TEGNA Inc. (NYSE:TGNA) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 8, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Kirk von Seelen - Vice President and Treasurer
David Lougee - President, CEO & Director
Julie Heskett - Senior VP & CFO
Tom Cox - Chief Growth Officer

Conference Call Participants

Dan Kurnos - Benchmark Company
Steven Cahall - Wells Fargo
Craig Huber - Huber Research Partners
James Goss - Barrington Research

Operator

Hello and welcome to TEGNA First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Kirk von Seelen, Vice President and Treasurer. You may begin.

Kirk von Seelen

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2024 conference call and webcast. My name is Kirk von Seelen, and I am TEGNA's Treasurer. Today, our President and CEO, Dave Lougee; and our CFO, Julie Heskett will review TEGNA's first quarter performance and results and provide TEGNA's full year and quarter ahead outlook. After that, we'll open the call for questions. Hopefully you've had the opportunity to review this morning's press release. If you have not yet seen a copy of the release, it's available at tegna.com.

Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that this conference call and webcast includes forward-looking statements, and our actual results may differ. Factors that may cause them to differ are outlined in our SEC filings. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided reconciliations of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the press release.

With that, let me turn the call over to Dave.

David Lougee

Thank you, Kirk. And good morning, everyone. I'll begin with a summary of recent highlights and then turn the call over to Julie, to walk you through our financial results in more detail. Tegna achieved our key guidance metrics in the first quarter. We closed the acquisition of Octillion and began integrating it into Premion, made significant early progress toward our $350 million capital return commitment for 2024, and completed multiple local rights deals for local pro sports teams. Including with the Indiana Fever and rookie phenom Caitlin Clark.

Also during the quarter, we returned more than $100 million to shareholders with $82 million in share repurchases and $20 million in dividends. And as we announced in this morning's press release, our board has approved a 10% increase to our regular quarterly dividend. This builds on our track record of dividend increases, including the 20% dividend increase last year, and reflects the confidence we have in the durability of our free cash flow from our business and the strength of our balance sheet.