American Tower Corporation (AMT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good afternoon, and welcome back to Citi’s AppsEconomy Conference. For those of you I have not had a chance to meet in person, I'm Mike Rollins, and I cover the communication services and infrastructure stocks for Citi. I just want to mention before we get started that we do have disclosures available to the right of the video player or under the Citi Disclosures tab if you're viewing this via velocity. Also for those of you joining us today, you can place direct questions that you may have in the box on the screen that will come directly to us, and we'll try to get those integrated into the discussion today. So with all those housekeeping items on the way, I'd like to welcome back to the conference, Tom Bartlett, President and CEO of American Tower. Tom, it's great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Mike, it's great to see you as well. As we're talking before, we'd hope to do this face to face, but I'm glad we're able to get together here.

I was saying earlier, since this is the first year we're calling at the AppsEconomy Conference, maybe it's only fitting that we're hosting it over an app. But hopefully, in-person in the future.

That's true. Agreed, agreed.

So Tom, it never seems like it's a dull year for American Tower. So after what's another busy year for American Tower, maybe this is a great chance just to outline what the strategic and operating priorities are for the year to come?

So a lot of activity for a simple tower business, isn't it?

It is a lot of activity?

Yes. I know. Well, I think, Mike, when -- if you just take a step back and for us, it's all about continuing to win now and building that franchise to be able to win later. I mean that's how we've managed the business. If you think about our business over the last 10 years, we've made heavy investments in the United States, acquiring the Verizon portfolio, acquiring GTP, an independent tower company. We've made major investments in Europe, most recently acquiring the Telxius assets. And now we've also made a major investment in acquiring CoreSite, a data center operator. And so it's all about positioning ourselves to be able to win now and win later. And it's about really trying to leverage our strength within the tower business itself. We have that exclusive real estate in 25 different countries around the world. We have over 200,000 sites. We have visibility over the next few years to take that up to 300,000 sites. We have terrific customer relationships around the globe. We have long-term contracts. We have over $60 billion in contractually committed revenue. I believe we have the best people on the planet in our business. I believe we have a really strong culture. And we've got a great tower model overall, which hasn't changed. It's multiservice, multi-tenant, leveraging all of our exclusive real estate. And then on the flip side, it's about leveraging what we see going on in the market, what we see going on from a technology perspective. And we're seeing 5G clearly being built out here in the United States. I saw that Verizon had some good metrics this morning in terms of the REITs that they've already achieved. We see that movement to the edge, given what 5G, and I'm sure we'll talk about that a fair amount. We see cloud-based interconnection broad-based wireless growth, new spectrum, open networks and the overall acceleration of digital transformation. And so if you kind of look at that as a backdrop, what we are continually trying to achieve. And what our goal is, is as we've done in the past decade is to drive sustainable double-digit growth, cash flow growth and dividend growth for years to come, while also expanding our return on invested capital. And really, at the end of the day, deepening and increasing our overall market leadership. So how do we do this? There are several elements, if you will, to our plan, not just for 2022. But as you look out over really the next 2, 3 years. And the first element is scaling the core. It's continually driving more organic growth onto our sites globally. I mean that's the best way that we can drive cash flow growth. And so it's uniquely trying to find ways of being able to do that. And that goes to positioning our operations in a way such that we make it easier for our customers to do that. It may be contractually trying to drive more activity to our stats that way. But that clearly is our #1 driver in the business. It's also about building new ones. So we'll set a record for 2021 in terms of build-to-suits. I would anticipate that we'll set another record in 2022. It's our best use of capital, double-digit NOI returns. And I can't commit as much -- I would commit as much capital as I possibly can, the build-to-suits. We don't build them on spec. We build them underneath master lease agreements for our existing customers. And as I said, we've been very successful in terms of that program and going forward, I would expect the same. We'll also look to explore as part of the scale in the core M&A where it makes sense. We've been pretty aggressive over the last several years. There's a lot of activity that we see around the world. We are looking to continually really grow scale in Europe. And so that's where we're spending most of our time thinking about opportunities. But you don't know where that's going to be, candidly. I mean, it's a function of valuation and strategic fit. 2022 will also be about the further integration and leveraging our acquired assets that we picked up over the last 12 months, particularly Telxius assets that we pick up in Europe from Telefonica and clearly, CoreSite. And if you take the -- take a step back, it's also -- and this is not just in '22, but going forward, it is really trying to improve our overall global value proposition. As I said, we have visibility up into a few hundred thousand sites. There's really nobody that can compete with that kind of distribution. And so we continually are looking at ways of being able to leverage that such that we can position that uniquely and really be a truly global business as opposed to an international business. So that's all about kind of scaling the core. With that, we'll also be looking longer term at being able to improve our overall margins within the business. And as you increase tenancy at a particular site, it's a natural evolution to be able to improve our overall margins. The second element to kind of our core strategy is accelerating the growth of our platform expansion, whether it's around power or sustainability, energy, the edge, wireless connectivity, even certain international fiber opportunities, being able to offer these to existing and new customers, being able to even bundle these elements together to provide a broader value proposition is really a critical component of our growth. And so I would expect in 2022, we'll see an acceleration of that. Clearly now with having CoreSite part of the family here. That will absolutely accelerate the opportunities we believe that we're going to start to see around the edge and really developing that overall business model. But also things that we're doing around power whether it's on solar, whether it's even wind from a sustainability perspective, we're finding our customers are really getting very anxious about our ability to even take this to the next level. And so we've had great success in terms of bringing down our overall carbon footprint taking away from diesel generation, but there's still a lot more, I think, that we can do. And then the third is really developing our overall teams globally, continually building out our -- those teams and improving our overall cultural foundation within the business. I mean we're all at a baseline. We're moving to a hybrid type of environment. How do we manage our way through that. Looking at additional skills to be able to build out our platform expansion, providing connectivity in the markets that we're servicing and being a good corporate citizen in those markets is also critical. And we've talked about digital communities and some of those philanthropic types of initiatives that we have that are really driving for us to achieve our purpose in terms of connecting the unconnected, ensuring that we're an inclusive culture and we're able to take advantage of and leverage the diversity that we have within the business. And so that whole element is also a critical component, not just in '22, but really over the next several years in terms of building it out. So it's about scaling the core, it's about accelerating the growth of the platform. And it really is about further developing that healthy cultural foundation that we've got in the business. So kind of a lot for you kind of out of the gate. But we do think we have the model in place to be able to develop our '22 plan, '23, '24 plan. And as I said, it's all about building a business, a franchise that wins now and a franchise that has the ability to win all the time in the future.

Well, that gives us a lot to drill down on. Maybe the first area that's of focus is the CoreSite transaction, which you just completed over the holidays. And we'll go to our live survey question first. And for our audience listening in, this is an anonymous survey. We're not tracking your responses. You may see the survey before I even start speaking to it to share what the choices are, and vote whenever you like. And we'll get the responses in within a couple of minutes and share that. So the first one is how do you view the CoreSite acquisition in the context of American Tower pursuing the metro and mobile edge compute opportunities. And this is something, Tom, that you and the team talked about when you announced the transaction. And we're giving 3 choices: net positive by increasing the likelihood of the monetization of the edge and accelerating the timing; net neutral, that just the timing and opportunity still seems uncertain; and net negative, by increasing ownership of assets that don't provide immediate revenue synergies and may require significant development capital in the future. And so we're going to see what our respondents come back with, our audience. But while that's happening, maybe you talked about the importance of acquisitions to expand scale, expand geographies and the focus on return on capital. Can you talk about how you're approaching M&A maybe differently or similarly today versus a few years ago, with the observation being the transaction multiples of recent deals are much higher than they used to be for different assets that you're buying?

Well, our model has not changed, Mike. I mean, the way that I came into the business back in '09. The process that we created then for how we're allocating capital is exactly the same that we're utilizing today. I mean our overall capital allocation ladder, if you will, is first to our dividend and to our CapEx, then looking at M&A, inorganic growth. And to the extent that, that doesn't exist, and we're maintaining our kind of their leverage where we think it's appropriate to maintain. We'll buy back shares. And so that ladder of capital has not changed. I take that back. The only time it changed was in 2012 when we became a REIT. And that was the first time we started to pay a dividend. Prior to that, we had not. But since 2012, really for the last 10 years, it's been the same. And our approach to looking at M&A and inorganic growth has not changed. It's -- we look at things over a very long period of time, really a 10-year model. We look at the discounted cash flows on a risk-adjusted basis, whether it's the market, whether it's a particular product, whether it's a particular customer. And so there is a risk element that's added into the model to be able to look at it. And once we determine what that value is, we then look at allocating that capital versus really buying back a share of stock. And is it going to create value over time and where can we create the most net present value within the business. And so if you take a look at the assets themselves, particularly with the success of 4G and 5G, a lot more co-location going on, a lot more mean activity going on. And so I think the businesses themselves have driven more value for themselves over time. And candidly, that's why it's getting more interest from third parties, and that's why multiples have expanded. The bottom line is that ROE creating strategic deals that are going to allow us to win later. Are they accretive? Are they driving AFFO per share? And over time, are they really being able to enable our overall expansion of our return on invested capital. And I think we had a pretty good track record of what we've done over the last 10 years in terms of how we have invested capital within the business. So I think that it's fair to say the model has not changed. The way we're thinking about assets and locations of where we did has not changed. We continue to do it again on a risk-adjusted basis, and we'll continue to allocate capital that way.

And so the results are in from the survey, and we'll talk specifically about CoreSite in just a moment. So 19% said net positive, 33% net neutral and 48% viewed it as net negative. So when you -- and I know it's a new deal for our investors to process, what got American Tower excited about buying the asset as opposed to what the proxy talked about, which is the initial partnering idea?

Well, 2 things. One was that in and of itself from a stand-alone perspective, it's generating accretive cash flow to our business. And so the business in and of itself is driving the kind of performance that it can do on just on a pure stand-alone basis. So that's one element of it that I'm hopeful will give investors some comfort. But the more exciting piece of it, it increases our overall probability of success of winning at the edge. And I know that's a more challenging notion to try to understand because people are trying to understand, well, what does that mean? When will that happen? And how will that occur? And it's hard to really address that with any kind of specificity. But what we do believe is that like we've seen in the wireline world, we're going to see wireless access, wireless capability closer and closer to the customer. We've seen that in the wireline world, we believe, and I've seen this for the last 30 years that what happens in the wireline world gets followed by the wireless world very, very quickly. What's driving that kind of wireless activity is 5G. If it weren't for 5G, none of this would be interesting to us. We're a tower business. We want to take advantage of our exclusive real estate and our multiservice multi-tenant model. What I'm trying to do is drive more and more activity out to the tower site itself. And so as a result of having now this particular asset base, we've got 2 of the 3 critical elements to what we think that's going on within kind of the digital world. It brings us cloud access and it brings us interconnection. We bring distribution. We bring 220,000, growing to 300,000 sites over the next few years. They bring us to cloud on ramps, they bring us the interconnection. And we're going to see this natural migration out to the edge. I mean my goal, candidly, is to create 1,000 sites within our footprint within the United States to have a couple of megawatts of power and have a couple of hundred cabinets in each one of them. That's the goal. And to the extent that we can do something like that, there's an incredible amount of value that can be created that's going to drive a significant amount of growth for American Tower. And so coming back to your question, there are 2 pieces of it. One, on a stand-alone basis, it creates value in and of itself. And two, it increases our overall probability of success of being able to achieve that kind of vision that I have for the business over the next several years.

There's a lot that we can probably follow up on with the views that you just outlined. I want to get to some of the other topics and if we have time to come back to the edge and the cloud. But I also want to get to the core business, which is of course, the colocation business. And in the U.S., I'm curious if you could just talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the environment? And have there been any updates? I know there's this Verizon MLA that we get asked about, whether you updated that? And how you see that being important or not important or the cash organic growth in the domestic tower business over the next couple of years?

The whole notion of holistic, not holistic, that one particular element over a longer period of time, it doesn't really impact. It's -- the reason that I think those types of arrangements make sense is that we align ourselves even more strategically with our customers. And as a result, we provide even a higher level of service, a high level of execution for our particular customers. It gives us both some budget visibility if you will, in terms of the success. But over an extended period of time, Mike, the business is going to come anyway. We're going to get that colo. We're going to get that kind of amendment activity. And so with regards to Verizon, I mean, Kyle was the guy, right? And so you heard from Kyle in terms of the significance of how they're deploying and the kind of success that they have had already with 5G. I mean Verizon and AT&T, these guys are pros, right? And they know how to do this. They spend a lot of capital on acquiring spectrum. And so they're going to be very aggressive in terms of deploying it. And so we think this is we're in a good 5G cycle. We think we're still in a very early innings of that 5G cycle. But we're going to really, I think, see the benefits of that kind of deployment over the next several years. So with regards to Verizon, whether we go on a pay-as-you-go kind of a la carte or whether you're going to go on a holistic -- again, over an extended period of time. It's not going to make any difference. That's what we've noticed. That's what we've seen. We've had these kinds of arrangements in place. We have one in place with AT&T right now. And so I think the backdrop for the U.S. market is really strong. I mean we have a particular issue with regards to the Sprint T-Mobile churn that we're going to -- and we've talked about for the last 2 years now or 1.5 years, we're going to -- it's going to challenge us in 2022. But we've laid out longer-term guidance. And we would expect from '23 to '27 to get back up into that 5% to 6% kind of growth on a much larger business, which is really consistent with what we've seen back even in some of the 4G deployments. So we think the U.S. fundamentals are very strong. We think 5G is very different than 4G in terms of the opportunity, and that's largely driven not just by the speeds and the types of applications that we are all going to be able to enjoy as a result of the speed but the lower latency. And I think that the lower latency that 5G is going to be able to provide us is really the juice within the technology that's going to really, I think, change the way we think about, it was everything that we do. And by the way, we're seeing 5G deployments now in many markets around the globe. You look at Europe, which we think has a great backdrop for growth going forward. We've already started to enjoy it. Now with the presence that we see in Europe, heavily growth there as well. We expect to see continued strong growth in Africa, strong growth in Latin America. So we're really excited about the kind of the backdrop that we're starting to see over the next several years.

And so you walked into our second survey question for our audience which is how will American Tower's domestic growth over the next 7 years, which was you gave this guidance out compared to its average annual target. So it was at least, I think, 4% including merger churn, at least 5% without merger churn. So we're basically asking our audience, will you meaningfully outperform those targets of the 4% and the 5% on the 7-year average, will you be in line with that? Or will you underperform that? And so we're going to go to our audience in a moment for that. But you mentioned before about in the near term, you're talking about -- or actually, over time, you're talking about how the holistic deal, nonholistic deal doesn't really change much. American Tower does have guidance out there for 2% organic growth in '21, '22, including the merger churn, 5% without the merger churn. Does that number get affected? Or do you still feel good about the guidance that American Tower put out there, regardless of whether it's a holistic or nonholistic deal with Verizon?

No, Mike, I still very -- still feel good about the kind of the expectations that we set out there.

Okay. And then while we're waiting on the survey results, one other question, going back to the CoreSite acquisition, have you funded the equity portion of the deal that you previously highlighted that there might need to be some equity to fund part of CoreSite? And if not, what are your thoughts on funding that transaction to get the balance sheet where you want it to be?

Yes. I mean we've closed the transaction last week. As you know, we went through a tendering process, and so we closed it. And we closed it largely with bank debt, kind of short-term debt facilities that we had put in place. And now the teams are actively working in terms of, okay, what does that ultimate mix look like from a debt and an equity or equity-like product look like? I mean we've spoken with the agencies and the like in the Telxius transaction as well as even the Verizon transaction, if you go back a number of years ago, we'll take our leverage up into the kind of the higher 5 range and then plan on delevering that back down into that 5x range over time. And so the teams are actively working in terms of what the right mix is, what the tenders are, what the equity component would be like, whether equity-like products might be a piece of that overall puzzle. And I would expect that all to come together some time in the first quarter.

Is partnering still an option the way you did Telexius (sic) [ Telxius ] or Telxius, excuse me, where...

It very well may be. We've looked at alternative capital sources. And they've been very effective. It's been a terrific approach for us in Europe. That's always part of the mix. I'm not sure whether that would happen out of the gate or might be something longer term. But yes, there's a lot of interest in this particular -- I mean I really think of CoreSite as a currency. And as I said, it's an asset that really does, I think significantly increase our overall probability of success at winning at the edge.

Well, if we go to our survey results back to that, so only 2 results came back, 84% of our audience thought you'd be in line with your 7-year goals and 16% thought you could outperform those goals that you set for yourself. So I'm curious now that you have, I think, almost a year since you put out these goals, what's your current visibility. And what could be the drivers that could lead to upside or downside to those targets?

Over that longer period of -- Mike, I think hopefully you can still hear me here. Yes. I think in terms of the next couple of years, if you will, I mean, the big impact on our overall organic growth is clearly going to be the visibility and the expectation for the Sprint churn. And so we obviously know exactly what that is. We believe that we have good visibility into at least probably 2/3 of our revenue growth given the commitments that we've made with the likes of T-Mobile and DISH and even the holistic that's in place with AT&T. So I think that particularly within the United States over the next couple of years, we have a high level of visibility. Now what could start to outperform that, not just over the next 2 years, but over the next 5 years, really out to 2027, is incremental activity that is occurring at the edge. So is the kind of significant success, if you will, of driving more co-location of activity, more cabinets, more servers out at the edge. We could be underestimating what that impact could be. It clearly could be the even the significance of 5G and what that means to the overall environment. 5G is very different than 4G, which is very different than 3G. And so the types of applications and the types of use cases for 5G is we see our customers developing the market, getting more presence in the market, how their end users, consumers and enterprises alike are leveraging that particular technology could require some significant incremental capital that our customers are going to have to spend to meet the needs of their customers. So there could be a lot more capacity that's going to be required with 5G over the next several years, which could be a really -- which could drive outperformance of that overall growth rate.

Great. So we've got some questions coming in from our audience, and they're steering us to the international markets, which we'll get to in just a moment. First, I'll introduce our last survey question and then we'll talk about international and then come back to the survey, which is what's the business risk to future consensus AFFO per share growth for American Tower? And choices are: not concerned, customer consolidation or rationalization, rising rates, currency, slower domestic growth or slower international growth, and those are organic numbers. And so we'll see what our survey comes back with on that. But let's move to international for a few minutes while we collect those results. So what are you seeing on the international leasing environment? What's going well? What could be better? And I know in the past, I think there's been some flagging of different countries and regions are experiencing the pandemic differently. So maybe just a broad update of what you're seeing in your international markets.

Sure. I mean I guess I'll start with kind of our newest region, if you will, which is Europe. And we're seeing 5G spectrum being deployed, our customers being quite aggressive in terms of the deployment. We're seeing new market entrants, particularly in Germany. And so we're seeing what we expected, but some very nice growth in the marketplace. We're seeing good build, new build-to-suit opportunities in the market as well. And I would expect that to continue going forward. We have a strong urban presence in the markets like Germany, in markets like Spain. And that becomes particularly important when we're starting to look at 5G deployments and new market entrants in terms of coming up with national presence. So I think a really solid presence. And that's what's looking -- driving us to continually looking at more scale even in Europe. We really have a solid presence in Germany and in Spain, less of a presence in markets like France, a little bit of presence in Poland. But I think there's more opportunities to the extent that the opportunities prevail and they prove themselves, there could be opportunities for further expansion in that particular region. Moving over to Africa. We had strong growth in '21. And what we really expected, Nigeria was very strong. I would expect to have a solid particular region and good growth. We're doing a lot of interesting things on power and sustainability as well as digital communities. So I think we're making an impact in the markets that we're serving, but we would expect to see strong growth in that area. Similarly, in Latin America, we have grown kind of in that 7% to 8% range. We do have some churn occurring within a couple of different countries in the marketplace. So our growth might be down a little bit from where we've seen it in the past. But we've been there for 20 years. We have great relationships with our customers, generating solid AFFO per share growth and ROI. And so I continually looking at that kind of being a steady eddy, if you will, of growth. Not sure there's a significant amount of M&A opportunity in that particular market given how it's developed, but really a strong growth provider for us, and we would expect that environment to continue over the next few years and in '22. In India, we've seen some good things that have happened in the marketplace from -- really from a regulatory perspective, will generate positive organic growth at the end of 2021. I would expect that in 2022. We'll roll out guidance in February, Mike. But I think we're seeing some good signs of growth in the marketplace. So we're very cautiously optimistic on the market that maybe we've hit the bottom there and now we're going to start to see and enjoy some of that growth that we saw back a few years ago. But the government is very supportive there. We've seen price hikes in the marketplace. Again, we're seeing 5G, 4G, but we're also seeing shoots for 5G. We're seeing more spectrum being deployed in 2022. And business is starting to get recapitalized. And so we're excited about what the opportunity could be in India going forward. We think '22 should be a strong year for us there as well. So I think it's a good backdrop. We've always thought that our year-end is the reason that we're there, and particularly in those developing markets that we would expect growth to be at least a couple of hundred basis points faster than they are in the United States. And so we've always talked about our business in the form of flywheels, the U.S. being the big flywheel. And all of the markets outside of particularly developing world, being smaller flywheels that are extending the overall growth curve and are increasing the area of growth under the curve and really driving the slope of the curve further positive. So we'll continue to invest. As I mentioned before, our build-to-suit program remains really strong, and we would expect that to be strong over the next several years.

We're getting a few additional questions specifically on Europe. And over the last 30 minutes or so, you've mentioned consolidation opportunities or M&A a couple of times in regards to Europe. And the questions that we're getting are revolving around this idea that there could be mega deals coming for towers in the landscape over the next year or so. And so is there an advantage that the incumbents have over there, the tower incumbents? And how is American Tower positioned or thinking about trying to participate in some of these larger deals that could become available?

Well, having the presence and the scale that we have does give us a seat at the table of talking with some of the large telcos that are there, that are looking to further monetize their assets. I mean Vodafone has been quite public. DT has been quite public. Orange has been quite public in terms of looking at opportunities that they may be pursuing with their particular sites? Who knows how that whole system will get developed. But clearly, having a presence there and having Vodafone as a customer, having DT as a customer, having Orange as a customer. Clearly -- having Telefonica as a customer, puts us in the conversation. And we are and I am able to have the dialogues with the leaders within those businesses to talk about how that model and how those models might unfold. And so again, there's nothing that we can predict with regards to what ultimately might happen in that particular region. But I'm hopeful that if the math works that we can be participating in that in some way.

Great. Let's go to the results of our third survey question, which was the risk to future AFFO consensus and 16% said not concerned. 5% was consolidation or rationalization was the concern, 0 for rising rates, 32% for currency and then 16% for slower domestic organic growth and 32% for slower international organic growth. So currency and slower international growth were 32% each or almost 64% between the 2 of them. Tom, what is American Tower doing in terms of trying to manage currency in the international markets? And what's your visibility? I think previously, you talked about the opportunity for international markets to, on average, do 200 basis points better than domestic? Where are you with that visibility?

Well, we've historically, we've seen that, Mike, right? And we've seen that in the past year. And given the demand and the diversity that we have across that portfolio, we do have good visibility in terms of what we would expect to enjoy. Our international markets are generally a technology behind us in the United States of our customers' capital spend because there is very little being invested, particularly in the developing markets, almost 0 being invested in their core wireline markets. And so that's always given us comfort and that's what we've experienced in terms of that growth. From an FX perspective, as you well know, Mike, and just on every one of our international markets. We tie our escalators to inflation. And so to the extent that there is a good correlation with currencies as well as with inflation as well as with kind of FX movements, we are trying to underwrite that risk in a significant way. And over a long period of time, it has actually worked quite well over the last few years, there's been a disconnect between what we've seen on FX and an inflationary basis. But we would expect that over time that there will be a high correlation. We are doing more borrowing in some of the international markets, particularly in Europe, we've been very aggressive in terms of euro borrowings. And so that's also another way of being able to shield some of that exposure. But we really -- it's -- fundamentally, we look at again, our model being the same model that we're deploying in 25 different markets, including the United States. We're a big believer in broadband wireless growth. Over the last couple of years, and I would expect this going forward, our customers in our existing markets are spending over $50 billion of capital. We have $60 billion of contractually committed revenue, it's on the books right now. And so if you're a believer in not just 4G, but now 5G technology in terms of how that's going to drive demand, people, I think, should be more comfortable about our kind of overall growth rates that we would expect within the business over the next several years. And that, again, is our overarching goal is to drive that double-digit AFFO per share and dividend growth. 2022 could be a challenge, just given the amount of the Sprint churn. But over time, as we've demonstrated over the last decade, that's what our mantra is. And so that's what our goal and all of our objectives tied to driving that kind of growth.

I think this takes us to our rapid fire. Tom, are you ready for our 3 questions inside of 3 minutes.

All right. Go ahead, Mike. Let me have them. I know you do this every year, we'll see how I do.

All right. So the first question, we changed them up for this conference. Why should investors buy your equity?

It's our cash flow and dividend growth. We're a growth stock. We are a simple business. We're a tower model. And I believe we have market leadership, and we're only going to further develop the market leadership within our markets. And as I said, our investment strategy is to win now and win later. So this is definitely, I think, a long-term investment that people should consider.

Second question, is inflation a net opportunity, net neutral or net risk for your business model and financial performance?

It's a net neutral, Mike. I mean, our -- again, we have escalators built into our contracts internationally. They're largely driven tying to inflation. Our land, which is our biggest cost, has fixed escalators largely in the United States and again, kind of the same basis internationally. And our payer role is the next largest expense, which is somewhat controllable as well. So I don't really look at the inflation as being -- having a significant impact on our business.

Last question since this is the AppsEconomy conference now, what application can fundamentally change demand for connectivity or data consumption over the next 1 to 3 years?

Well, I'd say early on, it has to be gaming, even watching some of the commercials over the -- and looking at what Microsoft is just doing with Coke, I think it has to be gaming. I think longer term, probably in that cycle, it would be AR/VR. You take a look at the opportunities for virtual reality, with training and education and collaboration. I think we'll start to see a lot more glasses going forward being used. But it would be gaming, AR/VR, but everything being driven by 5G.

Well, Tom, it's great to see you. Thank you for joining us today.

You bet, Mike. It's great being here. Be safe. Be well. We'll talk soon.

Thank you. Be well.

Take care.