Arthur T. Minson
Analyst · Jefferies
Thanks, Rob, and good morning, everyone. As Rob indicated, we continued to perform well in Q2. We posted our strongest second quarter subscriber metrics in years, and we performed right in line with our previously announced financial expectations for Q2, with very strong sequential growth in revenue and adjusted OIBDA. Let me walk you through the Q2 highlights, starting with our subscriber performance, which was strong despite the typical second quarter headwinds. On the residential side, we lost 34,000 customer relationships in Q2, which is the lowest decline in residential CRs in a Q2 in 5 years. In business services, we added 21,000 CRs, the best quarterly CR performance ever for business services. The Q2 residential CR performance was driven by across-the-board sales channel improvements in connects, with churn essentially flat year-over-year. The flat churn is particularly impressive, considering that this year, all customers eligible for a rate increase received their increase in early Q2, so the investments we have made in retention in the last year continue to bear fruit. Residential video net declines at 152,000 was still higher than we'd like, but represent the best for a second quarter in 3 years. Bundling performance was strong. Residential Triple Play net adds at 42,000 put us at 124,000 Triple Play net adds year-to-date through June. This is a dramatic improvement from last year when he had lost over 100,000 Triple Play subs in the first 6 months of 2013. The improvement in Triple Play trends was driven by much stronger Triple Play connect volume and significant improvements in upgrading doubles to triples, as well as lower churn. You'll recall that we have spent a lot of energy over the last few years in-sourcing our phone operations. And as a result, we've reduced our phone costs under $4.50 per line per month. The improvements in our cost structure has enabled us to aggressively bundle phone in doubles and triples for as little as $10 while growing our gross profit per phone subscriber. The result was 79,000 phone net adds, the best Q2 phone performance in 5 years. This was also the second -- this was also the best second quarter for HSD in 4 years, with 67,000 net adds. The positive mix shift in HSD continued as connects to each of our 3 higher-speed tiers accelerated compared to last year's second quarter. Tier upgrades among existing customers also were very strong. And together, our 3 highest speed tiers now comprise 34% of our HSD customers, up from 26% a year ago as we continued to upsell existing HSD customers. And close to 40% of our new HSD connects are to our Turbo and above tiers. We are also very pleased with our Everyday Low Price $14.99 Lite HSD tier, which is designed for more price-sensitive customers. It again accounted for approximately 15% of new Internet connects in the second quarter, making this a very effective tool for taking customers from DSL, and now accounts for approximately 4% of our HSD base. Residential net adds in July were better than last July and looked a lot like July 2012, and keep in mind that subscriber activity in Q3 is typically back-end loaded. With that, let's move on to Q2 financial results. I know year-over-year comparisons have been normal standard for tracking financial trends, and our year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 was solid at a little over 3%. But given our subscriber weakness last year, I don't think year-over-year comparisons tell the full story. This quarter, sequential trends were quite strong, with total sequential revenue growth of $144 million, which is the best organic sequential growth since 2007. The sequential improvement in residential services revenue of $94 million was driven by a healthy mix of rate and volume as a result of both the strong subscriber performance we saw in Q1 and $1.53 sequential increase in residential ARPU, with the increase in ARPU principally a result of the unified rate increases we implemented this quarter. In business services, revenue increased $126 million year-over-year in Q2. Organic growth, excluding our year-end 2013 DukeNet acquisition, was $97 million. One of Phil Meeks' key initiatives is beginning to pay off, as sales rep productivity increased 15% sequentially and 20% year-over-year. We now have a pretty significant backlog of sold, but not yet installed business, which bodes well for future revenue. The business services team is very focused on streamlining the installation process, both to be more responsive to customer demand and to capture the revenue sooner. On the product side, high-speed data contributed roughly half of Q2 revenue growth. We connected almost 23,000 buildings to our network in Q2, bringing total buildings on net to approximately 900,000. And we expanded our serviceable market by more than, $400 million per year, bringing the total serviceable telecom revenue opportunity on net to almost $14 billion, meaning, that we are currently serving a little over 15% of our on-net telecom revenue opportunity. Other operations revenue grew 8% in Q2. Media sales revenue increased 5%, primarily due to growth in political advertising revenue. We expect ad revenue growth to accelerate in the back half of the year as political advertising kicks in. Other revenue increased primarily due to affiliate fees from our residential services segment for carriage of the Dodgers RSN. Second quarter adjusted OIBDA of $2.05 billion was spot-on our public comments at an investor conference in May. Again, I will focus our sequential trends, where we converted over half of the incremental revenue from Q1 to Q2 into adjusted OIBDA, despite the launch of the Dodgers network. On a year-over-year basis, operating expenses were up $159 million or 4.5%, with total programming and content costs up $107 million or 8.7%, with the biggest driver of the increase being Dodgers costs. Programming cost per residential sub, including an intercompany charge for a market rate Dodgers deal, increased 10.8%. I will also point out that over the last year, that we have invested more in sales, marketing, retention and care. These are important investments that have allowed us to drive the improvements in operating metrics that Rob noted in his remarks. These improvements in operating metrics are already beginning to translate into improved customer satisfaction scores, which should lead to improved revenue trends over time. To help fund these customer-facing investments, we did continue to manage shared services costs closely. In Q2, they were roughly flat year-over-year, excluding merger-related and restructuring costs. We remain very focused on identifying ways to operate more efficiently. Rob updated you on the Dodgers situation. And while we continue to work hard to engage with other distributors of that carriage for the Dodgers network, my recommendation for modeling purposes is to assume we do not sign additional affiliate agreements for the Dodgers network this year. So on a full year basis, and including lost advertising revenue, I expect SportsNet LA to cost us around 50 basis points of revenue growth and 125 basis points of adjusted OIBDA growth. To put a finer point on it, our initial guidance, including the benefit of Dodgers distribution, was 4% to 5% revenue growth and 5% to 6% adjusted OIBDA growth. Adjusting for the lack of Dodgers network carriage on growth would have reduced the original range of guidance for revenue and adjusted OIBDA growth to 3.5% to 4.5% and 3.75% to 4.75%, respectively. My current expectation is we'll be at the low end of the pro forma range for both revenue and adjusted OIBDA growth. As compared to the original guidance, we are getting more of our revenue growth from volume as opposed to rate, which is consistent with our long-term strategy. And as discussed, we have increased our investments in areas such as tech ops, care and Maxx. I expect we'll see the typical sequential trend in adjusted OIBDA from Q2 to Q3, so total company adjusted OIBDA growth will be meaningfully weighted towards Q4, which benefits from political advertising, easier year-over-year comparisons in Q4 as a result of last year's Q3 and Q4 subscriber losses and the absence of Dodgers rights fees in Q4, which was -- has been a drag on growth in Q2 and Q3 this year. Adjusted diluted EPS was very strong at $1.89, up 12%. It's worth noting that as a result of the suspension of our share repurchase program when we announced the Comcast transaction on February 13, share count reduction had a smaller impact on EPS growth in Q2 and will continue to have a lesser effect going forward. Free cash flow was $459 million for the quarter, a $273 million decrease from the prior year period, primarily due to higher capital spending. Let me tell you what we're doing here. As you'll recall, the 3-year plan we outlined on our fourth quarter call contemplated the rollout of TWC Maxx in 2 cities this year: New York City and L.A. Our progress in these cities has been very good. As a result, as Rob indicated, we now plan on pulling forward a third TWC Maxx city this year, Austin, Texas, where network hardening and the rollout of much higher HSD speeds are already underway and the digital conversion is about to begin. In addition, subscriber volumes have been strong, and we have accelerated the replacement of older set-tops in many cities, contributing to a better customer experience. As a result, we now expect to spend an additional $250 million this year in CapEx for a total of just under $4 billion. These investments will benefit Comcast when we close. And in the unlikely event we don't close, we will be stronger for having accelerated this capital deployment. As a result of the new IRS regulations that allow us to take an immediate tax deduction for de minimis expenses, the $250 million of gross increase in CapEx will cost us approximately $150 million on an after-tax basis in 2014. We currently are targeting around $2.5 billion of free cash flow in 2014, close to last year's free cash flow despite the increase in CapEx. On the balance sheet side. We had approximately $24.2 billion of net debt at the end of the quarter for a leverage ratio of approximately 3x, which is down a little from last quarter. We will continue to delever between now and closing as a result of the suspension of our stock buyback program. As we've previously noted, we plan to continue to pay our $3 annual dividend between signing and closing. So I know I walked you through a lot, but we're now a couple of quarters into our operating plan, and I'm really pleased with our results and our momentum. And I'm excited that we've been able to accelerate the pace of investment, which will position us very well in the future. With that, let me turn it back over to Tom for the Q&A portion of the call.