Kurt Bagwell - Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
Analyst
Thanks Pam and good morning. As you can see by our numbers, we're very pleased with Q2 results and our performance. Revenues and margins were strong. Costs were in line or better than expectations. We continue to steadily grow our asset base and we finished the quarter with strong backlog. Our customer base overall remains active. History continues to repeat itself and at each quarter some carriers were slowing down a program and planning for the next, some are picking up activity and some just steadily deploy. Overall, the organic leasing activity in Q2 was very high, as we had our best growth lease up quarter per tower in a year and signed more new co-location tenants than at any time in the last 5 years. Our customers continue to add to and refine our networks to produce high quality service for voice, data and video. Continued heavy subscriber increases and subscriber minutes of use increases are also driving the action. There is intense competition between the carriers to improve their networks in an effort to attract more users and reduce their churn. In the second quarter, we saw good activity from Verizon, MetroPCS, T-Mobile, Cricket and Clearwire. It's expected that Sprint Nextel, AT&T and T-Mobile will pick up in the second half, we are just starting to see signs of that activity for both new leases and amendments to existing leases. In Q2, 83% of the new leasing business signed on our tower was derived from new tenant agreement, while 17% came from amendments to existing agreement. This is a higher mix of new tenant agreement than we obtained in the recent past, reflecting more geographic expansion, new carriers entering markets for the first time and slightly left overlay work. We expect the overlay amendment activity to be higher in the second half of 2007 in terms of total dollars signed. 93% of the new revenue signed on our towers in the quarter came from telephony and other major broadband carriers. Rental rate for new tenant leases remain solid. An average tenant rents across our entire portfolio increased yet again to $1757 per month, up from $1753 at the end of the first quarter. At the end of the quarter, we had 14,212 time leases, representing an average of 2.5 tenants per tower. We expect this pattern of increasing average monthly rent to continue each quarter. Same tower year-over-year revenue growth on the towers we owned for more than a full year at June 30 was 10.5% net of churn and 12.2% excluding Cingular AT&T churn, which we view is one-time in nature and different from ordinary churns. Same tower cash flow growth was 13.5% net of churn for the same period and 15.2% excluding Cingular AT&T churn. Based on the second quarter results of our peers, our organic growth rate once again led our industry and reflect the high quality and desirability of our towers. We are doing a great job on minimizing the cost associated with our tower portfolio, resulting from both the hard work of our employees and the high quality of our assets. We are the industry leader in low risk maintenance and augmentation costs per tower, which is a direct result of the fact that we have compared to our peers the highest percentage of towers on our portfolio built specifically for the independent tower ownership business. On the asset growth front, we purchased 68 towers and build 15 more in Q2, bringing our total own tower base to 5783. We've purchased an even greater numbers of towers already this quarter; we have a strong acquisition backlog. We expect the new build activity to continue to grow each quarter through out the rest of the year. On both class of new assets, the subsequent leasing activities has been very strong, we plan to continue to push hard with our plan of growing our asset base in a steady high quality manner. In the Services segment of our business, Q2 revenue was at $20.7 million and segment operating profit was $2.7 million or 13%. Q2 revenue was down 17% from the year ago quarter, the segment operating profit was up 31%. We are very pleased with our gains and profitability in the segment as we focus on profits over volumes. Forward services revenue was due primarily to reduced bookings from AT&T which historically has been one of our top 2 services customers. It would be a mistake for people to misconstrue our services revenue as a good indicator for our leasing business, as our services business is always much more relied on one or 2 customers in any given quarter. Other carriers that we don't perform as much, services business were extremely busy as evidenced by our leasing results and increased leasing guidance. AT&T was not as busy in the second quarter, but we are starting to see AT&T become more active. We continue to anticipate this year will be a more traditional year for services, with each classic second quarter growing versus the previous one. Overall, our operations at SBA continue to be strong and we believe 2007 will be a solid year for the industry and especially for our company, as our clients continue to expand their networks. At this point, I'll turn it over to Jeff.