BCE Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the BCE Q1 2026 results conference call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Chris Summers. Please go ahead, Mr. Summers.

Thank you, Matthew. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. With me here today are Mirko Bibic, BCE's president and CEO, and our CFO, Curtis Millen. You can find all our Q1 disclosure documents on the investor relations page of the bce.ca website, which we posted earlier this morning. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement on slide two, reminding you that today's slide presentation and remarks made during the call will include forward-looking information and therefore are subject to risks and uncertainties. Results could differ materially. We disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law. Please refer to our publicly filed documents for more details on assumptions and risks. With that out of the way, I'll turn the call over to Mirko.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Chris. Our Q1 results demonstrate continued disciplined execution across all four of our strategic priorities in what remains a competitive operating environment. Consolidated revenue was up 4%, and adjusted EBITDA grew 2.9%. As we've outlined consistently, our capital allocation is organized around three priorities. To strengthen the balance sheet through disciplined deleveraging, fund our strategic priorities, and of course, return capital to shareholders through a sustainable dividend. We continue to execute against that framework in Q1. Most recently, we announced divestiture of our land mobile radio business to Motorola Solutions for And that's at an attractive valuation of approximately 10 times EBITDA. The latest in a series of actions to simplify the business and accelerate our path to our leverage targets. We're making significant progress across each of our four strategic priorities as well. And I want to walk you through them, starting with putting the customer first. I'm on slide three. You see that we continue to advance a number of initiatives to improve the overall value proposition and service experience for our customers, including the expansion of internet contracts in Ontario, which give customers greater price certainty, continued scaling of hardware-free 5TV, and the full launch of our voice virtual assistant across Bell, Virgin Plus, and Lucky Mobile. Each of these supports longer-term, more stable customer relationships and a lower cost to serve. Fiber continues to be a key growth driver for us. In Canada, we added close to 43,000 residential FTTH subscribers in the quarter, with demand remaining solid across our footprint. Combined with the contribution from Ziply Fiber, total residential fiber net ads were close to 50,000, and internet revenue across our North American fiber platforms grew 15% year over year. In wireless now, Q1 was an unusually competitive quarter, Promotional activity across the industry extended well beyond typical seasonal windows. We were deliberate in how we responded, staying out of the most aggressive pricing early in the quarter and participating selectively where we saw longer-term value. That discipline is reflected in our results. Strong post-paid net ads of close to 17,000, a 21% increase in gross activations, and continued resilience and bell-branded performance. Early indicators suggest the market is normalizing, and our focus remains on lifetime economics, not quarter-to-quarter volume. Video net subscriber additions swung to positive, improving approximately 26,000 year-over-year on strong uptake of the streaming bundles we launched in the second half of last year. That content pull-through, together with growing adoption of subscriptions across our fiber base, is driving meaningful momentum and product intensity. which is a key metric we're tracking against our Investor Day framework. Turning now to our third strategic priority, which is to lead an enterprise with AI-powered solutions. This is where I want to spend a bit more time today with you because Bell AI Fabric is creating considerable value in a very short period of time, and I want to make sure investors fully understand the story. Let me start with a simple framing. Bell sits at the intersection of secure, high-performance networks, trusted enterprise relationships, access to significant power, and now purpose-built AI infrastructure with a time-to-compute advantage. No other Canadian company has assembled this combination, and it's very difficult to replicate. That's our competitive advantage. Last year, we outlined our ambition to lead in this space, and we introduced three businesses, Ateco, Bell Cyber, and Bell AI Fabric. Each is closely tied to our core strengths in connectivity, distribution, and trust. Since then, progress has only accelerated. I want to begin with Saskatchewan because it's a landmark investment for Bell and for the country's AI future. Less than two months ago, we announced a fully contracted 300-megawatt purpose-built AI data center in Saskatchewan. It's a transformational project that meaningfully improves our long-term growth profile and is incremental to the financial framework we laid out at Investor Day. Our construction partners have mobilized on-site and preliminary work is underway. I'll walk you through what that looks like on the ground and we'll get to slide five. At full run rate, as we've shared before, this facility alone is expected to contribute approximately 500 million of revenue, 400 million of EBITDA, and over $250 million of free cash flow at an IRR of approximately 20% at the data center level, with additional upside from sovereign workloads and related services on top. Beyond Saskatchewan, our broader AI fabric ecosystem continues to scale. In late March, we launched our MERIT BC facility. Consistent with our model, Bell is providing the building power and cooling. The tenant supplies and funds all compute hardware. The facility uses a closed loop liquid cool design that does not draw from municipal water resources. The capacity at MERIT is part of the approximately 73 megawatts of AI fabric capacity we referenced back in October. At this time, We have four fully contracted facilities, Mission Flats in Merritt, BC, which are both live, as you know. We have Winnipeg, which will go live early in the second half of this year. And that one is on an operating lease basis. Those three constitute 29 megawatts of the 73 megawatts we guided to an investor. And of course, we have Saskatchewan on top of that, which is under construction. We also continue to build out the sovereign AI solutions ecosystem during the quarter. We announced strategic partnerships with Coveo to deliver sovereign AI-powered digital services, with Hypertech to deliver end-to-end sovereign AI infrastructure built, hosted, and operated in Canada, and with SAP to strengthen Canada's digital sovereignty with cloud and AI infrastructure, and post-quarter with Celestica to advance the development of a Canadian sovereign AI infrastructure stack. Each of these partnerships reinforces a critical point. Bell AI Fabric is not just about data centers. It's a full-stack, Canadian-controlled AI platform with infrastructure, connectivity, security, integration, and services, working with best-in-class partners to meet the needs of governments, enterprises, and research institutions that require their AI workloads to remain here in Canada. And this brings me now to the financial results in Enterprise. Bell Business Markets revenue, which we're disclosing for the first time this quarter, was up 9.7% in the quarter, driven by 113% growth in AI-powered solutions. That's a powerful number, and it reflects the compounding momentum across all three of our AI-powered businesses. Again, I'll note that the merit facility contributed to the quarter, and Curtis will walk you through the financial details around that. We increased our AI-powered solutions revenue objective from approximately $1.5 billion to approximately $2 billion by 2028 when we made the Saskatchewan announcement, and we're confident in that target, and frankly, I see potential beyond it. We have line of sight to monetizing approximately 800 megawatts of power over time, and our pipeline of interest remains deep and active. In short, AI-powered solutions is creating significant benefits differentiated value for this company. It's closely tied to our core business. It's disciplined, demand-led, and return-driven. And it's a growth vector that no other Canadian telecom has. Turning now to our fourth strategic priority, which is to build a digital media and content powerhouse. Our digital pivot in media is now well into its sixth year, and the momentum's clear. When I became CEO in 2020, digital represented 19% of Bell Media's revenue and today it's 46%. That's up three points year over year and it's still growing. It's a fundamental transformation of this business and it's translating directly into subscriber growth, advertiser interest and new monetization streams. Q1 was the most watched quarter in Crave history. Our subscriber base grew 25% year over year to more than 4.7 million today, powered by a 59% increase in direct-to-consumer streaming subscribers. That's exceptional growth in any market. And with our target of 6 million subscribers by 2028, we have a clear runway ahead. What's driving this is the combination of premium original content, a significantly expanded library, the streaming bundles we launched in the second half of last year, and continued improvements to the product experience. including targeted marketing offers, efforts, pardon me, in the French language market. Another recent addition is SNL, which will simulcast on Crave and CTV beginning this fall, one of the most watched shows on television and a strong signal of the content value we're building across both platforms. We also continue to solidify our long-term sports content leadership. Over the last few months, we extended regional media rights with the Senators, the Montreal Canadiens, the Winnipeg Jets, and became the new Canadian home of the Toronto Tempo and the WNBA. We expect to announce additional major rights renewals in the near future. These are important long-duration agreements that reinforce our position as Canada's leading sports broadcaster across TSN in English and RDS in French. Sports content is the single most powerful driver of live viewership, advertising premium, and subscriber retention, and we intend to maintain our leadership. And on that note, and looking ahead, we're excited about the FIFA World Cup this summer. We have exclusivity on 104 games across our platforms, which presents a significant audience and monetization opportunity for Bell Media. The third element I want to highlight is our growing ability to monetize original content internationally. Our Crave Original Series Yaga and the Office Movers have been acquired by Sky for the UK and Ireland, and just last week, Yaga was acquired by AMC for the US market, with additional territories expected to follow. This builds on the global success of Feather Rivalry, which continued to generate cultural impact through Q1, earning a Peabody Award, multiple Canadian Screen Awards, and a second season renewal. The key here is that they aren't one-offs. They reflect a deliberate strategy to invest in premium Canadian storytelling and then extend the value of that content across the full value chain, including through our majority ownership of Sphere Advocates, our global content distribution arm. As a reminder, our focus is for Bell Media to deliver consistent annual revenue and EBITDA growth while contributing meaningfully to free cash flow for BCE. We're on pace to do exactly that in 2026. I want to pause now in slide five because I think it tells an important story. So this is back to a belly eye fabric. In the spirit of transparently tracking and communicating our progress and our strategic initiatives, let me provide you some more detail on the construction progress here. On the left, you can see our Mission Flats facility. That's the one in Kamloops, B.C., the very first one we opened last June. This is where Grok's AI inference technology is live and serving workloads today. Our second facility is the one in Merritt, BC. That went from dirt to a fully operational AI data center in nine months. Together, these experiences gave us a proven, reproducible playbook for everything that's followed. And on the right is Saskatchewan. This is what momentum looks like in real time. Our construction partners have mobilized on site. You can see the earthworks underway, site stripping, pilot testing, heavy equipment on the ground. The development agreement has been approved by the rural municipality of Sherwood, and our development permit application is currently under review. We selected our early works contractors and over half a dozen additional trade contractors in the Regina region. Long lead equipment, including generators and cooling systems, have been ordered and on schedule. We expect all major permits in place by July, and we remain on track for the first phase to come online in the first half of next year. So let's take a step back and look at the trajectory. A year ago, Belly Eye Fabric was an idea and a single facility in Kamloops. Today, we have the data centers I summarized earlier and line of sight to monetizing approximately 800 megawatts of power. Now turning to slide six. As you can see, we continue to track and measure ourselves against disciplined execution on the investor day targets we laid out last October. You see a sample of those metrics on the slide and the progress. And before I turn it over to Curtis in a moment, I want to touch on two more things, capital allocation and capital investment. On capital allocation, we've been very consistent. In February 2025, we laid out a clear plan. Simplify the business, strengthen a balance sheet, focus capital on higher return opportunities. And we reinforced all of that at Investor Day with significant transparency around everything we were going to do. We're committed to continue to share our progress transparently and regularly, and that's what we continue to do today. Since then, we've been executing one step at a time. We completed the sale of our interest in MLSC at a 10-time return. We exited Bell Smart Home. and most recently, of course, the land mobile radio divestiture. The roadmap hasn't changed. We're going to optimize the balance sheet. We're going to fund the strategic priorities, which are high growth, and we're going to return capital to shareholders through our sustainable dividend. And we're going to do that while maintaining the financial discipline and the flexibility to execute against our three-year plan. And a reminder, we're only one quarter into that three-year plan. On CapEx, As early as 2023, we saw where the environment was headed. We made deliberate choices back then to reduce spending on legacy segments and reallocate investment to growth segments. That's what we've done. That's what we're going to continue to do. Our Canadian telecom capex has decreased by over $2 billion, from $5.1 billion in 2022 to below $3 billion in 2026. That's putting aside the highly accretive AI fabric investments. Our underlying Canadian CapEx intensity is approximately 12% with wireless capital intensity at an industry low 7%. Our Canadian telecom CapEx will continue to decline. In the current environment, we've seen others in the industry recalibrate their capital spending. We totally understand that because it's what we've been doing. We laid out this discipline clearly at Investor Day and we've been executing against it for three plus years. But what makes our story different is where we're investing the capital we do deploy. We have a significant growth vector in AI-powered solutions that's intrinsically tied to our core business and that no one else in Canada has. Our capital allocation is shifting toward higher return growth opportunities like AI Fabric and our U.S. fiber platform as we maintain discipline on the core telecom side. Before I hand it over to Curtis, I want to acknowledge our entire Bell team. The results we're sharing today reflect the dedication and focus of everyone who works for this company across the country and in the U.S., serving our customers, growing the business, and executing on the plan we've laid out. I'm proud of what the team did. And Curtis, over to you now to take the team through the Q1 financial and operating results in detail. Thank you.