Telesat Corporation (NASDAQ:TSAT) Q4 2022 Results Conference Call March 29, 2023 10:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Dan Goldberg - President and Chief Executive Officer

Andrew Browne - Chief Financial Officer

Michael Bolitho - Director of Treasury and Risk Management

Conference Call Participants

Walter Piecyk - LightShed Partners

Marcello Chermisqui - Ares Management

Brandon Karsch - Kennedy Lewis

Arun Seshadri - BNP Paribas

David Windley - Jefferies

Raghav Garg - DoubleLine Group

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the conference call to report the Fourth Quarter 2022 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 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 annual report for the year ended December 31, 2022 on Form 20-F 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 report filed earlier today with the SEC. 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.

Dan 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 will open the call up to questions. Looking at our financial performance for the quarter and the full year, I'm pleased with where we landed. We beat the guidance we gave at the outset of the year as well as the updated guidance we shared when we released our Q2 numbers. We also continue to run the business in a highly disciplined and focused manner, closing the year with an adjusted EBITDA margin of roughly 75% and with $1.7 billion of cash on the balance sheet. As we mentioned on our last call, the overall operating environment was pretty stable from a demand and pricing perspective, and I was pleased to see our capacity utilization tick up throughout the year. Our big headwind for 2022 and it will be a headwind for the first four months of this year too was the DISH renewal on our Anik F3 satellite. As we've discussed previously, it was at a lower rate and for less capacity than the previous deal. And even though we promptly resold the balance of the capacity that DISH didn't renew, it was still the biggest contributor to the decline in revenue and adjusted EBITDA we experienced last year.