Charter Comm at Janco Partners Inc. 9th Annual Media & Telecommunications Conference - Part 1.

(From Fair Disclosure Wire)

CARL VOGEL, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, CHARTER COMM: Obviously we have the safe harbor language. Anything we talk about here that uses forward-looking financial statements are protected by that. Take a look at this. If you have any questions on our financials, any questions on this presentation, take a look at our website and you can find out any additional information. We will be using some non-GAAP terms. The EBITDA etc., things that you are all familiar with. Again, take a look at our website.

What I will be talking about is 2003. What we did in 2003, what our product strategy is going forward in 2004, what our new products are. I will update you and when I talk about new products that's essentially our advanced services, the voice over IP, digital DODs, subscription DOD and then 2004 goes in objective. We're pretty pleased with the accomplishments that we made in 2003. As Matt mentioned we significantly improved our liquidity. Free cash flow from operations went from about $300m negative when you take our operating income less capital expenditures, to $1.4b positive. That's really through the hard work of our management team that I will speak to here in a minute.

In addition we did some transactions in the capital markets that improved our liquidity profile by $2.1b, the largest of which was a $1.7b debt exchange that pushed out our convert maturities and there are some other maturities as well.

Financial discipline is a by word at Charter. We were relatively pleased in a year of transition to post the results that we did. 7% and 11% respectively on a pro forma basis when you take out the Port Orchard sale and certain advertising that we no longer do. We're very pleased. I believe we led the industry in data revenue growth. That may not be data unit growth, but revenues count a lot more than units in our view. 65% increase in 2003 and that was off of a very strong 2002 and we see our data business continuing to perform quite well in 2004.

Commercial Services revenue, we got very focused on this business. This is essentially selling high speed data services and video services to businesses around our footprint. This is an area that we kind of left behind. By way of context this is roughly a $200m business for Cox. We brought in Jeff McElroy who was the President of Cox Business Services to run our [indiscernible]. He gave us a lot of tips on how to improve this business, so we're very pleased with the growth that we've got in 2003 and again this is a big part of our business plan in 2004.

Income from operations increased 41%. It came off our result and our capital expenditures went down $1.3b. In addition we grew our revenue generating units. I think our competitive position is improving. I think we've got a good bundle. I think we've got good packaging and pricing message. We clearly have technology differentiate. We've seen some improvement in churn. Our operational efficiency and our margins are still quite good and our advanced service RGU has increased 12% in 2003.