Cable One, Inc. (CABO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Cable One Second Quarter Q2 Earnings release. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. I will now hand the conference over to Jordan Morkert. Vice President of Investor Relations. Jordan, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Cable One's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. We're glad to have you join us as we review our results. Before we proceed, I would like to remind you that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements relating to future events that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding future revenue, customer growth, connects, churn rates and ARPU, the future competitive structure of our markets, the long-term penetration opportunity in our markets, the anticipated benefits of our mobile service offering, new product rollouts, future customer retention trends, anticipated cost savings and other benefits to be derived from our billing system migration and our other investments in growth enablement platforms, our plans to expand our multi-gig capabilities in more markets, future cash flow and capital expenditures, potential uses for our cash flow, the MBI transaction, including the purchase price, MBI's future debt levels and other related matters, future tax savings, our expectations for monetizing our remaining equity investments and our future financial performance, capital allocation policy, leverage ratios and related targets and our potential financing plans. You can find factors that could cause Cable One's actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements discussed during today's call in today's earnings release and in our SEC filings including our 2025 annual report on Form 10-K and our forthcoming second quarter 2026 quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Cable One is under no obligation and expressly disclaims any obligation, except as required by law, to update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Additionally, today's remarks will include a discussion of certain financial measures that are not presented in conformity with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP. When we refer to free cash flow during today's call, we mean adjusted EBITDA less capital expenditures as defined in our earnings release. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release or on our website at ir.cableone.net. Joining me on today's call is our CEO, Jim Holanda, and CFO, Todd Koetje. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jim.

Thank you, Jordan, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. Last quarter, I spoke about taking the time to listen, learn and develop a clear understanding of where we are performing well and where we need to improve. Three months later, my view remains largely unchanged. This is a business with a strong network, attractive markets, meaningful cash flow generation and significant potential to improve operating performance. I continue to believe the greatest opportunities in front of us are operational in nature within our control and ultimately solvable through consistent execution. Today, I'd like to spend my time discussing what we're seeing in residential broadband, the competitive environment, the investments we're making across the business and why we remain confident in the long-term outlook. Turning to residential broadband. We reported losses of 17,000 customers during the quarter as elevated churn continued to pressure subscriber results. These results reinforce our belief that improving customer retention is our most important operational priority. Achieving that requires continued focus on both enhancing the customer experience and strengthening our overall value proposition. To support these efforts, we continue to augment initiatives across the business, including additional speed upgrades, more gradual promotional roll-offs and a broader portfolio of products and services designed to deepen customer relationships and improve customer lifetime value supported by enhanced retention tools. On the acquisition side, connect activity improved sequentially from the prior quarter and in each month of the second quarter providing additional confidence that our customer acquisition initiatives are moving in the right direction. We are making progress towards building a more balanced acquisition approach as investments in our people, platforms and go-to-market capabilities continue to gain traction. Over the past year, the contribution from door-to-door sales has more than doubled as a share of our quarterly connects, and we also continue to see encouraging momentum across our digital acquisition channels. These results reflect our efforts to diversify how we acquire new customers and build a more balanced mix of acquisition channels. Residential broadband ARPU increased sequentially during the quarter, benefiting from promotional roll-offs, the implementation of our AutoPayPlus program changes and continued adoption of higher-value products and services across the customer relationship, partially offset by customer retention initiatives and increased adoption of value-oriented offerings. Going forward, we expect to take an increasingly targeted and segmented approach to pricing and retention initiatives tailored to the competitive dynamics of each market we serve. This approach is designed to balance revenue objectives with long-term customer relationships and lifetime value. Competitive intensity remains across portions of our footprint, particularly in markets experiencing a fiber overbuild activity. Looking ahead, we expect the broadband landscape to consist of a mix of wired, fixed wireless, mobile-only and satellite solutions with wired broadband continuing to serve the majority of households because of its superior capacity, reliability and economics. The number of wired gig capable competitors varies across our footprint, and we increasingly tailor our products, marketing strategies and competitive responses to the local dynamics of each market. While those competitive responses may differ by market, our commitment to the communities we serve and our local operating presence remain unchanged. Our objective is to deliver an experience that earns long-term customer loyalty and positions us to compete effectively over time. As we evaluate the competitive environments across our footprint and where we expect them to stabilize over time, we believe our long-term penetration opportunity remains meaningfully above current penetration levels. This analysis reinforces our confidence in the business' long-term growth and value creation potential. Turning to Business Services. As we noted last quarter, our reported business services results reflect the impact of the previously announced sale of certain fiber-to-the-tower assets, which occurred in late Q1. Within Business Services, we continue to see encouraging momentum in portions of the business particularly within our enterprise, wholesale and carrier offerings as these higher-value fiber-based offerings benefit from long-term contracts, recurring revenue streams and attractive customer economics. During the second quarter, our SMB broadband business remained under pressure. To strengthen our offering, we expanded our product portfolio with the launch of Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS providing customers with a cloud-based communications solution that complements our existing connectivity services. UCaaS broadens the solutions we offer and represents another step in deepening relationships over time. Combined with improvements in sales execution and our go-to-market approach, we believe we are well positioned to build the momentum we're seeing across these higher-value commercial segments. Underpinning both our residential and commercial businesses is the quality and capabilities of our network. Today, essentially, all of our network is capable of delivering gigabit speeds and by the end of this year, the vast majority of our customers will be served by multi-gig capable infrastructure. This progress is not the result of a major new capital program, but rather a years of disciplined, capital-efficient investment in our network architecture and technology platforms. We believe these upgrades improve the value we deliver to customers while further strengthening our competitive position in the markets we serve. More broadly, we continue to invest in technology, automation, and AI-enabled tools designed to improve the customer experience, enhance employee productivity and drive greater operational efficiency across the business. Turning to Mobile. We are pleased with the early progress of the business. While it remains small relative to our core broadband operations today, customer adoption trends and the pace of growth across the platform are encouraging. As we've said previously, building awareness and changing customer perception takes time. Customers have known us as a broadband provider for many years, and we expect it will take time for customers to view us as a mobile provider. Across the broadband industry, mobile is an increasingly important part of the customer relationship. While it remains early on in our launch, we believe it is an effective way to improve customer acquisition, deepen customer relationships and strengthen retention over time. As penetration grows, we expect those benefits to become more meaningful to customer lifetime value and the economics of the business. As we continue to invest across the business, we remain disciplined in how we allocate capital. Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. We will invest in opportunities to improve the customer experience and strengthen our competitive position, while pursuing balance sheet flexibility and seeking to reduce leverage over time. Todd will provide additional detail on our balance sheet, liquidity position and capital allocation priorities in his remarks. Before I hand it over to Todd, I'd like to reiterate our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead. We're seeing encouraging progress across a number of the initiatives we've discussed today while continuing to invest in our network, our products and the capabilities that we believe will strengthen our competitive position. Combined with the positive cash flow generating characteristics of the business, and a disciplined approach to capital allocation, we continue to pursue long-term value creation for our stakeholders. And now Todd will provide a recap of our second quarter financial performance.

Thanks, Jim. Beginning with the top line, total revenues were $348.9 million for the second quarter of 2026 compared to $381.1 million in the second quarter of 2025 with residential video responsible for $9.7 million of the decrease. Residential data revenues decreased $16.7 million or 7.3% year-over-year driven by a 6.6% decrease in subscribers, while ARPU remained relatively flat. On a sequential basis, residential data revenues declined by $1 million or 0.5%. Data revenues on the business side declined by $3.8 million year-over-year or 6.6%. However, $2.2 million of this decline was attributable to the revenues associated with the tower contracts divested during the first quarter of 2026. Operating expenses declined by $3.6 million or 3.5% compared to the second quarter of 2025 driven by lower programming costs, offset by ongoing investments in customer experience. OpEx was 28.3% of revenues in Q2 of 2026 versus 26.9% in the prior year quarter. SG&A expenses for the second quarter of 2026 fell by $4.3 million or 4.7% year-over-year, due to lower labor expense and reduced billing system conversion costs. This was offset by continued investment in customer acquisition channels and related marketing. SG&A represented 25.1% of total revenues in the current quarter compared to 24.1% in the second quarter of last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of 2026 was $173.5 million, representing 49.7% of revenues versus $203.2 million or 53.3% of revenues in Q2 of 2025. Capital expenditures of $74 million or 42.7% of adjusted EBITDA and increased $5.6 million year-over-year. This was primarily attributable to our investments in the latest in-home advanced WiFi technologies and security solutions to drive increased customer satisfaction and related loyalty. We reaffirm our previous guidance that full year CapEx is expected to remain consistent with the prior year, and we will continue to remain disciplined and balanced on capital allocation priorities that are centered around the highest network reliability standards and debt reduction. Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx was $99.5 million in the second quarter of 2026, versus $134.8 million in the second quarter of 2025. During the quarter, we recognized several noncash impairment charges and fair value adjustments related to our franchise agreements, goodwill in our investment in MBI. These accounting charges do not impact our cash flow, liquidity, operating strategy or long-term growth initiatives. Additional details are included in our earnings release and Form 10-Q. During the quarter, we reduced our debt balances by $63 million, including nearly $60 million of reduction via voluntary repurchases at attractive discounts. Through the first 2 quarters of the year, we have reduced our total debt balances by nearly $130 million. At the end of the second quarter, we have $166.2 million of cash and equivalents on hand while our gross debt balance was $3.06 billion, consisting of approximately $1.66 billion of term loans, $550 million of revolver draws, $503 million of unsecured notes, $345 million of convertible notes and $3 million of finance lease liabilities. We also had $700 million of undrawn capacity under our $1.25 billion revolving credit facility at quarter end. Our net leverage ratio on a last quarter annualized basis was 4.2x. Our balance sheet continues to be supported by committed sources of capital and strong operating liquidity. We remain focused on strengthening it and continue to actively evaluate a range of financing alternatives with the objective of maintaining financial flexibility over the long term. With respect to MBI, we continue to evaluate the appropriate next steps and do not have any additional updates to announce today. As previously announced, during the quarter, 2 of our unconsolidated equity joint ventures Point Broadband and Clearwave Fiber merged. Our existing interest in Clearwave Fiber was exchanged for additional equity interest in the surviving Point Broadband entity. Our investment had a $135 million carrying value at June 30 and is now classified as an equity method investment with a one quarter reporting lag. We continue to assess potential monetization opportunities for our remaining unconsolidated equity investments whose proceeds could be allocated towards accelerated debt reduction as we have in the past. With that, I'll turn it over for questions.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Brandon Nispel with KeyBanc.

Two, if I could, one for Jim and one for Todd. Jim, you guys talked about having long-term confidence in the business because of the low penetration rate, but that's been sort of the case for a while. So can you talk more specifically about what you guys are doing to change that? And then on Todd, there's been some reports that you need to get some -- and you need to get some financing transactions done. Can you give us an update on where you stand with some of those.

Thanks for the question, Brandon. It's Jim. The immediate opportunity, 5.5, 6 months ago when I walked through the door was to really balance and invest in additional sales channels, primarily on the digital and e-commerce side along with the direct sales side. And when you look back over a year ago, those two sales channels accounted for less than 10% of sales. In Q2, they accounted for roughly 35% of sales. And that still benchmarks quite significantly under where I would say the rest of the industry is at. So we continue to invest in those channels. And as a result, as we stated earlier, we saw a strong connect momentum in the second quarter, which continues into the third quarter. And then on the retention side, which is the other side of that equation, again, ceding market share to FWA by not having a mobile and a bundled offering strategy, I think, set us behind. We have worked quickly to close that gap. Mobile officially launched across the footprint in March of this year. As I mentioned, the early results are good, slow at first tiers as we get customers used to the idea of the broadband provider providing mobile, but now we actually have a competitive response, both in terms of price and product set, that we didn't have before. And then again, the ancillary services that we're using to increase the value proposition for our existing broadband customers. We're highly focused on and deploying in real time. So those are the things that give me confidence in terms of our ability to take advantage of what I perceive certainly as historically being underpenetrated and the opportunity to have a product set and a pricing set to go after all households within our footprint.

And then Brandon, as it relates to the financing question, as in my prepared remarks, I outlined that we remain very focused on strengthening the balance sheet and continue to actively evaluate financing alternatives, given the consideration of that active evaluation, we are not in a position to answer any questions related to our financing efforts at CABO or the financing efforts at MBI at this time, but we will continue to explore, evaluate, pursue all potential opportunities because we know we need to provide clarity and additional stability to the balance sheet.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Williams with TD Cowen.

My first one is on the cost to acquire. You're changing your go-to-market strategy. You used to be more of an inbound model. Now you're doing, as you said, more direct -- more to door-to-door, which I'd imagine increases your cost to acquire. But then you noted that your digital mix is now, I think you said 35%, which would help. So a few moving parts there, what does that mean to the overall cost to acquire our customers. . Second question is just on ARPU. You preannounced pretty good ARPU numbers in July and ARPU rebound. And you mentioned a lot of moving parts whether it was promo roll-offs, AutoPay, product adoptions, but then you have retention and your front book is pretty aggressive. How do I put that all together in terms of or the ARPU trajectory is going, is the strategy to maybe you have a stable ARPU and try to grow subs on that or sacrifice a little ARPU going forward longer term?

Thanks for the questions, Greg. I'll take the cost to acquire question and turn the ARPU question over to Todd. But on the cost to acquire, yes, correct that direct sales is a more expensive channel that's roughly 10% to 12% of sales today. And so to your point, the digital channel is very efficient -- and we're seeing strong momentum there. And so I expect the overall [ CAC ] to increase slightly but not materially to where it really impacts margin overall. To the extent that changes as we continue to beef up those and those mixes changes, we'll be happy to update on future calls. .

Greg, ARPU question, both for the quarter, as you noted, as well as how you think about that going forward. The pricing adjustments that we made specifically in this quarter that were related to some of our AutoPayPlus and paperless billing programs did support that ARPU. I would say it also as usual, does result in some heightened customer attrition when you make that, but it supported the incremental ARPU there. The AutoPayPlus program, as we've talked about quite extensively in the past is something we're very focused on because that set forget it also improves the retention qualities of the customers that adopt into that, and we save money, of course because of the paperless billing dynamic associated with that. And so do our customers save money. So everybody benefits from that perspective. And then we continue to focus on the sell-in, right? It's not just a binary broadband product, it's a broadband product with the most advanced in-home technology, the eero system, on top of that eero system, the security solutions that honestly every customer should have given the ongoing attacks that are out there on that front. -- the sell-in to the full assist solution that we have that we've been introducing to our customers over the last 3 to 4 quarters, we call it tech assist, where you basically are supporting everything that our broadband connects in the home that we see adoption and a customer's willingness to pay for in addition to, of course, then selling in other products like video streaming. Some of those products we won't pay for. Some of those products will subsidize to improve the retention side of the equation because getting more products and more value into this we'll then continue to support the overall ARPU going forward as well as improve the retention. We do have some headwinds there as well because you talked about the front book the customer acquisition strategy is not just an inheritance model anymore. It's not just answer the phones. It's the offensive side that Jim just talked about. And we are willing to sell in to new customers at a lower price point. And some of that's a phone ringer to get them to call. Some of that's an engagement at the front door, but then working on selling in those additional products and then the promotional roll-offs help support that ARPU over time at the right level, not the kind of shock and all that drives more attrition. And I would expect that ARPU, while we continue to focus on expanding the penetration, as Jim outlined in his prepared remarks, will be something that will also then have some pressure on ARPU, but a balanced way in terms of adding customers and a willingness as we've talked about quite a bit in the past of giving up some of the enterprise ARPU to drive long-term customer growth.

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Cahall with Wells Fargo.

Kind of rolling it all up, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about your expectations for subscriber trends for the next quarter or 2. I mean you talked about the improvement in gross adds. It sounds like retention is what you're looking to attack next. I know the goal is to start to see some improvement in the year-on-year trend. Is that something you think you can get to by the third quarter, which I think is also typically seasonally a little better. And then with mobile being bundled in, maybe a little bit more aggressively, I think, Todd, you were just talking about some of the ARPU impacts. Maybe you can think about -- or maybe, sorry, you can mention how we should think about that trade-off between price and volume that you might be attacking right now?

Yes, Steve, I mean, similar to what I just said, but I can kind of go, I guess, a little bit deeper subscriber trends. We are encouraged by some of the platforms that we've invested in some of the team that we've continued to invest in, and those go-to-market strategies and that very hyper-local approach in our smaller community is driving some of the new customer acquisition. You're spot on. Retention is the highest priority, the most accretive customer is the one you already have and focusing that on the incremental value into those existing relationships like I talked about with the products like Jim spoke about with the incremental bundling. The third quarter is a seasonally better quarter and Q2, demonstrated that Q2 is usually the seasonally worst quarter in addition to some of the pricing adjustments that I talked about in addition to just a more intense competitive environment that we continue to operate in. And recall, if you're talking about year-over-year, Q3 of 2025 was definitely not a great quarter for us as we were coming through a lot of the billing system implementation. We did have a heightened churn as a result of that. So while not giving you guidance with the momentum we're focused on. I would say that that's a fair assessment, I think, as you outlined.

Great. And then just wondering if you have seen any increase in satellite competition in parts of the footprint?

No. The same as we discussed on the last quarterly call, again, it -- the offers are in the market for short periods of time. And then where it's pre-installed and free equipment and a low rate followed by going back to the $300 equipment fee, 150 install and normal rack rates. And that continues and the OpenSignal data that we continue to get on a very regular basis, again, while it was 0% at the end of '25, shows up as 1% here so far in '26. So it hasn't had any materiality in regards to competition. Having said that, we are highly focused on keeping track of that across our geographies on a very regular basis as a prudent step to track to see if that changes, and we'll be happy to provide updates on future quarters as well.