Telesat Corporation

All participants, thank you for standing by. The conference is ready to begin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the conference call to report the first quarter 2023 financial results for Telesat. Our speakers today will be Dan Goldberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of Telesat, and Andrew Brown, Chief Financial Officer of Telesat. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Michael Bolaido, Director of Treasury and Risk Management. Please go ahead, Mr. Bolaido.

Thank you and good morning. This morning we filed our quarterly report on Form 6K with the SEC and on CDAR. Our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. There are risks that Telesat's actual results may differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements as a result of known and unknown risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of known risks, see Telesat's annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC Telesat assumes no responsibility to update or revise these forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Dan Goldberg, Telesat's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Michael. This morning, I'll share some thoughts on our financial results and give an update on the business. I'll then hand over to Andrew. He'll speak to the numbers in detail, and then we'll open the call up to questions. It's been just six weeks since we held our call for our full year 2022 results. So we don't have that many big updates to share with you today. Our Q1 numbers came in consistent with our expectations. And at this time, we can reaffirm the full year guidance we gave in late March. When we released our full year results, I noted the two biggest contributors to the decreases in revenue and adjusted EBITDA that we're forecasting this year. The first was the residual headwinds from the ANIC F3 dish renewal we secured early last year. which will show up in the first four months of this year. The second one we noted was an expected renewal with Bell for NMIC 4, which comes up for renewal in early October this year. We noted that we expected Bell to renew all the DTH capacity on NMIC 4, but at a materially lower rate than the current one, which is exactly where we've landed with Bell. Bell has renewed all the NMIC 4 DTH capacity for two years, with an option to extend for another year effective in October when the current term expires. As we noted on our last call, these two renewals, DISH and BELL, account for approximately half of our anticipated revenue and adjusted EBITDA decline for the year. I also want to flag that utilization at the end of Q1, while quite high at 88%, is down slightly from the 89% we had at the end of Q4. There were some changes in the fleet in Q1, with ANAC F2 going into inclined service, so we pull it out of the utilization calculation, and ANAC 4 coming into the fleet, so it goes into the utilization calculation. But those movements, net-net, had no real impact on utilization as a whole. We don't have any new update on light speed at this time relative to what we said on the call six weeks ago. I will say that we continue to make progress with the various parties we're engaged with. There's great enthusiasm within the company and our board about the prospects of the Constellation, and we remain optimistic that we're going to be able to move forward with the program, recognizing we're still not quite there yet, and it's not over until it's over. We hope to be in a position to provide greater clarity soon. Finally, as we noted in our press release this morning, we repurchased approximately U.S. $103 million in face value of Terraset debt since our last earnings call, which we believe strengthens our financial position and creates value for shareholders. So with that, I'll hand it over to Andrew and then look forward to taking any questions.