Cogeco Communications Inc.

Good day and welcome to COGICO Inc. and COGICO Communications Inc. Q1 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Patrick Ouimet, Chief Financial Officer of COGICO and COGICO Communications Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Ouimet.

Thank you. So good morning and Happy New Year, everyone. So welcome to our first quarter results conference call. As usual, before we begin the call, I'd like to remind listeners that today's discussion will include estimates and other forward-looking information. We ask that you review the cautionary language in the press releases issued yesterday and in our annual reports regarding the various risks, assumptions, and uncertainties that can cause our results to differ. And with that, I'll now pass the line to Frédéric Perron for opening remarks. Thank you, Patrice.

Good morning, everyone, and Happy New Year on my behalf as well. We're pleased to report our Q1 results this morning and provide a progress report on several of our initiatives. We take great pride in our rational approach to value creation. Our goal is to drive superior execution and enable sustainable growth and optimize our capital deployment in order to progressively increase our cash flow delivery over time. Our operational priorities are the same we've been communicating over the past year. Drive Canada-US synergies, increase digitization of our sales and service interactions, accelerate advanced analytics, pursue disciplined network expansion, and cross-sell wireless. The delivery of those five priorities is orchestrated through a structured three-year transformation program with over 150 initiatives and associated financial KPIs. We're delighted to report that we're making strong early progress on these priorities. Our transformation efforts contributed to an expansion of our EBITDA margins. We've now rolled out BreezeLine Mobile and our Canadian wireless effort is well on track to go to market over the coming quarters. We're also seeing interesting customer momentum on both sides of the border. In Canada, we achieved strong internet subscriber growth again this quarter and are not seeing any signs of slowing down. In the US, customer satisfaction is improving quite nicely and we're seeing early signs of improvement in our subscriber metrics. In Ohio in particular, we just had our best quarter since we acquired that business. We're cautiously optimistic about the potential for continued steady improvement in our US customer metrics over the coming quarters. Now, let's take a look at our Q1 results. Our first quarter consolidated results were well aligned with our focus on balancing subscriber growth with financial performance. At Cogeco Connection, our Canadian telecommunications business, We continue to experience strong internet subscriber growth with our base expanding by 10,700 subscribers under both the Cogeco and the Oxio brand. We continue to make progress in our Ontario fiber network expansion in rural areas. This subsidized extension program will continue through fiscal 2025 and end in fiscal 2026. As a reminder, Our Quebec network expansion program was completed in the last fiscal year. We've recorded higher than expected customer penetration levels in these greenfield expansion areas and have now increased the number of Canadian homes passed by nearly 139,000 since the beginning of fiscal 2022. At BreezeLine, EBITDA remained stable versus last year, as planned, due to a combination of efficiency improvements, lengthening customer tenure resulting from increased satisfaction, and a better mix of higher margin services as our BreezeLine customers sign up for increasingly fast internet speeds. Our U.S. fiber network extension program added 3,200 new homes fast in the quarter, bringing our total to more than 124,000 homes passed since the beginning of fiscal 2022. Meanwhile, internet subscriber metrics in both our legacy and Ohio regions improved in Q1, both on a year over year and a quarter over quarter basis. With regards to our radio business, Cogeco Media experienced ongoing challenges in the radio advertising market that contributed to lower than anticipated revenue. However, digital advertising solutions revenue showed resilient growth again this quarter and continues to provide an increasingly meaningful contribution to the business's overall revenue. Furthermore, we're pleased to report that Cogeco Media's stations, remained at the top of the ratings again in Q1. Now, let me turn the call over to Patrice, who will provide more details on our financial performance for the quarter. Patrice.