American Tower Corporation (AMT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Michael, are you on mute? I can't hear you. Emery, can you unmute Michael? There you go.

Great. Tom, can you hear me now?

I can, Mike. Yes. Sorry. Thanks.

Brings you back to the old days, right? So I'll explain that in one moment. So anyway. So for those of you who haven't met, I'm Mike Rollins, I cover communication services and infrastructure for Citi Research. We do have disclosures available at the conference registration site. And I'd like to welcome Tom Bartlett, CEO of American Tower. And the line I was using earlier is from Tom's earlier employer of Verizon. But Tom, thank you for joining us today. Happy New Year. It's great to see even if it's in this virtual environment. Of course, I wish we were seeing each other in person.

Yes, absolutely, Mike. It's great to be here. I love seeing the background that you have behind you. It's awesome.

Great. Well, we'll jump right into our first question of the day, which is to just set the stage for our audience with the strategic and the operating priorities for American Tower for 2021?

No, sure, Mike. I mean, let's -- maybe I'll spend a couple of minutes on this. I mean, our overall goal continues to be to accelerate the rate of growth and expansion really in all facets of our business from the top line down to the bottom line. And they're really kind of 4, I would say, basic elements to our 2021 strategic plan: The first being, it's grow our asset base and our capabilities and returns on our existing assets. Operationally, as we were for the last several years, very focused on selectively building and acquiring new assets, largely in our existing markets. So we're in 21, 22 different markets now. We want to get deeper and deeper into the markets that we're in. And we want to continue to grow our build-to-suit program. Last year, we did 5,000, 6,000 sites. My goal is to get that up to 10,000 sites. I'm not sure that's going to happen in 2021, but it's our best rate of return, kind of growth capital that we can spend in the business. We do that proactively with our customer base, driving into that white space that they have, largely in our international markets, but it is a great rate of return, and it continues to bring more sites into our business to be able to provide more density, more densification opportunity for our customers. Our business development pipeline is probably never been as active as it is today. I mean, it -- and that's no surprise. A lot of new spectrum coming in, in all of the markets that we're in, not just for 5G, but also supporting 4G in many of our emerging markets. And so a lot of our carrier customers are looking for ways to continue to monetize their portfolios to be able to support the capital that's needed to build out their investments. And so a lot of BD types of activity, we evaluate them just as we've been evaluating them over the last 10 years. We pursue what makes sense, where we can create the most NPV. And we also want to look to really kind of enhance the way we're providing value to our customers. We're going to look to opportunities to amend master lease agreement terms where it makes sense, really to drive more value for both our customers as well as ourselves. And then secondly, which we really started and we've talked about Mike in the past, are looking at ways to continue to extend our own platform of services and capabilities, where we think the opportunities are greatest. And we are currently working with a number of different companies on go-to-market strategies regards edge services in the United States, and we can talk more about those in a few minutes. We're also looking at ways to be able to extend our core and provide more power as a service internationally. And even some fiber initiatives where we can really take advantage of the exclusive pieces of real estate, that we have in those given markets. And again, all doing this while ensuring and maintaining our investment-grade balance sheet. The second element is really setting our sights on improving even our own kind of high-margin performance, not just for the sake of profitability. But also in a way to ensure that we're providing higher level of service and consistent service for our customers where we're operationally focused on expanding our global service capabilities that we've talked about in the past and standardizing basic levels of service and even our IT platforms on a global basis, being more cloud-based. And as we are on the last objective, really accelerating our power as a service offering. We look to buy additional land where it makes sense. We probably had a couple of thousand transactions in 2020. We'll try to accelerate that. We're looking at even future of work optionality as we come out of a post-COVID kind of a world. So we continue to look at ways of being more efficient. We have just under 200 licensed drone pilots in our U.S. business. And each one of those pilots are managing a number of sites, looking at the structural capacity of sites, opportunity of sites. Again, in ways of really trying to provide kind of this branded instant co-location for our customers. So we're trying to improve the overall value proposition, accelerate that as well as the profitability in the business. And third, as we've done over the last couple of years as part of our Stand and Deliver strategy, we think it's really important to extend our leadership position globally. We're helping to drive new legislation and initiatives in really all of our markets, particularly when it comes to spectrum availability, local permitting and zoning, even use of new technologies, infrastructure development, particularly as we see our purpose in terms of really connecting the un- or less-connected. And again, being in the COVID world, we know just how important that is. And lastly, it's everything related to our people and our culture. We want to accelerate our efforts to ensure we have a diverse and inclusive workforce and one where every one of our people feels a sense of belonging, one that is skilled, that's deploying new products and services. And so talent management is a critical component of our strategy in '21. One that we can continue to demonstrate our ESG efforts, and be a beacon, hopefully, for others to follow. We've received a number of awards for a lot of our ESG efforts in 2020. So we want to take that to the next level. And then lastly and perhaps even most importantly, as we kind of work through COVID, is remain vigilant on keeping our customers and our employees safe. So we're excited about 2021. The auctions that we're seeing right now, you're in the middle of, I know, looking at very closely, and we see new entrants coming into the market. We see new technology coming into the market, and we're seeing that on a global basis. And so we're really excited about what '21 has to offer. We're really excited to see '20 go relative to everything to COVID and cautiously optimistic about vaccines and making sure that we can get through this mess that we've been in.

Thanks, Tom. Maybe taking a step back for a moment before we get -- I want -- you're covering a lot of ground that I think we'd like to unpack with our audience today. But just taking a step back, when you think of American Tower, are you thinking of American Tower as a global tower firm that just pursues adjacencies, whether it's fiber, edge data center as Colo? Or are you thinking about American Tower as a global communications infrastructure provider that logically will keep extending geographically as well as into these adjacencies and become more of a conglomeration of services and platforms over time?

That's an interesting question, Mike. I think that the 2 were probably not mutually exclusive, right? I think in the broader sense, we think of ourselves as a global communications infrastructure provider. We're at the center in enabling the kind of the myriad of digital trends that are occurring across our footprint. This digital transformation that's going on, I think, we're -- a couple of key elements of that, I think, are being global, being interconnected, being cloud-based. I think we provide capabilities in all of those, so clearly, we see ourselves at the center of that on a neutral host basis, a multi-tenant, multi-service offerings, leveraging really the exclusive pieces of real estate that we have, the real estate rights that we have. That being one of our most significant competitive advantage, I think we do have. So we want to look for ways to be able to increase our -- and really increase our total addressable market. One of those ways is continually being the tower company that we are and investing in sites, buying sites, building sites, doing those types of things. I think it's a very logical way. And we've talked about that just a minute ago in terms of our customers looking to monetize a lot of sites on a global basis and that type of activity being really active at this point in time. But we also see the opportunity to be able to extend our core platform of land and real estate and tower in ways that they can increase the total addressable market. And that's one where we talk about looking at the edge. Looking at being able to extend some of the power-as-a-service capabilities that we have the ability to extend. But today, our customers on a global basis are investing $50 billion into their networks. And so we want to stay at the center of that. I think that the kind of the tower cash flow that we're generating is going to be the core for our business for many, many, many years to come. But to the extent that we can improve on and increase that $50 billion, participate in more types of spend going forward, I think are great ways of being able to improve our overall return on invested capital and improve our overall AFFO per share. So I guess, I do like to think of ourselves as being that global communications infrastructure provider. We're not a data center company. I don't have 1,000 software engineers. I don't provide hybrid cloud configurations, and I don't have a bare metal capability. But I do think that our infrastructure is such that it can fit well into that solution somehow. And I do think that, that can become a meaningful part of our TAM. And I think we do have a right to win in that area. I think that the opportunity there is even greater than our tower real estate, right? I mean it's -- we have 40,000 sites in the United States. I think that there are going to be a lot of edge capabilities within the United States. But given the real estate that we do have, given the power that we have, the relationships, the on-ramp to the wireless customers in those locations, I do think that it does provide us some opportunity to provide growth on top of our core platform.

So I want to come back to that topic in a few moments. But since you did bring it up, while it's fresh in everyone's mind, we're going to bring in our audience for our first live survey question. We'll ask it, and then we're going to come back to it in a little while after we go through some other questions. So for this one, I'm going to go to live survey question #3, which is, how do you view the edge data center opportunity for American Tower? The choices are: Interesting but unlikely to be material for at least the next 3 years; interesting, but AMT needs to partner or merge with a data center provider to take full advantage; exciting and should be meaningfully additive to revenue in the next 3 years or not that interesting and unlikely to materialize into an incremental revenue for American Tower or the towers broadly. So that will get pushed out to our audience. We'll come back to that in a moment. We'll come back to maybe one of the things that you talked about earlier, just to keep this at a high level before we delve into each of the key tower regions, which is the pandemic. And if you can just frame for us, Tom, if you're seeing any impact through this pandemic on the ability to execute leasing? And are there certain markets that are more sensitive to others with the pandemic, especially as we've been experiencing some countries a second or third wave of this virus?

I think that the -- our business continues to amaze me in terms of just how resilient it is to this type of a pandemic. And you can look at it from a number of different perspectives. The supply chain issues that we might have, the supply chain issues that our customers might have, haven't seen any supply chain bumps in the road, if you will, really from day 1. I think that ourselves and our carriers have such a breadth of opportunity that there are a number of different ways that they've been able to work through it as well as ours. I mean, as I said, 2020 is a record year for build-to-suits. So we haven't seeing those types of issues at all, whether it's even lighting or what we need to do at the site to prepare it, haven't seen really any implications there. We are considered essential in every market that we're in. And so we've had to have people working with our customers, obviously, out at the site level. We are able to do some of that remotely. Some of it needs to be at the site itself. But we've been able to work our way through that. There were initially some issues in terms of our people's ability to move around freely in some of our markets just because of some of the curfews and some of the blocks in terms of keeping people locked down. But that was really minimal from that standpoint. We do have a number of kind of global service operations in place where we're doing lease extraction and a lot of these types of things in a central location, and that's helped quite a bit in terms of being able to provide support for our customers. I think, interestingly enough, I was asked the question before in terms of a kind of network demand and impacts on the business, and that varies by market. You look at the U.S., what we've seen in the United States is definitely a dislocation of traffic moving from the cities, for example, moving out to the burbs. But in the United States, the fixed broadband networks have been able to take a lot of that load. There's -- you don't have the commuting impacts. And so the carriers have done really well, I think in terms of having infrastructure in place to be able to support kind of the changing mix of demand. Internationally, it's a little bit different. We don't have internationally, and particularly in the emerging markets that fixed capability -- that fixed broadband capability to a large extent. And so I think the carriers have done really well in terms of stepping up investments in some of their areas and some of the regions there to be able to mitigate some of the broadband connection issues that they might otherwise have generated. And you look at some of the growth, I mean, you look at our African growth. There's a very high single-digit, kind of, 8%, 9%, 10% kind of growth rates. And so the carriers are continually invested in their networks to make sure that people have, in fact, had and being able to get a broadband connection. But most of our people are still working out of the office today. We have the IT systems and platforms and processes in place to be able to support our customers. And I think what also helped is that while we do have a couple of thousand customers in the United States, there are 3 that are really generating 80% of it. And so we've been able to work very closely with those customers as well as the big MNOs outside of the United States on a direct one-on-one basis. We don't have a consumer. We're not in the consumer business. And so being in that type of a B2B business-to-business type of an environment, I think, has also helped us ensure that we can continue to provide high levels of value to our customers.

And we'll throw up our second survey, and we're going to get to this as well, which is our second survey question. What is the risk to future consensus AFFO per share growth for American Tower? You're not concerned? Customer consolidation or rationalization? Low or no inflation? Currency? Slower domestic organic growth? Or slower international organic growth? And you can enter those in. And while you're doing that, I want to, Tom, ask you about one of the comments from the third quarter conference call. So American Tower, I think, evolved its description of the target for growth and described that AFFO growth could be double digits. I think the comment was over the next decade, including the dividend yield. Maybe it was a growth and return combination. But that seemed to be different than previously where you were talking about AFFO per share without the dividend being double-digit growth. Can you unpack what led to the change or evolution? And how to think about the forward opportunity?

Yes, I think it was probably a misstep. My goal is continued double-digit AFFO per share growth, Mike. I mean, we've been able to demonstrate that for the last 10, 12 years. My compensation candidly is driven on AFFO per share growth and return on invested capital. And so we are absolutely incented to drive that kind of performance. And so our goal is to continue to drive that kind of performance, the yield. Again, we've been able to increase the yield 20% for the last decade or so since we became a REIT. And we tie that to our REIT taxable income. And so my sense is that, that growth rate, while I think it will still be double digit, it may not always be at that 20% level. We've talked about the fact that, that may come down a bit. And still in the double-digit range, but that would be incremental to our AFFO per share growth. And we do have a lot of levers. EBITDA is the most significant growth factor for AFFO per share. But I talked about how we're looking at margin performance and how we're looking at ways of being able to extend and increase the levels of margin that we have in the business. We've got capital CapEx opportunities. We have cash taxes. There are a number of different elements to AFFO per share. It is on a per-share basis. We have a buyback program that historically, we've been able to take shares out of the market. While we haven't done that in the last year or so, we could talk about why? But that's also another tool that we do have. So -- and we also have a number of refinancing opportunities and initiatives in place. So I do think that there are different levers that will help us on top of the EBITDA growth that we've got -- cash EBITDA growth that we have going on in the business. Does that mean every year, Mike, it's going to -- we're going to be able to achieve that? Probably not. But that's clearly our objective, and it's clearly our goal that over a 10-year period, you know that we're going to be able to achieve that type of growth. That's clearly our goal.

Well, let's see what the audience thought might be the risk to that future to at least where the consensus is, if we can reveal those results on the screen. So the slower domestic growth, 36%; international, 24%; not concerned, 16%; rationalization, 16%; currency, 8%; low or no inflation, 0%. Tom, as you look at these results, how do you think about -- and we were just talking about it, but how do you think about some of these inputs into the process?

Well, I mean, from a -- if you take a look at those things that are going to impact your EBITDA growth, you have the 2 elements up there in terms of organic growth, domestic and international. I mean we're coming off internationally in 2020 with high single-digit growth rates. On a consolidated basis, it's been brought down by our India growth rate, but I'm optimistic that we're going to be able to get those growth rates back up to some of the historical rates that we've been able to enjoy. Given their lack of wireline presence and their move to 4G and ultimately to 5G and their overall broadband penetration, I think the emerging markets internationally have a really strong, bright future. We've always said that we expect them to grow 200 to 300 basis points faster than the U.S. market. And that's why we're there, right? I mean, there's the risk that comes along with that? Sure, there's risk that comes along with it. We try to underwrite it with higher rate of return requirements and those types of things. And we try to cover some of the depreciation in the currencies with CPI-based inflation terms and contracts that are part of the master lease agreement. We are aligned with the major global MNOs in those markets. And so if you're a believer in wireless broadband, we should expect to see really solid rates of growth in our international markets. Domestically, the headwind that we have domestically right now that we've been transparent about and talking about is the churn coming from the T-Mobile-Sprint merger. And we'll get through that. Is that going to be an issue for -- '22 is really where it will be probably most significant. But you take a look at the growth, the top line growth coming from those same 3 carriers as well as new entrants coming into the marketplace, new spectrum, new technology, I think that prints a very positive outlook longer-term for the U.S. market. And so while there could be a shorter-term headwind in the U.S., I really do think that longer term, it looks very good. And once we get through this kind of major churn issue, really, the rates of churn for the other carriers as well as T-Mobile, once we're through this, should be really minimal. So I think that that's a really strong backdrop going forward. So I understand why people are thinking that it could provide some headwinds for us. But as I said, I don't know that I've never been more optimistic about the opportunities for our business globally.

I think part of the questions that we've been getting is just the -- how different factors come in, in terms of timing. And so is there any help that you can provide in terms of what's happening may be on a gross basis for the organic growth before you have to think about the timing of T-Mobile churn? And how dependent that gross is, whether it's on C-band, ongoing investments, things of that nature?

Yes. No, I would -- 2021, clearly, this is not guidance, but it will come out in a month or so and talk to that, but clearly expect an uptick in new gross business, signed business, commenced business in the United States. I mean I think even overall, I would expect, including even build-to-suits, but I would expect over $30 million of new -- monthly new business generated for our business, which is 20% higher than it was last year. And so I think that's just indicative of new spend, new spectrum, new entrants in the market on a global basis. And do I specifically look at C-band or -- not really, Mike. I mean I think that's an impetus for new spend. I mean the biggest correlation to our growth rate is our customers' CapEx that they're spending on our networks. That could be on new antennas, that could be dropping in a new spectrum, that could be in radios, that could be dropping a new fiber up the site. So there are a lot of different -- could be on new generator programs that we're putting in place for -- to harden a site for a given customer. And so we expect our customers to be able to be spending aggressively as they have in the past. I think that the fact that they're spending what they're spending for C-band, I think, is just indicative of how optimistic they are in terms of being able to optimize 5G technology going forward, which I think is a very strong statement for our business. They're not going to be spending all of this capital, all this cash on C-band without the ability to spend a lot of CapEx on deploying it. And so I think that's a real strong message for how they think about 5G and the opportunities for 5G. And as I mentioned before, we're right in the middle of that. And so we should be able to, as a neutral host, hopefully, be able to take advantage and participate in a lot of that opportunity. So I think it all provides a very strong backdrop for the future.

And Tom, is there any linkage between the amount they spend or the perceived quantum of spend being high or low relative to the speed at which they build out and deploy? Or is it sort of separate from one another?

Well, what we saw, I think, with 4G was clearly a real accelerated spend. And so if you look at some of our growth rates, organic growth rates -- mind is escaping me here a little bit, but like in 2013, '12, '13, '14, as you recall, we're up in the kind of the 9-plus percent rates of growth. And they've come down in the latter part of the decade and into 2020, which now they're kind of the more normal maintaining, investing to be able to support that 30% kind of growth rate and network demand. I think going forward, I think that there will be obviously, a desire to deploy 5G on a nationwide basis with real structure in place as fast as they can. Now it's going to take a while to get it cleared and for them to be able to really aggressively deploy that mid-band spectrum. But I would expect that to be a latter 2021, 2022 type of an event. And then I think it's a function. They're not going to build it before the demand necessarily comes. They want to make sure, the carriers want to make sure that they've got that basic level of service in place. And then when all of the demand starts to pile on, whether it's lower latency driven, whether it's speed, whatever it might be, then the carriers will come back and further invest in their networks. I mean they're pros at that. They've been doing it for decades, and we've seen kind of that movie unfold many, many times before.

And I want to get to a question with our survey and then come to you for your perspectives on it, on something that's really emerged over the last couple of months. A debate, I feel like that's really picked up. And the question is, will the locations of your tower portfolio influence the market share of site leasing activity, whether it's Colo or amendments over the next few years, given DISH, given C-band and the choices here are: yes, it will influence urban and suburban is more valuable than rural? Yes, rural actually becomes more valuable for coverage and densification? Or no, tower companies are likely to keep their average share positions for new leasing activity? And we'll have our audience weigh in on this. We'll go to this -- reveal this one next in our queue, and then we'll get your perspectives on that. But before we get there, you made an interesting comment earlier that you're targeting to get the build-to-suits to 10,000 a year and I'm curious, I think in the past, you've talked about getting double-digit returns on the international development projects. Can you still maintain those returns as you expand the funnel to process more volume whether it's over a year or doing that over multiple years?

We believe so. We've taken up our build-to-suit program. It's grown almost every year now for the last several years, and we've still had the opportunity to be able to achieve that kind of success. And so we're not building these on purely spec, we're building them under master lease agreements with existing customers. And again, this is largely outside of the United States, where there still is a significant amount of white space. And in particular on sites where there's a significantly higher level of demand on those sites than what we had seen in the United States. And so we're hopeful that we would be able -- we won't build the sites unless we're getting a very attractive rates of return. So so clearly, I'm looking to drive that kind of demand and that kind of performance with those types of return requirements. Now we're not there yet, Mike, and we don't have that engine in place that's driving up to the 10,000. But that's clearly a goal that I'm looking to achieve over the next several years.

And is that just simply symbolic that I think in the past, the bull case on international has historically been the subscriber to cell site ratio was much lower than where it would be in the U.S. and, therefore, there's this view in emerging international markets, that there just needs to be more sites deployed, period. Is that...

A lot of it is cell splitting. It's just having more locations there to be able to meet the kind of demand requirements. And then they still have a -- and by the way, in the United States, we still have white space as well. But you also then take a look at, okay, what really is that broadband connection. We have 25 down and 3 up in the United States. Well, how many people are actually getting 25 down and 3 up in the United States? I mean, I was -- even this morning, I wasn't getting 25 down and 3 up. And so then you go look at your international markets, and we talk about the unconnected, but there's a significant less-connected element. And as I said, I think that's really been exposed as part of this whole COVID pandemic. And the countries themselves, the leaders themselves in those markets realize the significance of getting that type of connectivity. It's not just e-commerce. It's e-health. I mean you look in many of the markets, we don't have hospitals like we have hospitals here in the United States. And so there's an awful lot of telehealth that's going on in the marketplace. And if you don't have a broadband connection, you're not going to be able to get that kind of a service. And so there's a real awareness, I think, globally, of this lack of infrastructure that markets have. And we even have -- and hopefully, we will have a significant infrastructural rural play here in the United States. I mean, it's already in the works. There's already funding there. And so even in the United States, as I said, I didn't have of 25, 3 this morning. There are a lot of areas in the United States that don't have that. And so there's a lot of less-connected as well as unconnected people here even in North America.

We're going to reveal the results of the survey in terms of the locations of your portfolio and see what our audience thinks about that subject. And just to read it off for those that are on audio-only. 58% believe, yes, urban and suburban towers are more valuable than the rural. No, likely to keep the same share, 37%. And yes, rural sites become more valuable, 5%. Tom, can you help expand on how the American Tower portfolio is positioned? And is there a risk that you underpenetrate the share for an opportunity like DISH where Crown is on public record of describing that they think they're going to get a disproportionate share for at least the first 15,000 sites constructed?

I mean candidly, Mike, if you take a look at the last, again, 5, 7 years, we've gained more share of the market than the other players. We've gained over -- well over 50% market share. And if you take a look at the revenue per site that's added on any given year. Again, we outperformed the other tower companies in terms of incremental revenue per site. And so it's not just a function of the sites themselves, it's the locations, it's a function of the structural capacity. It's a function of the ease of doing business, being able to get them on our sites on a timely basis. And so there are an awful lot of operational characteristics that allow us to be able to generate more share than the others. And then it is the contracts. It's the relationship that we have and the contracts and how do you drive more share to them. So I think that our objective, obviously, is to continue to generate the kinds of shares that we have. Nothing candidly, I don't see anything that should prevent us from doing that. I think the relationship that we entered in with T-Mobile, I think, is a perfect example with the long-term agreement that we have in place, the type of holistic arrangements that we have. They're going to want to look to us first. I think in a new build like the DISH has. I mean, DISH is going to have to be on -- to be able to meet kind of the underlying FCC requirements that are -- that they're obviously going to meet. We're going to continue to get a lot of share of that business, so I don't see any share dislocation regardless of the timing of when those sites may hit or don't hit. I think we're going to be getting our fair share of that activity as well. And as I said, over the last several years, we've outperformed and gained a higher level of share than anybody else.

And we'll do one last question. It's been a tradition, Tom, to ask our audience what they think organic growth for the domestic business is going to be in the coming year or this year, 2021 now. And so if you pull up that survey, the choices are, and this is before the T-Mobile merger. So let's just take that out of the picture because we don't know exactly when or how the churn comes through. But if we take that out, would organic growth be at or below 3%? 3% to 5%? 5% to 7%? 7% to 9%? Or it should be over 9% in the last choice? And I think the reference point for 2020 is the guidance at the midpoint is 4.5%, is that right, Tom?

Yes. I think that's right, Mike.

And so curious for your view. And before we get to the answer to that question, let's come back to the question of the edge. And we'll reveal those results if we can. And see what our audience thought about how you're positioned? How interesting of an opportunity this is? That should be up in just a moment.

Are you looking for the results?

Yes, it should be up in just a moment. And so we'll look at the results. And in fact, since results are in, let me just ask you just to be respectful of everyone's time, do you need to partner? Do you need -- what do you need to do to be successful with this edge opportunity? And how should investors think about the time frame of when this could become meaningful for American Tower?

Right? I think that the opportunity for us, as I was mentioning before, is one where we can really extend our platform, our core platform, our capabilities and services. And we bring to that solution today, our land, our real estate, the power that we have at the sites, the sites themselves, the on-prem capability at the sites. And we have scale to be able to provide that in a meaningful way, not just domestically, but also globally. And so when you're looking at solutions for a large enterprise account, you really do need to have kind of that global interconnection capability and it needs to be cloud-based. And so we think we provide that unique operating capability. Now we're not the only ones that are going to be able to provide that or to provide those kinds of locations. And I think edge locations are going to be thousands and thousands of edge locations at the end of the day to support an IoT environment, to support enterprise accounts, multitude of different solutions, right? But we do think that we have the opportunity to win and participate in that kind of a solution. And it's not one where I think we're going to be able to do ourselves. I think it is one that we're going to be looking to venture to have others participate in. And we have, as I mentioned, a number of relationships right now with different companies, looking at different go-to-market strategies, looking at different proof of concepts, with a number of different types of customers, whether it's hyperscale or whether it's a data center company, whether it's enterprise, whether it's an MNO, looking at how we might be able to participate in that kind of an environment. And I do think it's a very logical extension of what we do. We can provide 500 kilowatts of power at a given location. It could support 3 shelters that could be up to 30 cabinets. And so you kind of do the math in terms of how meaningful it could be. Is it 1,000 sites? Is it 2,000 sites? Is it 3,000 sites? It doesn't have to be that many sites to become meaningful in my view from a revenue perspective. Is it going to happen in 2021? No, it's not. But I think we can get some traction in 2021, such that in a 3-year period, it can start to become something that's really interesting. And as I said, I think we can do this or others can't on a global basis. And so when you start to think about the opportunity for the big hyperscalers, big data center companies, they need that kind of global reach. And we've done that. And we have that zoning and permitting and exclusive pieces of real estate already available. And given the fact that we can do it at such scale and it's one entity ourselves, that have it all, I think we can be a very interesting partner or partner to a number of different players to be able to take advantage of the opportunity. So we're really excited about it. We're being measured about it. We're being smart about it, and we're really looking at for really what -- where those sweet spots might be, looking at our portfolio of sites to really try to understand where best we fit. And what are the most attractive sites that we've got in the portfolio.

Let's see if we can pull up those answers real quick. Justin, if you can do that for us. If you can share the edge one, that would be great. And so 54%, interesting but unlikely material next 3 years. Interesting, but need to partner, 33%. And 8%, not that interesting. Or 4% exciting within the next 3 years. So just a reference point of how our audience is thinking about that topic. And so in our last few minutes, there's 2 other things, I think that would be great to discuss. Let's see the results of the organic growth question for the domestic business. And see if we can get that up quickly.

Michael, we'll have that up in just a moment.

Okay. Great. We'll go to this other question first then. So let's do India. Is India going to start to recover meaningfully in 2021? Or is this going to just take a longer period to see some better organic growth in that market?

I think if you even take a look at the third quarter, Mike, if you take a look at the top line growth, it was double digit. Unfortunately, we had churn that offset that top line growth. It brought us down to kind of breakeven in terms of net organic growth. I think the structure of the marketplace there is sound. It looks very much like the U.S. market. You got really 3 plus 1 wireless providers, and you have 3 large tower companies in the marketplace. You have a government that's very focused on digitizing, again, the entire country. And so -- and you've got a lot of new names coming into the market like Facebook and Amazon and Google. And so I think that provides an interesting backdrop and they see the same level of opportunity as we do and everything that they do is going to drive more demand on the network. And so we see a real, I think, a positive future there. We'll have guidance in 20 -- in February to be able to kind of peel that one back a little bit. But I think it's going to be some time before we get back to those growth rates candidly that we enjoyed back a few years ago. But the market itself is as exciting as we've always seen it. With 1.3 billion people and broadband penetration where it is and the lack of wireline presence, we think it provides a very meaningful market to participate in. All of our eggs are not in that basket. It's part of a diversified portfolio. But we want to be, I think, positioned there to be able to take advantage of that growth, which we think we're going to be seeing.

And for our last survey results, if we could reveal those. So 46% at 3 to 5; 46% at 5 to 7; 8% at under 3; 0, 7 to 9; and 0 over 9. So Tom, you already provided some comments on the gross activity. If you take T-Mobile consolidation churn added to the picture, are you just optimistic on what '21 can bring growth-wise over '20?

Yes. I mean, I think that, as I mentioned before, with new people coming into the marketplace, technology, I think we should see some good solid growth. We will have some churn that we talked about and we'll provide more color on that, Michael. And by the way, we've been asked a lot, and I think you even asked me, are you in a position to provide more kind of multiyear type of a guidance? And we're looking to do that. And so when we come back in February and release earnings, release the year, we'll talk about some of those growth rates on a multiyear basis to give people some color in terms of, okay, what do you see is the impact of the churn associated with Sprint and how that's impacting and what the timing may look like and those types of things. So hopefully, that will give people some more, as I said, color in terms of what it might look like. And -- but I think from a backdrop perspective over a long period of time, as we talked about before, it's -- I think it's very positive.

We talked about your business around the world. As we have our final minute, any closing comments or thoughts you would like our audience to walk away with?

No, I just hope people are as excited about what I see in the marketplace in terms of demand. We're in the middle of it. A neutral host, we've got some really interesting competitive advantages. We've got relationships with all of the major large MNOs around the world. And I think, as I said, I think we're really positioned to be able to take advantage of it.

Tom, thank you for sharing your time with us today.

Sure, Mike. It's great to see you. Look forward to seeing you face-to-face sometime soon.

Agree. Great to see you, too, and I hope we can do this with our audience too at some point in person in the not-too-distant future. Thank you, and thanks to everyone for viewing into the live stream. Thank you.