Cogeco Inc.

Good day and welcome to Cogeco Inc. and Cogeco Communications Inc. Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Patride Ouimet, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Cogeco Inc. and Cogeco Communications Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Ouimet.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this second quarter conference call, which Philippe Jeté and I will take as usual. So 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 our press releases issued yesterday. So I'll turn the call over to Philippe.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the second quarter results of fiscal year 2023. We are reporting consolidated results which are in line with our expectations. While the industry continues to be impacted by increasing macroeconomic pressures and a more competitive environment, we remain focused on balancing subscriber growth with financial performance while remaining disciplined with our cost structure. We continue to execute successfully on our fiber to the home network expansions program with the addition of 32,000 homes passed during the quarter, which brings us to more than 140,000 home paths over the last 18 months. This is a 5% increase to our network during the period. Our reliable high-speed network, innovative digital product offering, and local customer service have already enabled new internet subscriber additions in these areas, which position us well for the future. For mobile, we are encouraged by the government's indication that it is looking to support increased competition in the wireless space. We remain focused on meeting regulatory requirements, which we expect shortly, leading to the negotiation of wholesale rates with incumbents. As a reminder, Cogeco owns such spectrum in 91% of its Canadian footprint, which is a requirement for MVNO access. We are also pleased with our March acquisition of Oxio, a telecommunication operation serving about 48,000 residential customers in Quebec, Ontario, and Western Canada. With this great addition, we now have a second brand in Canada to serve younger and price-conscious customers with a fully digital customer service. Looking further into the future, we also intend to explore longer-term opportunities by allocating up to 100 million of capital to new growth opportunities These funds will be invested over a five-year period with the objective of generating attractive long-term returns. The goal is to create new opportunities for growth in a fast-changing environment while building on our innovation, our operational experience and minimizing investment risk due to the limited size of each investment. Additionally, Like the government subsidized fiber expansions that we are undertaking in Canada, we remain interested in participating in similar expansions under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Funding Program in the United States. Each state will run its own process allocating funds by region, which we expect to begin later in the calendar year. In terms of recent notable ESG deployment, development, Cogeco has been ranked for the fourth consecutive year among the world's 100 most sustainable corporation, according to Corporate Knights. This ranking results from a rigorous assessment of over 6,000 companies around the world, generating more than $1 billion in revenue. COGECO's performance was particularly recognized for its board diversity, carbon productivity, and sustainable revenue and investment. I would also like to highlight that we recently published our annual ESG and sustainability report, as well as our climate action plan, which detail our environmental, social, and governance commitments, initiatives, and performance aim at driving sustainable growth and business resilience. I will now review our operational results. Let's start with our U.S. operations. As mentioned earlier, we continued our fiber network expansion, where we added 17,000 homes passed this quarter, or 68,000 homes pass over the last 18 months. At BreezeLine, we continue to focus on growing the customer base. And as you see, we have made progress. Outside of Ohio, we grew our internet customer by 1,700, both from our current and newly served areas. The product mix has also improved with a greater proportion of new connections taking faster internet speeds and therefore driving a higher average revenue per unit. In Ohio, internet net losses stood at 5,500, which we would obviously prefer to be a net gain, but is nevertheless an improvement over previous quarters. There is still more work on our plate to return to growth in our internet customer base in Ohio, And it will take more time to gain greater brand awareness in that market. But we remain focused on our plan where every step counts to set the foundation for future growth. BreezeLine also continued to roll out its IPTV product in Ohio to all its existing customers and densifying and interconnecting its network fully to BreezeLine's core. Moving to the Canadian operations. We accelerated our construction efforts to connect more homes in unserved and underserved communities in both provinces, where we added about 15,000 homes passed during the quarter and 73,000 homes passed over the last 18 months. As a reminder, these fiber-to-the-home expansion projects are mostly done in partnership with governments and deployed in areas which do not currently have high-speed internet providers. We are pleased with the results that we are seeing from these expansion projects, which have contributed to growth in customer additions. Overall, our Canadian team did an excellent job executing on effective sales and marketing strategies, which led our internet customer base to grow this quarter by 7,800 across our traditional markets and these newly served areas. The Canadian business has also improved its ARPU with an improved customer product mix. For Cogico Media, our stations remain at the top of the ratings, confirming once again our leadership position, even if we are operating in soft advertising markets. In the meantime, we continue to expand our multi-platform audio content options with more digital ad tech solutions. Now, let me turn the call over to Patrice, who will provide more details on our financial performance for the quarter.