Strive, Inc. 15% Series A Perpetual SATS Preferred Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Good afternoon. I'm here with Charlie Ergen, Paul Orban, our CFO, and John Swieringa, our COO. We will begin with opening remarks from Charlie, followed by a question-and-answer session. We ask that any participant producing a report not identify other participants or their firms in such reports. We also do not allow audio recordings. All statements we make during this call, other than statements of historical fact, constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provided by the Securities Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to be materially different from historical results and from any future results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

For a list of those factors and risks, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2025, our 10-Q filed today, and our subsequent filings made with the SEC. This information and supplemental materials relating to today's call will be posted on our investor relations website. All cautionary statements we make during the call should be understood as being applicable to any forward-looking statements we make wherever they appear. You should carefully consider the risks described in our reports and should not place any undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. We assume no responsibility for updating any forward-looking statements. We refer to OIBDA and free cash flow during this call.

The comparable GAAP measure and our reconciliation for OIBDA is presented in our earnings release and, in the case of free cash flow, in our Form 10-Q, as filed today with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to Charlie.

Thank you, Jeff. We're just going to take questions, but before we take questions, I just want to give a few opening comments. As you all know, August 1st, we had a $1.5 billion bond maturity for Hughes Corporation. We had discussions with the bondholders but weren't able to come up with a workable solution. We filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning for Hughes. I want to make just a couple points on that. One is, this filing is strictly limited to the Hughes entities. It does not include EchoStar Corporation, our other non-Hughes subsidiaries, or even Hughes international entities.

Second, we have first-day motions this afternoon in front of the court to ensure that Hughes continues to operate the normal course of business, and that means we're paying our employees, we're delivering for customers and channel partners as usual, and we expect to fulfill all ongoing forward commitments to our vendors. Third, we don't know how long bankruptcy will take before we can emerge restructured. As a result of the litigation that is expected in this, we won't take questions on Hughes, but I would refer you, and you are referred in our press release, there's a link to our filing that I think lays out chapter and verse the details there. With that, we'll take questions.

Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Dave, for the question.

First of all, you will see in the 10-K, 10-Q, I guess, that we did increase the authorization. The board increased the authorization up to $5 billion of buyback. Obviously, one of the things that we look at based on our capital structure is one of the things we look at, I would say first and foremost, we look at investing in our business. We'd look at our existing businesses to invest in and the opportunities there. EchoStar Capital, now under the leadership of Tom Cullen, we look at other things we can look at, which could include our own company. After that, if we can't find anything there, you could work all the way down to paying dividends.

We've been a good steward of capital for a lot of years, and I hope we'll continue to do that.