Antero Resources Corporation (NYSE:AR) Q4 2022 Results Conference Call February 16, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Brendan Krueger - Vice President, Finance

Paul Rady - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer & President

David Cannelongo - Senior Vice President, Liquids Marketing & Transportation

Michael Kennedy - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Neal Dingmann - Truist Securities

Subhash Chandra - The Benchmark Company

Umang Choudhary - Goldman Sachs

David Deckelbaum - Cowen and Company

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Antero Resources Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. At this time all participants are listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Brendan Krueger, Vice President of Finance for Antero Resources. Thank you. You may begin.

Brendan Krueger

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for Antero's fourth quarter 2022 investor conference call. We'll spend a few minutes going through the financial and operating highlights, and then we'll open it up for Q&A.

I would also like to direct you to the homepage of our website at www.anteroresources.com, where we have provided a separate earnings call presentation that will be reviewed during today's call.

Today's call may contain certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our earnings press release for important disclosures regarding such measures, including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures.

Joining me on the call today are Paul Rady, Chairman, CEO and President; Michael Kennedy, CFO; Dave Cannelongo, Senior Vice President of Liquids Marketing and Transportation; and Justin Fowler, Senior Vice President of Natural Gas Marketing and Transportation.

I will now turn the call over to Paul.

Paul Rady

Thank you, Brendan. I'd like to start by highlighting the significant transformation that Antero underwent during 2022. Let's start with Slide 3, which summarizes the consistent and repeatable results that we delivered throughout the year.

The top of the slide illustrates our continued focus on debt reduction. During 2022, we reduced our total debt by approximately $1 billion. Since the beginning of our debt reduction program in the fourth quarter of 2019, we have now reduced debt by over $2.5 billion.

Because of this conservative approach to debt reduction, we were able to shift our capital allocation towards increasing cash returns to our shareholders. As you can see on the bottom of the slide, we purchased over 25 million shares, representing 1% of the total shares outstanding.