Thank you for standing by. My name is Liz, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Shenandoah Telecommunications Company Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Lucas Binder, Vice President of Corporate Finance for Shentel. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today's call is to review Shentel's results for the fourth quarter and full year 2025. Our results were announced in a press release distributed this morning. In addition, we filed our Form 10-K and also a Form S-3 with the SEC to fulfill our Horizon merger contractual requirements to GCM. The presentation we will be reviewing is included on the Investor page on our investor.shentel.com website. Please note that an audio replay of this call will be made available later today. The details are set forth in the press release announcing this call. With us on the call today are Ed McKay, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Jim Volk, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After the prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I refer you to Slide 2 of the presentation, which contains our safe harbor disclaimer and remind you that this conference may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Additionally, we have provided a detailed discussion of various risk factors in our SEC filings, which you are encouraged to review. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. With that, I will now turn the call over to Ed. Go ahead, Ed.

Thanks, Lucas, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This past year marked another important step forward for Shentel as we continue to execute on our fiber-first strategy. Strong year-over-year growth in both Glo Fiber and Commercial Fiber drove a notable shift in our revenue mix with our fiber-based lines of business surpassing our incumbent broadband revenue in the fourth quarter. Throughout 2025, we remain disciplined and focused on our 4 strategic pillars that continue to guide our operational and financial priorities, building on our long history of success, completing our fiber network expansion, accelerating growth and positioning the business to inflect to positive free cash flow in 2027. I'm pleased with the way our team delivered on each of these priorities, strengthening our position and keeping our strategy firmly on track. Starting on Slide 4, we share some of our full year highlights. At year-end 2025, we passed approximately 427,000 homes and businesses in our Glo Fiber expansion markets, an annual increase of 81,000 passings. Our government subsidized passings in incumbent broadband markets more than doubled year-over-year to 22,000 and penetration in these areas has already reached 31%. We are well on our way to substantially completing construction for these capital-intensive expansion projects by the end of 2026. Glo Fiber data RGUs grew 35% in 2025 to 88,000, and we maintained data ARPU by driving customers to higher speed tiers. Lastly, we successfully refinanced our debt with our inaugural ABS financing in December that will save us approximately 170 basis points in cash interest expense and extend our maturities to 2030. We finished 2025 with strong momentum, driving customer growth, expanding our high-value fiber business and strengthening our balance sheet. This performance gives us confidence in our trajectory as we move into 2026. Turning to Slide…

Thank you, Ed, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 15 with the financial results for the fourth quarter 2025. Revenues grew 7.2% to $91.6 million, driven by another quarter of strong Glo Fiber expansion market revenue growth of $6.5 million or 39%, driven by a 37% increase in data subscribers and a 2% increase in data ARPU. Commercial Fiber revenue grew $2 million or 10.8% year-over-year, driven primarily by a negative deferred revenue adjustment in the fourth quarter of 2024. Incumbent broadband markets revenue declined $1.7 million, primarily due to lower video and data revenues from a 14.8% decline in video RGUs as customers switched to streaming video services and a 2.4% decline in data ARPU due to a more aggressive rate card in competitive markets. Broadband data subscribers did grow 0.6% year-over-year. RLEC revenue declined $500,000, primarily due to lower DSL revenue from a 24.4% decline in DSL RGUs, partially due to customers migrating to our broadband data service in the recently constructed passings supported by government grants. Adjusted EBITDA grew $8 million or 31.3% to $33.5 million, driven by $6.2 million in revenue growth and $1.8 million in lower expenses from a combination of Horizon synergy savings, higher capitalized labor from a strong quarter of fiber construction and lower bad debt. Adjusted EBITDA margins increased 670 basis points to 36.5% in the fourth quarter due to a combination of recurring synergy savings seasonality due to a strong quarter of fiber construction, favorably impacting higher capitalized labor and lower network compensation expenses and nonrecurring bad debt expense adjustments. We expect adjusted EBITDA margin to decline slightly in the first half of 2026 before expanding again in the second half of 2026. On Slide 16, we share our last 5-year financial results. Revenues and adjusted EBITDA grew at…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Hamed Khorsand with BWS Financial.

About the markets that you've decided not to enter in Ohio, how much CapEx are you looking to save? And is it all being -- was it all planned for '26? So it already brings down the CapEx that you're projecting for '26?

Yes. Hamed, the CapEx per passing in this last year is roughly going to be around $1,400 per passing. Now some of that money has been previously spent in prior years, and we're now really focusing primarily on just placing the fiber. So it's mainly construction labor at this stage, which will probably be about 75% of the $1,400 or, call it, $1,000 per passing. The markets that we decided to pass on wasn't an issue of timing as much as it was an issue of return on investment. As Ed mentioned in his scripted comments, the cost of aerial make-ready has gone up significantly, like 2 and 3x in some markets. And it just made it uneconomical for us to build these markets and get a return on investment as we've expected of roughly 15%.

Okay. And from a competitive standpoint, you introduced this 5-year guarantee, I think, last quarter. Have you seen any step down as far as competitive pressures go? Or is it still the same?

Hamed, recently, one of our large cable competitors actually increased their prices on their 5-year guarantee. But that just happened recently here in the first quarter. Other than that, we haven't seen significant changes since we launched the 5-year price guarantee.

Okay. And then you had said, if I heard you right, that it takes a bit longer on the business than on the residential. How fast -- I don't think I heard you say how fast it takes for residential to sign up.

Sorry, say again, for a residential customer to sign up?

Yes, to sign up for service. I know you were talking about how there's a delayed factor when it comes to business customers.

Yes. So with the business customers, in many cases, they're under contract. We have to wait for that contract to roll off. And in some markets, there are actually multiple providers going after business customers. So we expect terminal penetration on business customers to be lower than residential. But then residential customers that ramp to our target 37% plus penetration rate, we're tracking 5 to 7 years after we launch a market.

Your next question comes from the line of Vikash Harlalka with New Street Research.

I just have a couple of questions. Why did you feel the need to offer a 5-year price guarantee plans? Was it because competition was going in that direction? And then how does that impact ARPU growth? And I'll ask my second after you answer this one.

Yes. So it was in response to competition. One of our large cable competitors launched a 5-year price guarantee. We did initially see some impact on gross adds when they launched it, didn't see any impact on churn. But once we launched our own 5-year price guarantee, that impact on gross adds, we felt was mitigated. And as I mentioned on the -- in my script, we do expect short-term impact on ARPU as this 5-year price guarantees roll through about 1% over the next few quarters, but we expect it to stabilize after that in our Glo Fiber markets.

Got it. And then I have one strategic question. We recently met with many small private fiber operators. There seems to be a lot of appetite for M&A. Could you just remind us how you're thinking about M&A? And if you're looking to buy fiber assets out there, what characteristics are you looking for in any potential targets?

Well, I'd say we've certainly seen consolidation start. We believe consolidation will continue. At this point in time, we're focused on successfully completing our build plan, accelerating customer growth and then reaching that positive free cash flow inflection point in 2027. So that's really our main focus right now. As we look ahead further into the future, from an M&A standpoint, we'd be most interested in a pure-play fiber provider, less interested in a cable provider and not interested at all in a copper provider.

We have no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Jim Volk for closing remarks.

Well, thanks, everyone, for joining our call this morning. As I mentioned earlier, this is a very exciting time for Shentel, and we look forward to updating you on our progress in future quarters. Thank you. Have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.