James Meyer
Analyst · FBR Capital Markets
Good morning, everyone, and thank you participating in today's call. SiriusXM turned in an excellent performance in 2014 on all fronts. And we are excited about the guidance we've given you for the continued growth in 2015 and the many long-term opportunities that are before us today. In 2014, we originally projected that we will grow our subscriber base by 1.25 million, but we actually delivered growth of 1.75 million net new subscribers in 2014, ending the year with 27.3 million paying sub, making us one of the largest subscription media companies in the world. We added over 0.5 million in the fourth quarter alone, which incidentally marked the biggest fourth quarter we have ever recorded since 2007. Our revenue increased by 10% to just under $4.2 billion. Combining revenue growth, high variable margins and tight expense management, we grew our adjusted EBITDA by 26% to nearly $1.5 billion. And we converted more than $1.15 billion of this into free cash flow, up 25%. Once again we have beaten all of the guidance we gave you for 2014. We believe growing our free cash flow and even more specifically our free cash flow per share will enhance value for our shareholders. By this count, we also had an exceptional year, growing free cash flow per share to about $0.20, up 36% from 2013. We delivered this growth with a combination of higher cash flow and a lower share count, as we return capital to our shareholders via stock buybacks. You should expect this combination again in 2015. Our subscription growth in 2014 certainly benefited from growth in new car sales, which were up 6%; a slightly higher penetration rate, up 2 points to 71%; significant growth in pre-owned volumes; and a very strong retention performance, with churn coming in at 1.9% for the year. New and used car conversions reached all-time highs in 2014. And our trial funnel heading into the first quarter stands at 7.4 million, up from about 6.5 million at the same time a year ago. These strong metrics and our outstanding subscriber growth point to a very healthy business. Our content driven service is something that the carmakers overwhelmingly support and more importantly consumers increasingly demand. The year is early and we have 11 months to go, but we are off to a good start. That coupled with strong expense controls, and we are well-positioned to achieve our guidance this year. More ever, it is very clear to me that in the next few years, we have plenty of runway ahead of us to continue growing our business on all fronts. Our success has proven that consumers are willing to pay for an easy to use package of great content in the car. We know each and every automakers plans for satellite radio installations. While we don't know exactly what new car sales would be, we are very confident in maintaining a high penetration rate. This high new car penetration rate paired with the natural turnover of the auto fleet means that our enabled vehicle count will continue to grow rapidly. At the end of 2014, this number was just a shade over 70 million enabled vehicles. We expect this to cross 100 million by the end of 2017, a near 50% increase in just three years. There are many ways we plan on capitalizing on this. We are increasing our ability to offer trials in the used car market, now at over 15,000 participating dealers, and we are finding more information on subsequent owner transactions. Our service continuity program, which we implemented in mid-2014, ensures that existing subscribers who buy a different vehicle have an easy time moving that subscription over. To drive greater household spending and increase retention, we are testing household plans as an alternative to per radio pricing. And we are building new ancillary revenue streams with weather, live traffic and our growing connected vehicle business, which provides safety, security and convenient features to end-users. Since we have contribution margins of 70%, our objective is to increase revenue and the resulting free cash flow from the growing base of enabled vehicles. We intend to be well-positioned to succeed in a world of fully connected cars. We think that nearly all new cars by the end of decade will have some form of connectivity. While more competition is inevitable, SiriusXM strategy is to turn this connectivity into a tremendous positive for our business. I want to point out something. Our main competition has been and will remain free ad-supported entertainment. This doesn't change in the connected vehicle. So our focus will continue to be on convincing people to pay for a premium experience with great content that is extremely easy to use. Let me be clear, we have major efforts that are now well-underway to avail ourselves of the enhanced capabilities of connected vehicles to supplement our satellite network. And this work will be the next step in solidifying our competitive advantages. The joining of our IP and satellite technologies will let us offer more features to subscribers and will help us better understand and manage our customer relationship with them. Another underappreciated asset we have is the unique value of our network and spectrum. Today, they provide tremendous value to us for our core service, but in the future we will have significantly more flexibility, as we adopt wide-band radios and increase ancillary uses of our nation-wide system. We are extremely excited about the long-term benefits to our business of this growing network flexibility and in-car connectivity. In the near-term, you will see us implement an all new streaming product, including new apps for iOS and Android in a new web experience. Quite frankly, in my opinion, our apps weren't good enough and we needed to put more resources into making them better. These new SXM apps are the result of a year-long effort to completely re-architect our streaming platform, bringing more services in-house and giving us flexibility to push out more frequent updates and enable our service for additional platforms. Our subscribers will be able to easily discover content and search through SiriusXM's vast archives of entertainment. Users will also see improved speed when signing in or changing channels, as well as enhanced reliability in low bandwidth situations. We are beta testing these new apps now and we hope to roll them out to our broader subscriber base within the first half. Being the leader in curated, exclusive and compelling content is central to our company's mission. We will continue to add and refresh our programming line up. We know the variety of our bundle, music, sports and talk is what attracts subscribers and convinces them to pay. In 2014, we solidified our leadership in women's programming by carrying The Ellen DeGeneres Show, producing a daily exclusive show with Jenny McCarthy and adding the TODAY Show. Also, with NBC News, we launched broadcast of Meet the Press and the Nightly News with Brian Williams. In sports, we continue to improve our offering. We launched the channel in conjunction with Bleacher Report and added a new exclusive daily show hosted by Stephen A. Smith, the popular ESPN broadcaster. We also recently launched SiriusXM Insight, a new talk channel that has already gathered significant national media coverage. We also continued our track record of music discovery, giving first national airplay to acts such as Vance Joy, Hozier, Cole Swindell and 5 Seconds of Summer, among the many others. We launched three new music channels with unique format not heard on traditional radio; Venus, which is rhythmic pop; Y2Kountry, which is country hits from the 2000s; and Utopia, which is a dance hits channel. We also began co-producing two new and exclusive music shows with YouTube, the YouTube 15 and the YouTube EDM15. We think SiriusXM is unique in the discipline we bring to investing and using our free cash flow. We start with looking at our existing business to make sure we are investing in all the projects needed to ensure the business is well-managed and poised for further growth. Of course, this includes frequent new investments and programming, as I mentioned, but we are also making substantial R&D investments that we expect to yield returns in the future. Consolidating the OEMs around the single chipset platform, expanding network capacity, adding new in-car features to make the radio experience more enjoyable and easier to use, and finally, significantly reducing the form factor of our satellite radio modules and their cost, making future OEM installations easier and cheaper. These investments along with our focus on IP connectivity will give us the most powerful entertainment platform in the vehicle in my opinion. We also look continually at external investment and merger and acquisition opportunities, businesses that would be a logical fit, growing businesses with scaleable models, and of course investments that result in long-term accretion to free cash flow per share and other key metrics. These are extremely hard to find, but we do value having dry powder should such opportunities arise in the future. We also see our own stock as an investment. We believe it represents a good value today. We've spent $2.5 billion last year to retire 739 million shares, which was roughly 12% of our outstanding share count at the beginning of the year. I believe you'd be hard-pressed to find many companies with such a disciplined approach to rewarding shareholders. We have $1.7 billion of remaining buyback authorization from our Board of Directors. Given our low leverage and growing free cash flow, we have a sizeable ability to continue returning capital to our shareholders. So there you have it. I am very proud of the hard work of everyone on our team. We executed our plan and then some in 2014. We have set goals to further grow our business with more subscribers to produce more cash flow in 2015. And we are taking all the necessary steps to invest in the long-term platforms needed to produce a very durable franchise in the connected car. With that, let me turn it over to David.