Michael Prior
Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open, please go ahead
All right. Thank you, Justin. What you didn't say before as I was the cause of the delay, so sorry everybody. So jumping right into it. Fourth quarter results as well as for the year reflects a substantial impact from the hurricane that hit the Virgin Island in September, stating the obvious. And then in our quarter, our jump in net income was also related driven by the full recognition of our storm insurance claims, which were paid in early 2018. While we expected that result it was nonetheless a relief to see it and timely as well in view of the urgent needs in the market. On the other hand, both revenue and EBITDA for our International Telecom Segment and overall, were negatively impacted by the continued widespread storm related service outages. And I'll touch more on where we go from there in a few minutes. Outside of that event, we had a quarter that was on a whole positive, and largely a little better than expectations. From one perspective, it indicates the strength of our model, which is a portfolio of critical infrastructure based service providers whether communications or power in largely unconnected markets. While the storms were an extraordinarily severe event in the Virgin Islands, our other markets in the Caribbean and islands region from Bermuda to Cayman to Guiana, all delivered positive results and continued to execute on their major initiatives. I think the diversity and market positioning of this portfolio and the platforms within it will serve us well moving forward as we focus on progressive improvement throughout the year and adjusting our U.S. telecom business for a contraction and shift in the market. At the same time, we continue to explore areas for further investment and growth. So with that, I'll turn to more specifics, starting with the International Telecom segment. And I'll start of course with the main event, which is the recovery from the impact of the two category five hurricanes that struck the Virgin Islands and rapid succession in September. So our immediate priorities, driven by necessity and realities on the ground was clean up of downed wires, damaged switching facilities and similar infrastructure, as well as support for our employees, many of whom had serious damage to their homes and the larger market. As the fastest path to bringing up critical communication services in the territory, we placed our initial restoration priority on our mobile network services, including the launch of our new LTE plant, which was brought up early in the fourth quarter and used both to provide mobile communication services and also replacement home and office broadband services, through the distribution of MiFi devices to many thousands of our former fixed customers. Simultaneously, we prioritized cyber-based broadband services to critical government agencies and institutions, including FEMA, the offices of the U.S. Virgin Islands government, banks and other enterprises required to get critical processes and services and the economy overall moving again. And our Viya team rightfully received some praise for these efforts. We then began work on the repairs and improvements, needed to our switching core and worked out on the main trunks to the extent that the power restoral efforts made that feasible or practical. This was slow going at first, because of the lack of available crews and other logistics unique to this isolated Island environment. The dam finally broke on those hurdles in the current quarter and we now have been able to deploy a much larger number of trucks and crews to accelerate restoral to all the core network and beginning to pick up the pace on the other necessary work. As a result, we are now making significant progress everyday reconnecting large numbers of customers. However, it will still be many weeks before we expect that substantially all of our customers reconnected and power to all of the sites necessary to achieve that. While restoration has moved slower than originally expected and in hindsight I am sure we could have done some things better, there has been no lack of effort or will involved and I want to publicly thank our team, both our employees and all of our contractors and partners for their diligence and efforts under very difficult circumstances. Looking forward, we face some critical decisions as we continue with the rebuilt as to have best from a technical, practical and fundamental business sense to do that. To that end, we have had an ongoing constructed dialogue with key regulatory and government officials as to how to find solutions to satisfy the critical concerns of all the stakeholders. So we were able to not just restore but emerge with a more resilient and robust infrastructure for this very hard hit market that will continue to face the risk of future storms. Lastly, the main industry in the Virgin Islands is tourism, and most hotels and resorts have not reopened, and some are not expected to do so until 2019. So that could stretch the timing of a full recovery into next year. In other markets in this segment, as noted, we saw some steady progress in most areas. Looking at subscriber levels and adjusting for exits or some smaller properties during the year, our wireless subscribers were essentially flat, but our fixed data subscribers increased by about 7.7%. Some of the data subscriber gains were offset by decline in voice or access lines of about 4.7%. But taking together, we see those as positive trends and consistent with our expectations. Much of the data subscriber growth is being driven by the expansion of our fiber network in certain areas, and those investments will continue on a careful selective basis throughout 2018. Wireless ARPU insurance both improved year-on-year with ARPU up 3.8% and blended churn down to 2.7% from 3% a year ago. These are good trends for the underlying economics. And ARPU growth mainly reflects increased data usage and plan adoption. So in U.S. Telecom, moving to that segment, the fourth quarter for this segment came in slightly better than we expected as certain of our smaller customers increased volumes and our earlier cost cutting moves yielded some benefits. We also added a small number cell sites in response customer needs. While all that is positive, that doesn't change the trajectory we outlined some quarter ago for 2018 and refreshed in the earnings release. We still expect contraction in the core business here before we have a chance to see top-line growth again. But we are very active in restructuring and re-pointing this business. We still have a lot of confidence in the team and the platform and we believe there are number of ways we can drive value over the mid-to-longer term horizon. Those efforts include everything from operating efficiencies to new wholesale and commercial offerings. We don't expect those activities to yield immediate benefits, but we hope they help us deliver improvements forward from 2018. Moving to the renewable energy segment. Nothing changes quickly in this segment, given the long term nature of the investments and revenue assets, but we did see continued signs of progress on our phase of builds in India and getting the final regulatory clearances to start earning revenue from the power being produced. In the fourth quarter, we made some structural changes to team and processes in an effort to improve the speed of execution and the operational efficiency. We have a substantial pipeline remaining, but we are being careful about how we proceed with that. And since funding partners are critical to our strategy, we are working through how and when it would be best to bringing those sources. We are still subscale and differentiated for the India solar market with our focus on private enterprise customers, and that's slowing us down a bit on the debt side of the funding. And while it hasn't significantly impacted perspective equity returns at this point, we do need to find a solution there. In other areas, we recently launched the corporate venture investment group ATN Ventures. Our focus is to invest in technology companies that bring strategic value to ATN and positively impact our operating businesses. We have hired experienced technologists, operators and investors who will partner with great entrepreneurs to build lasting value. So in summary, the hurricane had a major impact on the quarter and the year, but our network rebuild efforts are picking up pace as is the restoral of the other critical infrastructure in the territory. On the capital investment and allocation front, we made some important changes to our approach to dividends and buybacks, and some smaller investments we feel good about. While there will be some fall off in our U.S. telecom revenue base in the first quarter, primarily as a result of the asset sales we completed in 2017, we see 2018 as the year of progressive improvement from there as we benefit from ongoing progress in restoring service to the USVI, continue to grow our broadband and subscriber base -- our broadband subscriber base in other international markets and generate incremental revenues from our solar power plants in India. So Justin, I will now hand it back to you.