James Holanda
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thanks, Jordan, and good afternoon, everyone. We really appreciate you joining us today. I've now been in the role for a little over 70 days, which has given me the opportunity to spend meaningful time with our teams, get closer to our markets and develop a clear view of where we are performing well and where we need to improve. At a high level, I'd say the work underway across the business is moving in the right direction, but those efforts are not yet showing up consistently in the results. Today, I want to spend my time on 3 things: what we're seeing in the business, what I've learned since stepping into the role and our focus and priorities going forward. Starting with the quarter, we're not yet seeing the full benefit of the changes we are making in the business. Results reflect the broader economic backdrop and continued pressure in our more competitive markets, particularly in customer retention. While we have already begun to make changes in these areas, it remains early and those efforts are not yet meaningfully reflected in our results. At the same time, first quarter connects improved year-over-year, which we view as an early indication that elements of our strategy are beginning to gain traction. In addition, we are roughly 2 months into our MSO-wide mobile launch. And while it is too early to draw conclusions around retention or lifetime value, initial customer response has been encouraging. We continue to believe mobile can become an important component of the broader relationship over time. Even with these challenges, the business is generating substantial free cash flow, reinforcing both the durability of the model and our ability to continue to execute on our debt reduction, strengthen the balance sheet and create long-term shareholder value. In the first quarter, we generated approximately $115 million of free cash flow and $500 million over the past 4 quarters, providing meaningful flexibility to allocate capital in a disciplined manner. Turning to residential services. I want to spend a bit more time on what we're seeing in the business. In the first quarter, we reported 12,600 net residential broadband customer losses on a sequential basis. While this reflects continued pressure in certain areas of the business, there are several underlying dynamics that help frame how we are thinking about the trajectory going forward. Over the course of my career, I've seen firsthand what has and has not worked in operating environments like this, and those lessons are shaping how we are approaching the business today. First, churn was elevated in the quarter, but remained primarily concentrated within our more competitive markets, which allow us to concentrate our retention efforts where they can have the greatest impact. At the same time, new connects improved year-over-year, driven in part by value-conscious customer segments. These customers represent an important part of our segmentation strategy and remain focused on adding them in an accretive way. We also saw year-over-year improvement across certain go-to-market channels, including e-commerce and direct sales, reinforcing our focus on meeting customers where they prefer to engage and expanding on our connect opportunities. From a retention standpoint, we are implementing targeted initiatives to better identify and engage at-risk customers. These include speed upgrades, more gradual stepped promotional roll-offs, AI-driven tools and a new CRM platform expected to go live later this year. We are also deepening multiproduct customer relationships through offerings such as mobile, Whole-Home WiFi, enhanced online security and comprehensive technical support for the connected home, all while continuing to invest in the network to further strengthen the consistent, reliable experience our customers expect. While still early, these are the types of operational actions we believe can improve retention trends over time. Looking at ARPU, results in the quarter reflected downward pressure from go-to-market initiatives and targeted retention offers, partially offset by continued selling to higher speed tiers and the broader multiproduct offerings just mentioned. While we may see some variability from quarter-to-quarter, we continue to expect ARPU trends to remain broadly stable for the year. Taken together, while retention remains the primary challenge, we believe the underlying trends in connects and multiproduct offerings provide a constructive foundation as we work to improve customer outcomes and drive more consistent performance. Turning to business services. Overall performance showed improvements through the back half of the quarter. Under Edwin Butler's leadership since early January of this year, the business services organization has moved quickly from assessment into execution. Targeted investments in sales enablement, go-to-market discipline and a new sales training program drove improved results across our fiber, carrier and enterprise channels. While still early, these trends are encouraging and reinforce our confidence in the actions underway. Todd will address some discrete items in the quarter in more detail. Clearly, competitive intensity persists. However, we believe our network capacity, reliability and local operating presence position us well, and we continue to invest for improved performance. Today, approximately 53% of our markets are multi-gig capable, and we expect to expand that capability to most markets by year-end, reinforcing our ability to meet growing customer demand across the footprint. Against that backdrop, over the past several weeks, it has become clear that our biggest opportunity is improving the consistency of execution across the footprint. Many of the underlying dynamics are consistent with patterns I've seen in prior operating environments. As a leadership team, we've aligned around a focused set of priorities where disciplined execution can drive the most meaningful improvement. These priorities center on strengthening retention and conversion, simplifying our product set and ensuring greater consistency in how we go to market across the footprint. We've already begun to take action in each of these areas with the objectives of improving the customer experience, the price value equation and therefore, the customer trends and the financial performance over time. The work we're doing today will still take some time to show up in our results, and we would not expect it to fully translate into the numbers within a single quarter. Our focus right now is on improving overall execution of the array of operating strategies at our disposal and continuing to strengthen the balance sheet. Stepping back, I remain confident in our long-term opportunity. The durability of our cash flow allows us to continue prioritizing debt reduction while maintaining the flexibility to invest in the business and support long-term shareholder value creation. That confidence is grounded in the strength and the capacity of our network as well as the clear opportunity we see to improve execution within our existing footprint. And with that, I'll turn it over to Todd, who will provide a recap of our financial performance.