Cogeco Communications Inc.

Good day, and welcome to Kijiko Inc. and Kijiko Communications Inc. Q2 2024 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. Please go ahead, Mr. Ouimet.

Thank you. So, good morning, everybody, and welcome to this second quarter conference call. As usual, before we begin the 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. Now, I would like to start by welcoming and congratulating Frédéric Perron, who took over the role as President and CEO of Cogico on March 11th. I've had the pleasure of working closely with Fred while he was leading our Canadian operations in telecommunications. And he certainly did a tremendous job transforming the business to set it up for the future. So Fred, welcome, and I will let you now take over the call with your opening remarks.

Thank you, Patrice, for the kind words. And good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for our Q2 2024 results. For those of you who may not know me, as Patrice mentioned, I've led Codeco Connections for the past three and a half years. having previously worked at other telecom operators in several countries. The North American industry is ongoing several changes at the moment, which is something I've also experienced while working in Europe. Though it's still a bit early after five weeks into the job to lay out all of our plans for the coming years and for fiscal 25 more specifically, I can already say that shareholder value creation will be at the forefront of our strategy and culture as we set our future course of action. In my first months in the job, I'm taking time to review all aspects of our operations to identify areas where we can increase our performance. I'm truly excited about that opportunity. Our plans will certainly include a strong focus on driving profitable growth through an acceleration of digitization across our enterprise, as well as synergies across our various units. Of course, we will also grow our recently announced American wireless business and will continue to pursue our capital-like entry into the Canadian wireless market. With that said, let's get right into our Q2 results. Our second quarter consolidated results were in line with our expectations as we focused on balancing subscriber growth with financial performance while remaining disciplined with our cost structure. Cotico Connection, our Canadian telecommunications business, delivered another quarter of strong internet subscriber additions driven by gains across our legacy and network extension areas and under our Oxio brand, in and out of footprint. Oxio is becoming an increasingly important growth driver for the company, and its digital sales, service, and IT platform enables a lower cost structure for the corporation, which will also benefit the company more broadly over time. Additionally, we announced the tuck-in acquisition of the Niagara Regional Broadband Network or NRBN in Q2, which is a fully fiberized network, expanding our B2B presence and access to municipalities, universities, schools, and hospitals in the region. In the United States, our customer attraction, retention efforts, and service enhancements over the past several quarters have contributed to higher customer satisfaction scores and positive media commentary. Our Ohio operations have also benefited from customers increasingly taking higher-speed internet offerings, driving higher revenue per customer, and expanding adjusted EBITDA margins while offsetting customer losses at lower price points. In both Canada and the U.S., we continue to see the financial benefits from our Fibre to the Home network expansion programs. that contributed to new internet subscribers in both markets. In Q2, we added close to 19,000 homes fast, bringing our total to 228,000 homes fast since the beginning of fiscal 22, representing nearly 8% organic growth in our network. We're now largely done with the Quebec expansion and our busy building in Ontario. Additionally, we look forward to the BEAD funding program in the U.S., which will provide subsidies to extend networks in underserved and unserved areas. In terms of mobile developments, we were pleased to announce that BreezeLine Mobile will launch this spring with a progressive rollout in the states that we serve. This pure MVNO wireless service will provide our customers access to reliable, competitively priced, and flexible mobile data packages. Not only will the upcoming launch of this service improve our bundling offering, it will also increase our addressable market, strengthen our product mix, and improve existing customer retention and satisfaction, all the while being capital efficient and accretive to our business in due course. In Canada, We're continuing our MVNO access negotiations. We cannot provide further details on these negotiations at this time, but we can say, however, that we look forward to providing our Canadian customers with wireless options. At Kotico Media, advertising sales continued their momentum again this quarter. We're also making progress with our new digital solutions and multi-platform audio content, which open up new revenue streams. I will now review our operational segment results. Let's start with our Canadian operations. As mentioned earlier, we continue to extend our network to more homes in new areas in both Quebec and Ontario. We added 14,600 homes fast in Q2 and a total of nearly 119,000 homes fast since the beginning of fiscal 22. most of which is part of government subsidy programs. Our Canadian team maintained its solid track record in Q2 by growing its internet customer base by 8,900 across our traditional markets, network expansion areas, and under our digital Oxio brand in and out of our wireless footprint. It is the fifth consecutive quarter that we report strong internet customer growth. in Canada. Moving on to our U.S. operations, we continued our fiber network extension program during the quarter with 4,000 new home staff and 109,000 home staff since the beginning of fiscal 22. As noted in our prior quarter, we're continuing to see an improving product mix of higher margin services and customer tenure driven by a greater proportion of new connections taking faster internet speeds. This has resulted in a higher average revenue per unit and an increased customer lifetime value. As always, we remain focused on achieving cost efficiencies and implementing product improvements. In Ohio, we've significantly increased our network capacity and have proactively swapped video equipment to our IPTV solution. These efforts, in addition to brand awareness and customer service improvements, are gaining traction with our customers as evidenced by our rising customer satisfaction levels and the types of those services taken by our customers. Though more work remains to be done, we remain committed to eventually reach positive Ohio internet subscriber numbers. With regards to the U.S. Affordable Connectivity Program, or ACP, which provides a $30 monthly credit to eligible U.S. residents, this program is expected to be defunded over the coming weeks. It is, however, worth noting that Breezevine has considerably less exposure to ACP than the industry average, with under 4% of its internet subscriber base under ACP. And that percentage is much lower when expressed as a percentage of revenue. Also, since most of our customers under ACP take more than the entry-level service, there are several opportunities available to mitigate the impact, and we have plans to address it. That being said, we could see some negative PSU movements from lower ARPU subscribers leaving this program in the next two quarters. For Cogeco Media, we recorded another quarter of year-over-year growth in revenue, with advertising sales modestly rebounding in our digital solutions, social media format, and revamped studio facilities, now providing meaningful contributions to revenue growth. Now, let me turn the call over to Pettis, who will provide more details on our financial performance for the quarter. Pettis, over to you.