Trilogy International Partners Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Trilogy International Partners Q2 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be opened for questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Anne Saxton, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Kate. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our conference call to discuss our results for the second quarter of 2021. This call is also being broadcast live over the web and can be accessed in the investor section of the Trilogy International Partners website. Joining me today are Trilogy's President and CEO, Brad Horwitz, and Trilogy's Senior Vice President and CFO, Eric Mickels. This call includes forward-looking information from which our actual results may differ materially. For further information regarding the various factors, assumptions, and risks that could cause our actual results to differ, please review the cautionary language in the About Forward Looking Information section of yesterday's press release, as well as the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements and the risk factors in our 2020 Annual Report on Form 20F, available on both CDAR and EDGAR. This forward-looking information represents our expectations as of today and, accordingly, is subject to change. We disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking information, except as required by law. Please also refer to yesterday's press release for definitions and reconciliations of any non-GAAP measures that we used during today's call. The press release is posted on our website at Trilogy-International.com under the Investors tab. I'll now turn the call over to Brad Horwitz, President and CEO of Trilogy International Partners.

Thanks, Anne, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our call. Today, I'll provide you with an update on our business, and then Eric will take you through our second quarter performance and outlook for the rest of the year. 16 months ago, our operating markets were in the midst of severe social restrictions as they grappled with the onset of the global pandemic. Our local teams made a number of adjustments early on to address potential impacts and positions for emerging from a COVID environment. Since that time, through effective management by its government, Life has resumed to normal in New Zealand, although the international borders still remain closed. Given the closed borders and the importance of travel and tourism to the New Zealand economy, we are not yet experiencing the reopening tailwinds that our North American industry peers are beginning to see. However, two degrees resilience and strong execution has resulted in continued solid results and we're pleased with our second quarter performance. Solid revenue growth over the prior year continues across all of our product lines with accelerating momentum in our B2B business, again bolstering our postpaid subscribers. Our B2B base has grown by 24% compared to a year ago, as our mobile B2B activations in the quarter grew 85% year over year. Our prepaid and fixed broadband products in New Zealand also continue to perform well, with double-digit ARPU growth in the second quarter compared to a year ago. Our increasing scale in New Zealand drove organic year-over-year segment-adjusted EBITDA growth of 8%. Bolivia, in contrast, continues to be impacted by COVID-19, and the second quarter brought with it a third wave of cases which have prolonged compression of our service revenues and segment-adjusted EBITDA. Despite these challenges, our local team remains resourceful and effective at controlling costs as it focuses on maintaining cash liquidity as we bridge this period of instability. Moving on to specifics by market, starting with New Zealand, our strong financial performance continued in the second quarter. Despite the ongoing lack of tourism in the economy, our local team's successful efforts to position for coming out of the pandemic including leveling up key roles in our organization, are evident in our strong results. This can be seen in the acceleration of our B2B customer activations and the ARPU growth of this base, improved prepaid data monetization driving higher ARPU, as well as improving pricing strategies in our fixed broadband business. We continue to grow our subscriber base, though consumer activity remains somewhat subdued. Retail foot traffic continues to be about 20% below pre-COVID levels, which has impacted activations. We believe this is due to ongoing border closures as well as a potential shift in behavior as people continue to work from home. Our continued retention efforts and active churn management have resulted in sequentially improved churn and net addition growth across all of our products. In the second quarter, our blended wireless churn of 1.71% was the lowest in 2 degrees 11-year history. It's challenging to estimate when the New Zealand borders will reopen. In April, a travel bubble with Australia was established and limited travel resumed, though at about 30% of pre-pandemic levels. In late June, an Aussie traveler in Wellington was confirmed to have the more contagious COVID Delta variant, resulting in a short period of level two restrictions in the area. Fortunately, there was no community transmission. With the subsequent broader outbreak of the Delta variant in Australia and resumed government lockdowns there, on July 23rd, the New Zealand government closed the travel bubble indefinitely. On the vaccination front, while there's adequate supply to fully vaccinate the entire population, only about 16% of New Zealanders have been fully vaccinated to date. The government has indicated that it is targeting 90% of its people being fully vaccinated by the end of this year. Our B2B product continues to accelerate, bolstering our postpaid mobile business. Our activation run rate continues to increase, and we continue to see growth opportunities ahead. Our big win in the second quarter was securing the New Zealand Post as customers, which could very well be the biggest B2B account in the market for 2021. This is on the back of winning the New Zealand Health Group account last year, which was the largest enterprise account in 2020. After a few quarters of tempered broadband activations, our marketing efforts to increase market awareness have gained traction. In the second quarter, spontaneous recall of our broadband product improved by 9% compared to last year, and we increased gross ads by 18% compared to a year ago, which also surpasses our second quarter 2019 activation levels as a pre-COVID reference point. We continue to make headway with our new wireless broadband product Gross ads increased five-fold sequentially in the second quarter. This subscriber base consists of both new customers as well as existing Two Degrees customers that have migrated from copper, which is accretive to our margins as we no longer need to pay Chorus a monthly access charge for those subscribers. Though just getting started with our wireless broadband product, we believe that the market opportunity is extremely significant for us. We were also pleased to see our mobile net promoter scores improve versus the last quarter. This result is supported by a number of effective efforts by our local team. In addition to proactive churn management, including the doubling of our customer save rates, we have improved our customer care metrics. We've worked hard on the network as well over the last 18 months to ensure parity with our competitors. In addition to strengthening our own network footprint of more than 1,300 sites across New Zealand, we now have an additional 237 new sites that expand our coverage through the infrastructure sharing agreement that we put in place last year. As we have mentioned previously, the new infrastructure sharing agreement provides an LTE experience for our customers, whereas the prior roaming arrangement was 3G only. In addition, more than half of the almost 500 sites contemplated by our rural broadband joint venture with the other two mobile network operators are on the air. As a result of our efforts, independent mobile analytic firm OpenSignal has again named Two Degrees as the top-ranked mobile operator in New Zealand. We received best performance accolades across several categories, including voice, video, and gaming. Regionally, we were also recognized as the number one provider in the Auckland region and received high honors in other areas as well. With respect to 5G, our network deployment is making progress and we remain on target to launch service before the end of the year using our 60 megahertz of limited term 3.5 gig spectrum. We continue to expect the long-term spectrum 3,500 meg rights to be auctioned off in the first half of 2022, with usage to begin in late 2022. Finally, a short update on the progress of our planned New Zealand IPO. We recently selected as joint lead managers Macquarie, Jardine, and Craig's, all are top tier in New Zealand and Australia, and bring solid expertise and execution experience. In July, our senior management team participated in more than 60 virtual non-deal roadshow presentations across New Zealand and Australia. Preparations continue as we plan for a listing before the end of the year, although the final decision will of course be market dependent. Turning now to Bolivia, after some improvement, the country entered a third wave of COVID-19 early in the second quarter. Cases appear to have peaked in early June, with mobility restrictions in place in most cities during the quarter, as well as increased vaccine supply, cases have been steadily declining. Early August numbers are similar to the end of 2020, which we find very encouraging. As expected, the resurgence of the virus in Bolivia has dampened our second quarter financial results. With mobility down and government subsidies several months behind us, Commercial activity in the country has been limited. We have been focused on retaining prepaid market share and increased our acquisition promotions to support this effort during the quarter. As a result, our prepaid activations increased 10% sequentially and our net additions significantly improved. While the pandemic resulted in a slight contraction of our postpaid base over the last several quarters, The proportion of our subscriber base in Bolivia that is postpaid at about 14% continues to be larger than that of the broader market. While the local economy remains pandemic constrained, our local team remains focused on cost controls and cash management. Further, our priorities have not changed with respect to optionality of this asset. There continues to be interest from third parties in acquiring the business, and we believe that there continues to be meaningful value with a compelling brand, a stable customer base, and strong network and a spectrum portfolio. With that, I'll turn it over to Eric to take you through the numbers. Eric?