posted on our investor relations website. 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. Discussions and comments related to our 2025 guidance exclude any assumptions regarding the potential effects of the tariff environment owing to the uncertain and evolving nature of these impacts. Earlier this morning, a detailed overview of our first quarter results was posted to our investor relations website. We also posted supplemental materials relating to today's call on our website.

With that, I'll turn it over to Hans. Thank you, Brady. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by addressing the evolving policy and macroeconomic landscape. We continue to monitor the ongoing developments, and we're confident in our ability to effectively manage our business for our customers and shareholders. In terms of height and uncertainty, our business has demonstrated remarkable strength, given the importance and the essential nature of our connectivity services, the size and quality of our customer base, and the strength of our balance sheet. Our diverse portfolio of offerings serves all market segments and positions us for success in any economic environment. And with our bias for action and position of strength, we expect that we will not only weather the current environment, but thrive in it. Now, let me turn to our results. We had an exceptional financial start of the year, delivering strong growth across our key financial metrics. Wireless service revenue was up 2.7% at the high end of our guided range. Adjusted EBITDA of $12.6 billion was our highest reported result ever. growing 4% and exceeding our guided range. Free cash flow was up over $900 million and enabled continued execution of our capital allocation priorities. Even with the recent declines in consumer confidence, we remain confident in our ability to deliver on our 2025 financial guidance. Our comprehensive portfolio of offerings and strategic moves were made over the last year's position as well for a sustainable financial and subscriber growth while also improving the customer experience. These moves include our brand refresh, along with continued evolution of our customer-first offerings, such as MyPlan, MyHome, and MyBizPlan, organic and inorganic broadband expansion with a pending acquisition of Frontier, AI Connect, and satellite partnerships that enable texting anywhere for free. RootMetrics recently recognized Verizon as the best, fastest, and most reliable 5G network in the U.S., And our network continues to get even better. On mobility, we're on track to deploy CBAN to 80 to 90% of our planned sites by year end, and we are aggressively rolling out 5G advanced features. On Fios expansion, we're ahead of our plan year to date to deliver 650,000 incremental passings this year. On fixed-wise access, our multi-dwelling unit solution is expected to gradually ramp over time, along with continued expansion of homes and businesses covered with the ongoing C-band deployment. Turning to our operation performance, our segmentation strategy focused on delivering targeted offerings is yielding positive results. We delivered a year-over-year improvement in combined postpaid and prepaid phone net ads. We did have a slow start on postpaid phone net ads, largely driven by elevated churn due to recent price ups, and pressure from federal government accounts. However, our prepaid net ads of 137,000 were the best since the track one acquisition. In broadband, we continued to take share. With fixed wireless access and fiber, we have the most complete offering covering all segments of the market, and we will cover more than 100 million premises over the time. Our fixed wireless access product continues to lead our broadband growth, and we have a great momentum to reach our next milestone of 8 to 9 million fixed wireless access subscribers by 2028. We're excited to expand our broadband opportunity and continue to scale our mobile and home offerings as we work towards closing the frontier transaction. The consumer group's multi-year business transformation effort is progressing as planned, and you'll hear more about that from Sampath shortly. In the business group, our private networks business continues to scale. We closed more than a dozen deals in the quarter, including private networks for AdventHealth and Nucor. We were named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for managed IoT connectivity services worldwide and reached an agreement to deliver a turnkey IoT solution for Atlanta Hawks. We have seen accelerated interest in AI Connect and continue to expand our partner ecosystem. Looking ahead, our priorities are clear. A continued focus on growing wider service revenue, expanding adjusted EBITDA and generating strong free cash flow. Accelerating our mobility and broadband growth and scale private networks. Leverage our existing fiber and edge compute assets to unlock new revenue stream through our AI Connect offerings. Focus on financial discipline, operation excellence, and customer experience. And finally, execute on our capital allocation priorities. Invest in the business, support and grow our dividend, pay down debt, and eventually share repurchases. With that, I turn the call over to Tony.