Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Consolidated Communications Holdings Inc. First Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.

After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session [Operator Instructions] Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Jennifer Spaude. Please go ahead..

Thank you and good morning. I'd like to welcome everyone to Consolidated Communications first quarter 2020 earnings call.

On the call today are Bob Udell, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Steve Childers, our Chief Financial Officer.Bob's comments today will highlight our strategic initiatives and our operational results as well as how we are managing our business through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Steve will provide details on our first quarter financial performance and an update on guidance.Following the prepared remarks, today we will open the call up for questions.

Before we proceed, I will remind you our earnings release, financial statements and earnings presentation are all posted on our Investor Relations section of our website at consolidated.com.Please review the safe harbor provisions on slide 2 of our presentation.

Today's discussion includes statements about expected future events and financial results that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. A discussion of factors that may affect future results is contained in Consolidated's filings with the SEC. Today's discussion will also include certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Our earnings release includes reconciliations of these measures to the nearest GAAP equivalent.I will now turn the call over to Bob Udell..

carrier, commercial and consumer. We are opportunistic with our fiber builds and focused on success-based opportunities that benefit multiple customer groups.Third, we are executing on our capital allocation plan, which we announced one year ago.

We are focused on disciplined cash management while we remain committed to improving the balance sheet.And our final strategic imperative is the review of our portfolio of assets for potential monetization. This analysis continues, and I'll update you further if there is a material event to discuss.Now first quarter highlights.

Our carrier sales team continue to drive gig Ethernet sales, and is doing an excellent job of negotiating long-term contracts.

Our collaboration continues with wireless carriers as we help optimize their capacity needs and provide transport solutions that offer diversity and maximize utilization for peak performance.Total tower connections under contract increased 4.2% year-over-year, totaling 3,900 connections.

As we build out capacity within our carrier-grade fiber network to support wireless densification, especially in rural areas, we are well positioned to be the backhaul provider of choice.Our network investments made for carrier services are also benefiting commercial customers.

Our on-net buildings increased 17% from a year ago, primarily driven by Des Moines Iowa market expansion.

The vast majority of our new sales are on-net which correlates to higher margins increased opportunity to add products and a greater ability to ensure the best customer experience.We recently launched ProConnect Unified Communications in Northern New England.

This cloud-based collaboration solution makes it easy for users to make and receive calls, host video conferences, share files, message and manage through advanced features from anywhere and from any device, a valuable solution during this time of the pandemic.Within the consumer channel, we achieved the fourth consecutive quarter of broadband revenue.

Our strategy of leading with broadband services is growing average revenue per unit, and it's working. Virtually 100% of our consumer base is connected to the network through either Fiber-to-the-Node or Fiber-to-the-Home.Our core network capacity allows us to grow broadband revenue in the most cost-effective manner.

Our fiber rich network positions us well to partner with communities to deploy last mile fiber in rural areas that would otherwise be difficult to justify financially.Just this week we announced the citywide upgrade of Brooklin, Maine and we've been successful with five other Fiber-to-the-Home RFPs in the Northeast and we are targeting a second half 2020 turn-up of these fiber network extensions.CCiTV, our streaming video service fully launched in Northern New England in late 2019.

It is leveraging the network speed improvements over the last two years. We see strong sales activity with CCiTV, and we continue to see 60% to 70% of the subscribers bringing their own device.The easy self to install product further reduces overall capital intensity compared to traditional video.

We will expand CCiTV in legacy markets this year and expect to launch this summer in Texas.

Through a combination of efforts including public-private partnerships, innovative and new technologies, we are improving our consumer broadband business.I will now turn the call over to Steve, who will provide more details on our financial results for the first quarter and an update on guidance for 2020.

Steve?.

Good morning. As Bob indicated in his remarks, we did have a very strong start to the year. And in the first quarter, we performed above our original 2020 guidance for adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow and debt reduction.

Despite the disruption of the health crisis and the transition to the work from home for safety of our employees, there were no material impacts to our Q1 results.

With that said, due to the uncertainties in both the severity and the duration of the current economic downturn, we are withdrawing our 2020 guidance and so we have more visibility into the impact of COVID-19 on our business.Slide 6 of the earnings presentation summarizes the company's first quarter results.

Operating revenues for the first quarter totaled $325.7 million, down 3.8% compared to Q1 2019 and we generated adjusted EBITDA of $131.6 million, which is up $1.3 million from a year ago.Now, let's look at each of our customer channels. Total commercial and carrier revenue was $147 million in the first quarter.

Data and transport grew 1.6% to $89.6 million. Voice services revenue declined $2.3 million, or 4.9%.

Other revenue declined $3.5 million, primarily due to lower equipment sales, which have very low margins.As we think about Q1 performance and potential impact of COVID-19 in the second quarter and beyond, our commercial sales team started this year very close to being fully staffed on quota-bearing headcount for our direct SMB and indirect resources.

We are seeing a high level and virtual sales activity with broadband upgrade in Unified Communications demand to assist in the transition to businesses working from home. We do continue to monitor our SMB channel.

And while we haven't seen a material impact to date, we do expect to see a higher churn rate for this customer group.Additionally, we expect decisions on equipment purchases to be deferred due to the economic conditions and we could see a decline in this lower margin revenue versus our original plan.

We are seeing strong performance from our carrier sales team this time. We have strong demand and a backlog for wireless backhaul to support higher national broadband needs.Before we move or transition to consumer, I'd like to emphasize our commercial and carrier group did have a very strong first quarter.

As we discussed, we expect certain areas to come under pressure. But as of today's call, we are seeing no material changes in our leading indicators.Now, turning to our consumer channel. Revenue totaled $126.4 million and was down $3.3 million or 2.6% year-over-year.

Consumer broadband revenue grew for the fourth consecutive quarter and was up 1.6% in the first quarter. Consumer revenue increased 4.5% to over $73 per unit.

We continue to realize positive momentum by leading with broadband, specifically in our newly upgraded areas.Consumer voice was down 6% or $2.7 million in the recent quarter, but that decline in voice revenue was cut in half from a year ago. We attribute this to a more robust broadband offering, which contributes to higher voice retention.

Our video revenue was down 8% and is consistent with our strategy to transition from low-margin, linear video to broadband streaming services.

The $1.6 million decline in revenue was more than offset by reductions in video programming expense and lower CapEx.Network access revenues declined $5.1 million, largely due to declines in special access and subsidy revenues were up slightly and remained at our expected $18 million run rate per quarter.With respect to subsidies we remain optimistic about the opportunity to expand broadband capabilities, in rural markets with the support of the Rural Development Opportunity Fund.We are evaluating the funding opportunities and potential returns on invested capital within our service area.

And we will be aggressive as we look to enable access to underserved areas.The SEC final order which was published in February brings certainty on transition revenue.

And adds new service tiers and auction weightings, that we believe will be advantageous for existing fiber infrastructure providers.Now turning to operating expenses, exclusive depreciation and amortization operating expenses totalled $205.6 million, an improvement of 8% or down $17 million, from the prior year.We continue to identify and implement initiatives to transform the business and optimize free cash flow.

Our track record speaks for itself in this area as we have been.

And we will continue to be very focused on improving our cost structure, based on the needs of our business and our customers.Cost of services and products declined $10.6 million, driven by network cost optimization, lower CPE sales and lower salaries and benefits, associated with ongoing cost initiatives.

Cost expense will fluctuate with revenue especially on equipment sales linear video content cost and network app revenues.The SG&A costs were reduced $6.6 million in the recent quarter, primarily due to operational synergies and ongoing efficiencies.

We did experience a modest amount of an increase in bad debt expense, related to the new accounting standards for credit evaluation for accounts receivable and also for COVID.As of today's call, we have not seen a material difference in our accounts receivable aging or daily cash receipt trends. We continue to monitor these key metrics very closely.

Net interest expense for the quarter was $32.1 million, down $2.2 million from the same period last year.Our weighted average cost of debt was approximately 5.3% at the end of the quarter down from 5.6% at year-end.

Cash contributions from the company's wireless partnerships were $10.1 million in the first quarter, compared to $7.3 million a year ago and are in line with our anticipated distribution level.Historically, our cash distributions have been $35 million to $37 million a year.

However, at this time, we have no additional insight to the financial results for our limited partnerships with Verizon.Adjusted net income per share was a positive $0.23 per share compared to a net loss of $0.03 a year ago.

The improvement reflects the consistency of our operating results, and a decline in depreciation expense.We invested $42.4 million in capital expenditures during the first quarter, which supported success-based projects and broadband network, infrastructure expansion.

Total liquidity, including cash on hand and availability under our revolver was approximately $98 million.In response to the economic impact of COVID-19, we will be focused on maximizing cash liquidity.

And we will be making certain elections under the CARES Act to defer employer portion of payroll taxes which we estimate to be a little over $4 million a quarter.Consistent with our capital allocation policy, we used essentially all free cash flow in the quarter to reduce debt by $43 million, for a total of $105 million in the last three quarters, since we made the change in our capital allocation policy.Our net debt leverage was 4.23 times at the end of the first quarter, down 4.33 – from 4.33 times at the end of the year.

We will continue to commit all cash – free cash flow to improve the balance sheet with the goal of getting to our net leverage target of four times as soon as possible.Although the near-term outlook is uncertain, our commitment to our strategic imperatives and our position as a critical service provider is stronger than ever.

We have demonstrated our ability to manage cost and we will take whatever actions necessary to protect the business.With that I'll now turn the call back over to Bob..

Thank you, Steve. So in closing, I'm pleased with the solid and consistent results we delivered in first quarter while reducing operating expense and executing on our capital allocation plan. We're taking every – we're taking action every day to keep our employees safe and help our customers and the communities we serve during these trying times.

We have a strong business and have operating plans in place to respond to the fluid events associated with COVID-19. We've weathered many storms in our 125 years in operations and I'm confident we'll manage through this one and help our customers do the same. Operator we'll now take questions at this time..

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Davis Hebert with Wells Fargo. Your line is open..

Good morning, everyone. I hope you are staying healthy and safe. Appreciate all the prepared remarks. Very helpful. In your prepared remarks seemed fairly positive about network performance and customer activity. You did withdraw your guidance however and I know you suggested SMB is something you're watching.

Can you talk about that percentage of revenue in the SMB channel and maybe some other areas where you see a lack of visibility having an impact on the full year?.

Well, thanks Davis for the question and I'll start that and then Steve will have I'm sure some specifics. Let me tell you how close we're watching the trends right now and how good we feel about what we're seeing. And the fact is we just don't know what the economy is going to do over the next 60, 90 days with respect to SMB closures.

But what we can tell you right now is we're seeing roughly 51,000 SMB accounts those – we define SMB as those with $500 a month bills with us or less.And there's 255 that have called us for either a temporary hold on their service which indicates that they want to maintain their business line and relationship with us.

And those customers get a 50% discount. And so that's really resulted in a 50% hold if you will kind of like a vacation or seasonal suspend.And that's resulted in about a $10,000 a month impact and that's as of yesterday we're seeing those statistics. So it's not a real significant factor yet.

And you look across our whole base; we think that with the increase in speeds, we're in a pretty good position to weather the storm. We just don't know what's going to happen over the next couple of months.

Steve anything to add?.

Yes. So Davis maybe just put a little finer point on what Bob said. If you look at our earnings release and the revenue tables, we don't necessarily break out SMB in that carrier commercial group. But I think Bob kind of gave you the math to get to $100 million -- $110 million total revenue from SMB if we broke it out.

So the way I would think about it total commercial, the carrier number is probably about 20% -- 26% to 30% of that total commercial carrier. And then SMB is probably maybe 17% to 18% of that number or said differently SMB is probably about 7% to 8% of our total revenue.And as like Bob said, we are monitoring the aging.

We're managing watching all the call center volumes. We've actually -- and as we've talked about in prior calls, we've actually added been staffing that or the SMB team up over the last few months so we're paying more attention to the SMB group anyway. And we've also rolled out several products.

So it'll make it easy for them to either move from home or come back to when they come back in the business. So right now through April, I'm really pleasantly surprised with the level of activity that we're seeing from the sales teams and we'll just continue to monitor it..

Great. That's really helpful. And then you're making nice progress towards your leverage target.

And how do you balance the debt pay down approach, which you made nice progress on that this quarter versus building liquidity to address some of that uncertainty that you guys referenced?.

Yes, Dave. This is Steve again. Thanks for the question and that is our focus right? I mean as Bob said in his opening remarks our strategic imperatives and our capital allocation policy even though we are withdrawing guidance those policies and commitments are still there and we're highly focused on it.

So with leverage again, we did accelerate the pace of deleveraging for Q1 all free cash flow went to pay down debt. And you might have noticed that we bought -- we only bought about $5 million in bonds in our open market repurchases.And that -- for the quarter that was in part because the bonds for most of the first quarter were trading 95 or above.

In Q3, Q4 we've bought about $55 million. We provided a little bit more significant discount. So we were focused on getting the revolver down over the first half of the quarter and then maybe the last two or three weeks when you started -- the bonds started trading down a little bit and because of the uncertainty of COVID.

Again, we did buy a little or a few bonds, but we were -- at that time we were pivoting towards maximizing liquidity under the revolver and getting them as close to zero as we possibly can.So I think in the short-term, we are focused on preserving every dollar of cash that we have.

We will look to -- we'll monitor both the bonds as well as paying down the revolver. But we are focused on preserving liquidity in the short-term. But again, we still remain committed to the overall leverage target of 4 times as soon as we can..

Understand. Okay. That's very helpful. And then last question for me and I'll turn it over. You suggested your ongoing portfolio review.

I'm just curious if you were having ongoing conversations before this crisis hit if things do normalize knowing -- I'm not sure when or if that happens, but do you -- would you expect some of some of those conversations to come back again and more progress on any sort of asset sales? And that's it for me. Thanks..

Yes. Thanks, Davis. That obviously, I can't speculate or won't speculate on ongoing discussions. But I will say this any conversations that we're having continue, and no one knows how long this situation with COVID is going to last.

And so, I don't see it impacting with the cycle time it takes to evaluate and analyze and then work through discussions with any interested parties.I don't see that changing as a result of COVID unless this were to extend and affect the capital markets for 18 months. And even then, I think there's deals getting done.

So it's not changed our approach in any way. We're not a distressed seller of those types of things, but we're certainly doing analysis and deciding if some of those assets are better served by being part of someone else's structure and we'll continue that process.

Next question, Sidney?.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gregory Williams with Cowen & Company. Your line is open..

Hey, guys. This is Dan on for Greg. Real quickly you noted that you're going to be fairly aggressive in bidding for the RDOF opportunity that is advantageous for current connectivity providers.

Is it fair to characterize that a lot of the six million homes passed for RDOF are actually CAF II homes simply upgrading from 10/1 to 25/3 speeds, and these are homes that you've already upgraded with Fiber-to-the-Node. So it seems like you're in a very strong position to win again.

Again is that a fair characterization?And second, from COVID-19 is there any commentary on somewhat of an impact from the snowbird effect in some of the FairPoint markets where people are leaving for the winter that might not be coming back into the footprint due to COVID-19? Thanks guys..

Yes. Thanks Dan for the question. Let me start with the second part first and then I'll come back to the RDOF. We're actually seeing the opposite of -- we've seen about a full month to six week advance of people moving into the vacation homes in Northern New England.

Because what we're realizing is that's where people are going in order to social distance themselves. And so they're coming out of New York, Boston, whatever large city that they're most -- that they live in. And we've seen an advance of that, which we think is actually positive.So that's that point. The second related to RDOF, we are well positioned.

And let me give you a finer analysis of how to think about it. The reason that we acquired the FairPoint assets in the first place was the proximity of the fiber-to-the-customer base.

And that's made it advantageous for us to extend that through the fiber nodes and the Fiber-to-the-Home, especially as represented by the public-private partnerships that we're successfully winning.

We've got five of those that we'll build out in 2020 and that gives us roughly another 10,000 passings of direct Fiber-to-the-Home.And so the way to think about it is on the average, we're seeing the cost per passing of extending and connecting that network to be around the $500 mark, and that's literally half of what the typical industry average is when you got to build that including the core network from scratch.

And that puts us in an excellent position long term. So yes, we think we're well positioned for RDOF. And it won't be 25/3. It will be 100 or a gig..

Great. Thank you..

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen our next question comes from Jennifer Fritzsche with Wells Fargo. Your line is open..

Great. Thank you. A few if I may. I wanted to ask and sorry if I got cut off but if this is asked, but just what you're seeing in terms of wireless backhaul. It seems like that's holding up there, but I wanted to confirm T-Mobile now closed. Are you seeing some RFPs coming from them?Secondly, I wanted to ask about just Bob your bigger picture fast.

If we do see a forced stimulus both parties, both Democrats and Republicans have made clear that broadband will be a large part of that. This would be an addition to RDOF. Any thoughts you have there would be welcome. I'll just leave it at that. I have one more question which I forgot I'll come back to..

Okay. Thanks, Jennifer. Let me start with the stimulus piece first and I'll come back on the wireless backhaul. Overall on stimulus, we see it unfolding. And we don't know exactly how it's going to impact the economy.

But for example just in the last day, I heard that folks with SBA loans the banks are being told by the SBA that those loans are going to be paid for the next six month principal and interest. So that gives us some optimism on the small business side.In terms of stimulus, from an infrastructure perspective, we're deep in those conversations.

In fact, I'm participating in a listening session with the House Energy and Commerce Committee later today. And so we're driving discussions around how we take that stimulus and close that digital divide. And we absolutely feel we're ready with shovel-ready projects to implement those across our service territory.

We've done the analysis in preparation for RDOF as I mentioned in the previous question.And so, what I want to demonstrate for the staffs and the congressional reps and senators that are working on that is, we can make this happen now.

And I think we're in a good position to make sure that complements our RDOF and the sunset of CAF transition to greater deployment of broadband.So back to the wireless backhaul question. We saw as I mentioned in the prepared remarks an uptick in bandwidth augmentations. And we're very well prepared to handle that.

Our network team does an excellent job in managing capacity and keeping us positioned to move as bandwidth demand catalysts drive increase in usage. So, we saw augmentations.

We also set up an expedite path to continue to look at anything any dynamic that changes in bandwidth requirements across our carrier customers and we've got a good reputation for being responsive in that way.Yes, we are seeing some RFIs and RFP activity to continue supporting the commitments that were made to accommodate the T-Mobile-Sprint merger.

And any more than that, I think would be speculation and I probably can't comment on it at this stage. But we're optimistic and we feel well positioned to help in our markets with the unique assets that we have..

Great. Thank you very much..

[Operator Instructions] And I'm not showing any further questions at this time..

Well thank you all for joining us on this call. And I do appreciate -- we all appreciate your support of Consolidated and we look forward to updating you next quarter on our results and all of our progress with COVID-19 backdrop. Have a great day and please stay safe..

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation you may now disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day..