Telesat Corporation (NASDAQ:TSAT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript August 11, 2023 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Michael Bolitho - Director of Treasury and Risk Management

Daniel Goldberg - President and Chief Executive Officer

Andrew Browne - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Michael Pace - JP Morgan

Walter Piecyk - LightShed Partners

Arun Seshadri - BNP Paribas

Raghav Garg - DoubleLine Group

Marcello Chermisqui - Ares

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the conference call to report the Second Quarter 2023 Financial Results for Telesat. Our speakers today will be Dan Goldberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of Telesat; and Andrew Browne, Chief Financial Officer of Telesat.

I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Michael Bolitho, Director of Treasury and Risk Management. Please go ahead, Mr. Bolitho.

Michael Bolitho

Thank you, and good morning. This morning, we filed our quarterly report on Form 6-K with the SEC and on SEDAR. Our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. There are risks that Telesat's actual results may differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements as a result of known and unknown risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of known risks, see Telesat's annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC and SEDAR. Telesat assumes no responsibility to update or revise these forward-looking statements.

I will now turn the call over to Dan Goldberg, Telesat's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Daniel Goldberg

Okay. Thanks, Michael. This morning, I'll share some thoughts on our financial results and give an update on the business. I'll then hand over to Andrew, who will speak to the numbers in detail, and then we'll open the call up for questions.

As we noted in our earnings release, we've had a busy first half of the year. We're tracking our guidance, received FCC validation on C-band clearing which allowed us to recognize approximately $260 million in the quarter and completed some meaningful additional debt repurchases that we think strengthen our balance sheet and create value for shareholders.

But certainly, the big news was our announcement this morning that we've selected MDA as a prime contractor for the Telesat Lightspeed satellites; and that, by leveraging the advanced technology they've been investing in, we're able to reduce our CapEx on the project by roughly $2 billion, while fully maintaining the revolutionary capabilities of the network that we think are going to make it so disruptive and successful in the market.