Cogeco Communications Inc.

And welcome to COGICO, Inc. and COGICO Communications, Inc. Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Patrice Ouimet, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of COGICO, Inc. and COGICO Communications, Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Ouimet.

Thank you. So good morning, everybody, and welcome to this first quarter conference call, which Philippe Jeté and I will present as usual. Before we begin this call, I'd like to remind listeners that the call is subject to forward-looking statements, which can be found in the press releases issued yesterday. So please go ahead, Philippe. Thank you, Patrice.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for this first quarter results of fiscal 2023. But before we start, on behalf of COGECO's management and myself, we would like to extend our warmest wishes to all of you for the upcoming year. So let's now start the conference call. Cogeco's financial performance was in line with our expectations in the first quarter, despite the more challenging economy and competitive environment in the United States and Canada. Nonetheless, our reliable high-speed network Innovative digital product offering and local customer service have enabled us to connect new homes and customers as part of our network expansion projects. On the radio side, our radio stations remain at the top of the ratings, confirming once again our leadership position in this market, even if we are operating in soft advertising markets. So let's start with our US operations. During Q1, we pursued our fiber to the home network expansion where we added more than 17,000 homes passed during the quarter. This expansion is part of a program expected to grow homes passed by 5% in fiscal 2023, which is in addition to the 4% we added in fiscal 2022. In Ohio, all the issues encountered for the transition to BreezeLine's brand and systems are now behind us and customer service is back to our quality standard. As we said in our last conference call, we expected a loss of customer in Ohio during the quarter following a rebranding and systems migration. And while net customer loss improve in Q1 versus Q4, it remained high. So we still have work to do, work on our plate to grow our customer base in this market. We also pursue the second phase of OIO's integration by launching our IPTV product in the region to new video customers in December. and will make it available to existing customers this month, which is part of our focus on increasing ARPU in this market. As of network expansion projects in New Hampshire and West Virginia, we are making good progress and we have intensified our marketing efforts. Moving on to the Canadian operations. We accelerated our construction efforts to connect more homes in unserved and underserved communities in Quebec and Ontario, where we added about 20,000 homes passed during this quarter. We remain on target to add about 3% home pass in fiscal 2023, which is in addition to the 2% added last year. These fiber to the home expansion projects are primarily done in partnership with governments and deployed in areas which do not currently have high-speed internet providers. For mobile, we remain determined to launch a service in Canada as we now see less risk and greater clarity with strong government support for the new CRTC MVNO framework to be able to create sustainable wireless competition where we already operate broadband networks. As the last regulatory details and the final wholesale terms and conditions are becoming available, we are preparing our own commercial plans, and we will have more to share before the end of this fiscal year. Now let's discuss CogicoMedia. In the ratings competition, our radio stations are again at the top of the ratings for the numerous audience surveys. While the market remains challenging, we continue to expand our multi-platform audio content options with an emphasis on digital ad tech solutions. Now Patrice will discuss our financial results.