Telesat Corporation

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jordan and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Telesat second quarter 2026 financial results call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask questions during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, Press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to James Ratcliffe, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Earlier this morning, we filed our quarterly report for the period ending June 30th, 2026 on Form 6K with the SEC and on CDAR+. Our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. There are risks that TELUSAT's actual results may differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements as a result of known and unknown risks and uncertainty. For a discussion of known risks, please see TELUSAT's annual report and updates filed with the SEC. TELUSAT assumes no responsibility to update or revise these forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the call over to Dan Goldberg, TELUSAT's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Okay, thanks James, and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'll start with a few words about the business, and then I'll hand the call over to Donald to speak to the numbers in more detail, and we'll then open the call up to questions. Just last week, we announced we signed the first contract in the ESCAPE program, and we're very pleased to have secured that key strategic opportunity to provide such a critical capability to the Canadian Armed Forces. to support the range of important missions and interests that they have and that Canada has in the Arctic. With that contract announced and an expanded Lightspeed constellation fully funded for an accelerated rollout, we're very well positioned to execute on the wide range of additional opportunities for Lightspeed that we're now engaged on, including in the defense and government segments, allowing us to build on our already substantial $5.6 billion Telesat Lightspeed contractual backlog. Our strong confidence in our future prospects caused us to raise our publicly available revenue and EBITDA forecast for Lightspeed, which I hope you all saw last week. In addition to the strong commercial traction we're getting, we've also been making excellent progress on the technical and operations fronts for Lightspeed. On the constellation development side of things, we've signed a firm contract with MDA for 69 additional satellites, bringing the fully funded and committed constellation size to 225 satellites. We've secured almost all the launch capacity we need and expect to sign an agreement for the final Falcon 9 rocket required to complete the deployment of the 225 satellite constellation in the near future. and we continue to expect global commercial availability in the first quarter of 2028. In light of the expansion of the Constellation, you may have noticed in today's earnings release that we updated our 2026 Lightspeed Total Investment Guidance for 2026, which includes both OPEX and CAPEX associated with delivering the global network. Our prior guidance was one to 1.2 billion Canadian dollars of investment this year, which we've now brought up to 1.3 to 1.5 billion Canadian dollars, a $300 million increase to the bottom and top end of the range. In our geo segment, First quarter results came in largely as we had expected with most of the year-over-year decline coming from non-renewals and lower revenue renewals in our broadcast activities and to a lesser extent in reductions in services for fixed broadband customers. That was partially offset by new contracts for broadband services for commercial airline broadband connectivity. As you may have noticed, our geo backlog increased during the quarter. do primarily to a meaningful term extension of one of our broadcast video contracts, evidence of our continued efforts to maximize the value of our existing geo satellites, lock in long term commitments where we can to improve cash flow visibility in the legacy business, all while retaining careful cost controls to mitigate the impact of ongoing revenue pressures in the geo segment. During the quarter, Two of our geosatellites, ANAC F4 and Telstar 14R, reached the end of their useful lives and were retired from service. While we've been able to transfer nearly half the traffic from these satellites on the certain of our remaining geosatellites, the decommissioning of these satellites will still be a headwind for the balance of this year and into the future. We had anticipated this impact. We knew that these satellites were going to be retired this year. when we provided our geo-segment guidance for 2026 and we're reiterating that revenue and EBITDA guidance today. Staying with our geo-segment, we were pleased to see late last month the FCC's report in order to repurpose 160 megahertz of C-band satellite spectrum for terrestrial wireless use. Under the terms of the report in order, Telesat is due to receive 189 million US dollars in incentive payments for our role in freeing up that valuable spectrum. We're actively working to develop a plan to ensure that the spectrum is cleared prior to the transition deadlines in 2030 and 2031. We successfully cleared C-band spectrum in the prior FCC C-band reallocation proceeding and we're confident we'll be successful this time as well. Lastly, for Telesat GEO, we've entered into a new term loan agreement with a third party lender for 120 million US dollars to be used for general corporate purposes. These new funds will provide Telesat with greater financial resources to support our legacy business. We remain heavily focused on the upcoming Telesat GeoDebt maturities and achieving a fair and balanced consensual outcome for all of our stakeholders. So with that, I'll hand over to Donald. We'll speak to the numbers in more detail, and then we'll open the call up to questions.