Greg Maffei
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please, proceed
Thank you, Courtnee, and good morning to all on the call. Today speaking on the call besides myself will also have Liberty Broadband's; Chief Accounting and Principal Financial Officer, Brian Wendling; Ron Duncan, CEO; and Pete Pounds, CFO of GCI, respectively will also be available to answer questions. Also during the Q&A, we will be available to answer questions related to Liberty TripAdvisor, but please do note that TripAdvisor has not yet reported on its third quarter results. So some of our answers may be limited. Turning first to Liberty Broadband. In the period of August 1st through the end of October, Liberty Broadband repurchased 5.5 million shares for $550 million, a listed price of charter of about $319.76 per share. Over the same period, we received $616 million of proceeds from Charter share sales. I'd note we also increased our repurchase authorization in August, which now has $2.15 billion remaining on it as of the 1st of November. Towards the end of the quarter, we did pull-back on some of our LBRD buyback. We did this with an intent to retain some portion of the cash flow from our Charter sales to address some of our near-term liabilities. Looking at Charter and its operating results for the third quarter, which was strong, revenue was up 3%. And we added 61,000 residential broadband net adds. That's a large sequential improvement and a meaningful beat against consensus. Importantly, we also added nearly 400,000 mobile lines even in a low move and low incremental broadband environment. Mobile revenue was up 40%. At the end of the third quarter, Charter had 4.7 million total mobile lines. We at Liberty and those at Charter remain very excited about the value of bundling mobile and the mobile opportunity overall with meaningful gains in share of mobile net adds. In October, Charter launched Spectrum 1. We think this is a differentiated converged offer to take to market, with compelling broadband Wi-Fi and mobile priced at $4.99 – $49.99 per month. You get 300 megabits of broadband speeds in mobile lines, and we do expect this will continue to accelerate mobile growth and drive broadband pull-through. Charter continues to – and also expand its footprint through new builds. This remains a priority and we believe it's a very attractive economic opportunity. We are pleased with the early progress on RDOF and the additional subsidy opportunities in the pipeline. I do want to thank Tom for his leadership over the past 10 years, and we very much also look forward to having to continue on our partnership with Chris Winfrey, which will start when we accelerated rather when he become CEO on December 1. And with that, let me turn it over to Brian to discuss the financials in some more detail.