Jennifer Witz
Analyst · Evercore
Good morning, and thank you for joining our first quarter call. SiriusXM turned in a great performance across the board. Like many companies, we are benefiting from Americans getting back on the road, growing auto sales and consumer incomes bolstered by significant federal stimulus. These impressive results are also a strong testament to demand for great content, our resilient business model and once again, our teams flawlessly executing the strategies we laid out. SiriusXM is the premier audio entertainment company in North America. Across our properties, approximately 150 million users regularly listen to our content, much of it is premium, unique and expertly curated, covering everything from music to talk, news, sports, comedy and podcast. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention upfront that Drake, a global superstar and one of the most streamed artists in the world, in March launched his highly anticipated exclusive SiriusXM channel, Sound 42, bringing his diverse musical taste to our millions of subscribers. For the first time ever, we have also enabled nonsubscribers to tune in by an open access option we set up for this channel. Our business model, the best in audio, powered by complementary subscription and advertising engines, has made us the most profitable audio company in the world. You are already familiar with our world-class capabilities on the subscription side. And on the advertising side, we now have the tools to serve as a one-stop shop for both advertisers looking to efficiently buy large audio audiences and for audio content creators looking to distribute and monetize their content. We are truly a unique company with a mix of assets and skills found nowhere else. And as I mentioned, our year is off to a great start. We achieved record low first quarter churn of just 1.6%, driving an 83% increase in our SiriusXM self-pay net subscriber additions to 126,000, up from 69,000 in the first quarter of 2020. Our revenue growth of 5% was bolstered by a rebounding advertising market and our off-platform and podcast success. Adjusted EBITDA of $682 million climbed 7% and was the highest single quarter EBITDA figure in our company's history. We are well on track to achieve our full year subscriber and financial guidance. Automotive SAAR was a phenomenal 16.8 million in the first quarter, up 14% from the first quarter of 2020 and led by an astounding 17.7 million in March. We generated more trial starts in March than in any single month in our company's history. Still, we are carefully following the news about silicon shortages and frequently speaking with automakers. If not for this uncertainty and the historically low auto inventories being reported, we would most likely be increasing our subscriber guidance today. Remember that SiriusXM in-vehicle is no longer purely based on a one-way network. I'll discuss more about 360L in a moment. But this next-generation platform now in close to 2 million vehicles gives us new insights about consumer behavior. For instance, it has helped to give us valuable insights into the COVID recovery, which shows us that driving and commuting in the first quarter was still only 80% of pre-COVID levels, but in recent weeks has climbed to 90% of pre-COVID levels, a positive sign that people are getting back to normal life. It's tremendously exciting to have this growing collection of data at our fingertips, and this data set will grow dramatically over the next few years as 360L becomes the default SiriusXM platform in vehicle. 360L deployment as a percentage of new vehicle trial starts were about 18% in the first quarter, and we are on track for 360L to reach about 25% of this year's SiriusXM-enabled installs. 360L is the plan of record with most OEMs, and its adoption will continue to climb over the next several years. The 2-way functionality and advanced UI enabled by 360L opened up a host of engaging features for consumers and new capabilities for our business. We are also utilizing consumption data from 360L to help optimize our one-to-one marketing efforts to drive better conversion, retention and pricing. This is still new for us, and we have much to refine. But with growing volumes and experience, we are well on our way to enhancing both the consumer experience and business performance from our next-generation SiriusXM platform. Our SiriusXM ARPU continued its steady climb, up nearly 3% from the first quarter of 2020 to $14.30 and demonstrating the high value our subscribers place on our premium content bundle and easy-to-use service. The strong demand for our All Access package has encouraged us to create a new top-tier, high-end offering that will include additional content, exclusive customer benefit and multiple access points, a sort of super-premium family plan. We plan to launch this new offering in the coming months. We are also making progress driving out-of-car streaming among SiriusXM subscribers and gaining more subscribers, who don't need an in-vehicle subscription. We find that higher engagement outside the vehicle and more listening across the households lead to better in-vehicle conversion rates and retention performance, so we will continue to invest in these efforts. Continuing the recovery trend in the back half of 2020, our advertising business has rebounded from the pandemic lows, and we see steady momentum so far in 2021. Historically, ad revenue is seasonally slower in the first quarter of the year, but even still, we managed to achieve revenue of $354 million, a 24% increase from the prior year period. We're very proud of our position as the largest digital audio ad platform in North America, enabling advertisers to reach almost 2/3 of online audio listeners with our on and off-platform ad products. Stitcher adds to our opportunity in advertising with greater access to the fast-growing podcast segment. Stitcher had a record quarter, and we are extremely impressed with its performance so far. We launched The Atlas Obscura Podcast, which hit the top 10 on the Apple Podcast chart. In addition, this week, we announced the acquisition of 99% Invisible, which furthers the expansion of SiriusXM's podcasting universe and deepens our content creation skill set. Roman Mars and his talented team at 99% Invisible will continue to work with us to develop new podcast projects. AdsWizz, the global leader in digital audio and podcast technology solutions, has reached a significant milestone of over 1 billion monthly podcast downloads from its audio platform. The platform, which is used by leading media companies and podcast publishers, including NPR, The New York Times, NBCUniversal News Group, American Public Media, WNYC Studios, and Rogers Sports & Media in Canada, combined publishing tools and audience analytics from Simplecast with our award-winning suite of monetization products and services. AdsWizz tech powers 4 of the most popular podcasts in the U.S., The Daily, News Now, Up First and Dateline NBC. Pandora's tremendous scale remains the cornerstone of our success in ad sales. And while Pandora engagement overall remains a challenge, we do see encouraging growth in the use of Pandora in vehicles. Further, when listeners use our Modes feature to tailor their personalized music, we see a meaningful uptick in listening. As Pandora is one of the larger ad supported apps on iOS, we are keeping a close watch on IDFA development and should be relatively well positioned to manage that transition with our considerable first-party data. We never stop thinking of creative ways to enhance the variety and value of the programming we deliver to our customers. And in the first quarter, SiriusXM made several high-profile additions that further solidified our position as the best provider of curated audio programming in North America. We already talked about Drake. In addition, we recently unveiled more than 30 new SiriusXM streaming music channels that go deep with specific artists, including exclusive channels from Bob Marley, LL Cool J, Armin Van Buren and Steve Aoki. As with Drake, the biggest artists and brands in music see our platform as the medium for them to share music, pursue creative explorations and express their world views. Throughout Black History month, we presented several SiriusXM channels that honored pioneering black artists, and Pandora launched Wake Up! mode on the Black Music Forever station. Pandora, SiriusXM and Stitcher, all back the Stand for Sonic Diversity pledged with the goal of increasing the number of voices of people of color in audio advertising. For Women's History month, our Pandora live powered by women virtual event, featured performances by Gwen Stefani and Jazmine Sullivan and was hosted by Hoda Kotb from SiriusXM's TODAY Show Radio. On SiriusXM, 15 different channels celebrated the Women of classic rock, jazz, '80s, '90s country and hip-hop. In the podcast space, we debuted original exclusive podcasts from Marvel and SiriusXM. Marvel Declassified and Marvel Method launched widely on SiriusXM, Pandora, Stitcher and all major platforms. Furthering our efforts to deliver the best and most comprehensive sports programming and similar to our recently expanded agreements with the NFL and NBA, we signed a new agreement with Major League Baseball that extends our relationship for multiple years and also expands our streaming rights. We now offer every MLB game in addition to every NFL and NBA game as part of our premier digital-only subscription. This enables our subscribers to stream all the games on our app and on 360L, and they can even choose to hear their favorite team's announcers for every game. Earlier this month, we also produced and presented our First Masters as the tournament's exclusive audio broadcaster. Greg Norman, one of Golf's all-time great players, served as our lead analyst. And we continue to unveil important collaborations to deliver our content to more and more listeners. We teamed up with T-Mobile to deliver a first of its kind Pandora experience to T-Mobile customers that includes ad-free radio weekends, special music stations powered by popular SiriusXM channels and early access to SiriusXM original podcasts. We are looking to launch additional collaborations with T-Mobile in the future. Solid advertising growth, effective investments in compelling content and robust digital products and a resilient growing self-pay subscriber base has solidified our premier position in the audio entertainment industry. Our first quarter results give us high confidence in our full year outlook and the long-term position of our business. With that, I will pass it over to Sean.