Altice USA, Inc. (NYSE:ATUS) Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call November 2, 2022 4:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Nick Brown – Executive Vice President, Corporate Finance and Development
Dexter Goei – Executive Chairman
Dennis Mathew – Chief Executive Officer
Mike Grau – Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Phil Cusick – J.P. Morgan
Craig Moffett – MoffettNathanson
Doug Mitchelson – Credit Suisse
John Hodulik – UBS
Jonathan Chaplin – New Street
Brett Feldman – Goldman Sachs
Michael Rollins – Citi
James Ratcliffe – Evercore ISI
Peter Supino – Wolfe Research
Steven Cahall – Wells Fargo
Operator
Hello, and welcome to the Altice USA Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator instructions] As a reminder this conference is being recorded.
It’s now my pleasure to turn the call over to Nick Brown. Please go ahead.
Nick Brown
Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining. Today, we are joined by Altice USA's Executive Chairman, Dexter Goei; and CFO, Mike Grau; and we’re delighted to introduce or new CEO, Dennis Mathew, who together will take you through the presentation. And then we will have time for Q&A.
As today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements, please read the disclaimer on Slide 2. Dexter you can please go ahead.
Dexter Goei
Hello, everyone. Kicking off with a summary of our third quarter performance on Slide 3, revenue declined 7% year-over-year, mainly driven by pressure in our residential and advertising businesses, as well as the loss of air strand revenue in the prior year after the termination of our legacy Sprint contract. Excluding air strand revenue, the revenue decline would have been just 4.3% year-over-year.
Q3 adjusted EBITDA declined 18.1% year-over-year with a margin of 39.9% or down 12.7%, excluding air strand revenue, reflecting both the revenue decline and higher OpEx to drive future growth.
Residential broadband customer net losses were $43,000 for Q3, which was relatively in line with the losses in Q2 as a lower market activity environment and current competitive pressures impact to the pace at which our growth initiatives are materializing.
Free cash flow remains solid, even with our elevated fiber investments generating $136 million in Q3 and $535 million to date.
Our Optimum Fiber network deployment continues to accelerate rolling out at the fastest quarterly pace to date, adding 321,000 new fiber passings in the quarter. We also added 31,000 fiber customers in Q3 and expect to continue to grow at an accelerated pace through both gross additions and migrations of existing customers to our fiber network.