Cogeco Communications Inc.

Good day and welcome to Kojiko, Inc. and Kojiko Communications, Inc. Q3 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Patrice Wimet, Chief Financial Officer of Kojiko, Inc. and Kojiko Communications, Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Wimet.

So, good morning, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter results conference call. So, 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 and MD&A issued yesterday, as well as in our annual reports regarding the various risks, assumptions, and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ. And with that, I'll pass the line to Fred Perron for opening remarks.

Thank you, Patrice, and good morning, everyone. We're pleased to share our Q3 results today. We'll be giving you more color on our solid Canadian Internet subscriber growth, our strong free cash flow performance, and our Canadian wireless launch. We'll also be sharing insights into our U.S. challenges, and we'll explain why we're optimistic about improvements in the coming quarters. Let's start with our Canadian Internet customer growth, which was strong again this quarter. We're quite upbeat. about our Canada customer trends going into Q4 and next year, especially as wireless and new Ontario network expansion projects being lit up become new additional contributors to our customer growth. Turning over to free cash flow, when we began our three-year transformation last year, we mentioned that we expected significant OPEX and CAPEX synergies, from initiatives such as combining our Canadian and U.S. operations, reducing truck roles, consolidating vendors and platforms, and digitizing our sales and service interactions. Less than one year into our transformation, we're pleased to report that our OPEX and CAPEX synergies are tracking well above plan, with significant runway still to go. For this fiscal year in particular, we now expect this to translate into a net CapEx reduction versus our prior estimates. We're maintaining our investments in key revenue generating projects, such as network upgrades and extensions, in line with our original plans and with historical trends. Only a small part of this year's CapEx savings are deferrals to next year. So what you're seeing in terms of CapEx underspending comes mainly from real operational efficiencies and synergies. These synergies will increasingly add to our already strong balance sheet and are putting us well on track to generate approximately $600 million in free cash flow by fiscal 2027. We're poised to continue to raise our dividend and lower our debt, which stood at 3.1 times debt to adjusted EBITDA by the end of the third quarter. Turning over to Canadian Wireless, we're ready to go. We already have an initial cohort of users on the service and will broaden sales in 12 markets over the coming weeks ahead of a full commercial launch later this fall. We won't be sharing offer details today as we want to announce it to our customers first. However, we can share the following. The product will be exclusive to customers also buying Wireline with us, will target low to mid data users, and will provide a time-limited launch bonus for the first wave of customers joining us. In the US, our Q3 subscriber metrics were impacted by an uptick in competition in three of our states, as mentioned in our last earnings call, and by internal execution gaps, which have now already been addressed. The ongoing transformation of our sales and marketing capabilities, combined with the fact that some of our competitive headwinds were temporary in nature, make us confident that Q3 was a low point and that we should see gradual improvements in U.S. customer metrics over the coming quarters. In this coming Q4, more specifically, we expect U.S. customer metrics for residential internet segments by far our largest, to be better versus Q3. We will be doing a large one-time disconnect in the bulk segment during the fourth quarter, but our predictable bulk sales pipeline shows that the segment will return to growth in the following quarters. We're lowering our revenue outlook for the year as a result of the U.S. pressures, but this decline is offset by operating efficiencies as a result of our transformation program. Therefore, we're maintaining our original adjusted EBITDA guidance for the year. We're also raising our free cash flow guidance, thanks to the transformation-related CapEx synergies I mentioned earlier. Patrice will share more deep information on our outlook later in this call. At Cotico Media, the radio advertising market continued to face challenges, but revenue increased during the quarter. helped in part by ongoing growth in our digital advertising solutions and strong listener engagement. Our leading radio stations have continued to achieve strong market share in their target markets from recent audience surveys. Before I pass it over to Patrice for more details about our results, please allow me to comment on the current Canadian regulatory environment. The CRTC is stubbornly maintaining a broken TPIA or resale regime that has completely failed to meet its original objective to help new entrants get into the market. Today, the regime is mainly used by the big three Canadian telecom companies to get even bigger. On June 20th, the CRTC rejected our appeal to fix the regime by disqualifying the big three Canadian telecom companies from leveraging it. By doing so, the CRTC is misusing its power and it's favoring telecom giants at the expense of regional players such as Cogico. It's like forcing regional airlines to let national airlines use their planes. It just doesn't make any sense. As you can see from the announcements that we're making today, Including the launch of a completely new wireless service for Canadians, the first major wireless launch in this country in over 10 years, Cogeco intends to remain a growing competitive force in this country. We won't let the CRTC stop us from providing more choice to Canadians and are prepared to fight for the competition and investments that Canada needs. We urge the federal cabinet to be as passionate about competitive investments and economic growth as we are. Canadian telecom has been held back by this bad policy, and the government needs to act now. Patrice, over to you.