Uniti Group Inc. Common Stock TD Cowen 12th Annual Communications Infrastructure Summit

Thanks for having us, Greg. This is one of our favorite conferences, so thank you for having us.

Yeah. We just celebrated, almost a week ago, our one-year anniversary of the merger with Windstream. At the time, we promised a few things. One, that we would clean up the complicated structure that preexisted, and we'd replace it with one that would greatly enhance our cost of capital, and we followed through on that.

and really executed on that. Secondly, that we would remove the dis-synergies of that structure and replace it with real operational synergies and savings, and bring together the Windstream Wholesale business with the Uniti Leasing Wholesale business and get real synergies and real opportunity on attacking the hyperscaler business, and we followed through big time on that one. Probably the real bright spot of the merger, frankly. Thirdly, we promised we would really accelerate the Kinetic build, and we have done that materially. We really hit the ramp in the second quarter on the build. Then fourthly, we said all of those things would help position us to approach M&A from a position of strength, really on our front foot, as opposed to the way the two companies were pursuing it in the past, and we are making great progress there, too.

So with all that said, our priorities for the second half of the year are to just continue with the playbook that we have laid out. Executing on the Kinetic build, continuing to pursue more hyperscaler activity, and bring more of that book of business in-house.

and just executing on the strategic front. So very excited about the second half of the year.

You can keep going if you want to keep listing the record metrics, by the way, because I do think we had a legitimately strong quarter. That was a conscious effort on our part coming out of the merger, which was to put together several quarters of strong performance, set goals, and meet or exceed them. The simple things. We are really proud of the fact that we have done that. Three quarters in a row of solid performance, solid progress on the KPIs that actually matter to our business. We put together a quarter and a raise and guidance that are legitimate. There is not a bunch of one-time items that are supporting that, right? There are really legitimate improvements in KPIs. We are very excited about it. Yeah, the stock reaction was disappointing.

We have had a lot of investor interaction over the past two weeks, and our best assessment is that folks had built up some expectation about M&A.

because our name has been in the news, as it often is.

Yeah. I think there was an expectation for something to happen there, and it did not, and therefore a little bit of air out of the balloon, if you will.

Yeah. It doesn't change the fact we had a great quarter, and increased guidance for the balance of the year, and we're going to continue to execute on the things that we can control.