AT&T Inc. (T) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to day 2 of the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing John Stankey, who is the Chairman and CEO of AT&T. My name is Mike Ng, and I cover U.S. telecom media and cable here at Goldman. And we have about 35 minutes for today's presentation. First, I wanted to thank you for being here this morning, John.

Thanks, Mike. It's good to be with all of you, and I'll get the housekeeping out of the way, if you don't mind, I'd like to point you to our safe harbor statement, which tells you that we're going to be talking about some things in the future that are uncertain and have things that can't necessarily be planned. And occasionally, sometimes results differ materially from what we discuss. And if you'd like some more information, you can go to our Investor Relations website and see all kinds of fun disclosures to read. So...

Great. Well, to kick things off, I was hoping to talk a little bit about a big picture strategic question. Over the last several years, AT&T has obviously done a very good job of streamlining the business and refocusing priorities around 5G and fiber. The company has also been front-footed when it comes to the convergence strategy -- could you take a few minutes and perhaps walk through your latest spectrum investment announcement and talk about how that aligns to the broader AT&T long-term strategy? And what gives you confidence that you're investing in the right aspects of your business?

Well, effectively, the way I think about this decade of reordering that's going on in U.S. telecommunications is I do believe that there is going to be a decided move to converged solutions and that customers want fundamental simplicity, which is they wake up in the morning, whether you're a business or a consumer, and you say, I want to get on the Internet. I want to be connected. I've got to be able to do what I got to do to run my life or run my business and I really don't want a lot of friction or noise in that process. And I think fundamentally, where technology and capabilities are going that there's no reason that can't be delivered as a possibility to a customer. And whoever does that more effectively for more customers over time in this reordering of assets that are going on, will ultimately be the leader in the industry. So I think the trajectory we put on AT&T on is to, one, operationally be capable of doing that, and that includes doing things like improving our back of house and our agility and how we operate and run the business. But it also is centered around ensuring that we have the right assets to be able to assemble the kind of networks and connectivity, either owned and operated or partnered with to be able to provide that simple solution to customers. And we have been systemically investing to ensure that we could do that. And I feel real good about the progress we've made over 5 years in improving the operations. We've obviously, as you all know in this room, been investing at a very high clip to build the kind of infrastructure to do that, most notably, incrementally in fiber, but also reinvesting in other core parts of our business. And it was my point of view that kind of one of the missing pieces that we needed to address was to ensure that our wireless network could hang with anybody else's at best-in-class levels. And there was a mid-band spectrum opportunity for us to dramatically improve our circumstances and our position. And do it in a way that was accretive in terms of driving revenues into the business in addition to doing what it typically does, which is managing our infrastructure on a more capital-efficient fashion avoiding cell splits, running the network more effectively dealing with capacity over time. And importantly, in my view, when we look at the spectrum portfolio that we picked up, in particular, the mid-band, I had to be cognizant of where that spectrum was going to go over time. My calculus or my point of view, and I think what the management team felt was, it was pretty clear that as a going concern, DISH had its questions. EchoStar had its questions. In fact, in their own disclosures, they were offering that perspective. And so having been around a little while, I know what happens when these moments occur. We know what happens when owners of spectrum go into bankruptcy. And what that means is that spectrum generally doesn't show up in the market for many, many, many years. And it becomes a really significant regulatory fight and legal fight. And my point of view is sitting on the outside is we could either watch that happen. And more than likely, the outcome would not only be extended and take forever to work its way out. And it more than likely would have resulted in probably everybody in the industry feeding on something or we could be preemptive. We could be -- take the initiative to figure out how to solve this without that kind of a cleansing process that took years and get the assets that we thought were going to be best for our business. And in doing that, by what I feel like is a lot of certainty for our business as we think about completing this decade. And I don't sit around here today in my chair after having made this move and saying, I'm wondering when the next spectrum auction is going to be or what the rules are going to be or what bands are being brought in or am I going to have the capacity to deal with what I need? I now have a lot of knowns in my business. I know where I'm going to build 60-plus million homes of fiber. And I know where those neighborhoods are and I know where I need to go and get that down and we have the ordering and the priority, and we know how to get that done. I now know where I'm going to get all the capacity I need to run my business. And if the strategy is ultimately to get the greatest share of service revenues of the pool of how customers spend on telecommunications in the U.S., which is our goal to be the share leader in revenues for all spend in the United States. Those assets now line me up to be able to achieve that goal. I know what I can do in fiber first footprints where I can sell converged fiber and wireless to those customers. I know what percentage of the population I'll have that opportunity to do that. I know the locations where that's going to occur, and I can market accordingly. I can do things like pre-see market even before fiber gets in place to use wireless to begin penetrating and positioning the brand. But I also know in the markets where I'm not necessarily going to have the fiber footprint I might want at least long-term. And I've got to play as a wireless-only provider. I now have the options to address the right segments where combined wireless broadband solution and wireless mobile is sustainable if you hit the right customer base and the right opportunities. And I can get the management team focused on doing that. And the sum total of that set of mechanics gets us in a position where we believe we could come out as the leader in service revenues in the United States as we exit this decade as the best telecommunications provider.

It's a great way to open the conversation and there's a lot there that I'd love to dig into. But you mentioned 2 things that I think point to fixed wireless access as core part of the AT&T portfolio, the preceding the markets in places where you know you're going to expand into with fiber and then the wireless broadband plus mobile wireless product for markets where you're not. Could you maybe just expand a little bit on fixed wireless access, whether the spectrum investments enables you to accelerate your you go-to-market on that side and how you think about returns and that type of product?

Yes. I don't think my point of view on this has changed much, and I've said it multiple times. One aspect I've always shared is I actually think the technology is a great technology for a segment of the business market. There are many businesses, especially in the small and medium segment that their usage characteristics at a location as they required some kind of reliable scaled broadband, but they don't necessarily require the kind of capabilities that might be delivered over a symmetrical fiber solution. And in fact, some of these businesses are very mobile businesses that have relatively small, let's call them, home office kind of constructs. You go into a -- think about all the service companies that have vans and trucks and contractors and they generally have some kind of a main office where dispatching and those kinds of things occur or maybe inventory is tracked or kept. Their workforce is out and about. And we have great wireless relationships with those kind of companies. And sometimes, we have fiber in a location where a construction yard might be, but sometimes we don't. But they don't necessarily need fiber to run a construction operation. And fixed wireless allows you to do things in certain segments. You go to a storefront and a strip mall. There's a lot of proprietors in the strip mall. If you're running a nail salon, you're not necessarily -- you need broadband, but you don't necessarily need to have the most scaled broadband around. So there's huge opportunity in business, and I've always been a big believer that having a nationwide footprint of being able to offer Internet, as I described earlier, to businesses wherever they are is really, really important and something I'd be willing to invest in because, obviously, those customers come with a portfolio of services where oftentimes, it's maybe a fixed broadband connection and dozens of mobile devices that have to support that particular company or IoT connections into the vehicles. And we want to make sure we can do a full solution for those customers no matter where they are. And if you've already seen some of our messaging right now that's showing up in the various places where we promote our products and services, you'll notice we're talking about AT&T Internet as we message that. We don't talk about fiber. We don't talk about fixed wireless. We just talk about Internet. We want the customer to understand we can solve an Internet problem for them, and then we'll decide what the best technology is to bring to them depending on what their particular needs are. And that's, I think, a really important place to be, and I feel good about our network now that is 300,000 square miles larger than some of my competitors that I can do that broadly and have a really compelling dynamic around that. In the consumer space, as I said earlier, the reality is while we've done a fantastic job leading in fiber. And at 60 million homes plus we will be 1 of the most significant scaled provider certainly with the best technology in the United States with that footprint. There's still, call it, 130 million homes in the United States and the reordering of assets will take a little bit more time. Would I love at some point in time, to have a more consolidated footprint that goes beyond 60 million, if that opportunity presented itself? Sure, I would. Whether or not that happens, don't know at this point, don't know how it might happen. But what I do know is places where I don't have it. I need to make sure that I can be really, really effective for the segment of the market that can be served by nonfiber solutions. That isn't a huge segment of the market, but there is a defined segment of customers that find that to be an acceptable solution that works for the household size that works for their living arrangement, we need to be really good with that and bundling and converging those households if we're going to be the revenue leader. This opens up that opportunity for me to do that. And frankly, if I'm really good at doing that, if I get really good at doing it in concentrated locations, MDUs, maybe certain developments, that also becomes an opportunity for me to think about how I then justify that investment of extending a fixed network to pick up that traffic after I've seeded the market. And the plus is I've got revenue-ready kind of customers coming in. I'm not building taking 18 months, a large amount of capital investment and then waiting for revenues to come in. And I think if we get good at that muscle, that will be really good over the long haul for the business and how it operates.

Great. Extending the conversation around spectrum. I was wondering if you could respond to some of the news earlier in the week with Starlink acquiring the S-band spectrum from EchoStar. I think at first blush, it appears very complementary to mobile wireless service with D2D. I think there's a concern in the market that, that can foreshadow some sort of satellite first mobile wireless service. I was just wondering if you could give your thoughts on that, talk about some of the challenges that would exist in using satellite to power a mobile wireless network and your views on the implications of that deal for the industry.

So not a surprise that it happened. I think those of us who watch the industry closely, it's -- first of all, it wasn't a surprise that those that are in the LEO business. We're looking for spectrum to extend their offerings. We're in partnership. One of our partnerships is with AST SpaceMobile. And as you know, they are an example of a company that went and acquired some spectrum recently to ultimately bolster their product offerings and sets. And there are others in the industry who have been looking around for options and solutions. And I will tell you, candidly, as we got into the discussions on the EchoStar construct and looked at the various permutations and worked with the counterparty some things become clear in that process of what ultimately may or may not happen. And it wasn't a surprise to me that, that particular portfolio spectrum went to SpaceX in the end. And is going to be used for direct-to-device. And I'd probably argue that, that may be the highest and best use of that spectrum for a variety of reasons because it does harmonize very well globally. And ultimately, if you're running a satellite business, especially a LEO business, having the global dynamics and economics for and are really important to that. That's kind of what makes that approach to things unique. Now does 40 megahertz of spectrum allow for a robust terrestrial replacement. As we sit here today, the answer to that is no. Over time, could that happen? Could somebody make a commitment to do something maybe different. Sure, it could happen. We just had a fourth wireless player. There's more than 4 players today when you think about how MVNO structures are set up. But we had a fourth wireless infrastructure player fail after many years of trying to figure out how to build that scaled infrastructure because I think one of the things that you would hear is the learning and takeaway is there's a lot more to build in the wireless network than putting up 50,000 cell sites. That you don't just put a bunch of sticks up and cover stadiums and cover 50 floors of a skyscraper and cover hotels and cover hospitals and cover -- those are done in a very different way, and they require substantial amounts of infrastructure and investment to get that done. They require complicated arrangements with right of access and there's norms about how those things occur. And so could you have an outdoor-based service that offered some fundamental basic connectivity? Sure, you could do that. And could that present opportunities to a business like ours to alter our cost structure in more rural areas where we have sites that we put up that we refer to as poverty sites that are just picking up traffic is on the law on the interstate as people pass through quickly. And possibly rationalize the network and make it more effective and efficient through wholesale relationships. Yes, it could possibly do those kinds of things. But do I think that when you start looking at terrestrial networks, that are sitting on over 300 megahertz of spectrum that are being engineered to deal with workloads that require low latency, especially as the dawn of AI occurs. And those cores, what you put in 5G stand-alone cores and how you build that backbone, are literally engineered to the round trip latency that's required to get into cloud infrastructure that's going to become more and more important over time as large language models and other things require centralized processing to move through things. I do believe there's a basis for having a scaled network that gets a bit off of the air and into fiber very, very quickly and that those are highly geographically engineered to do that effectively. That's a longer pot. That's something that's going to take some time to get done. And I think in some cases, there is speculation as to whether or not the technology can move fast enough and long enough to keep pace with what will occur on the terrestrial networks over time as evolution continues to occur on 3GPP standards and other things. So I think the important thing is, and what I would tell the management team and what I do tell the management team as we take nothing for granted. We don't walk in comfortable and complacent any morning. We should walk in paranoid. We should walk in understanding that there's a lot of creative people out there using technology in different ways, and we should understand what those things are. But we should also understand what our strengths are. And what our abilities are. And our strengths and our abilities are that we're going to have the fastest, most robust set of fiber infrastructure in the United States. We are doing the right things to modernize our network and the ability to do that allows us to see bits across any network origination point, whether it comes from a device, a handset, whether it comes from a fixed mobile connection, whether it comes from a fiber connection we can see that traffic and manage it on a uniform basis, and we can manage it effectively with security and performance. And if you do that, that's going to be a hard combination over time to be if you're a high-performance networking company, and I think networks are going to be -- have to be high performance to win over time given the way the economy and technology is going.

Yes. That's great. maybe bringing it into some of the more immediate competition. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the competitive activity in wireless and broadband today. Is this in part driving the pivot to the fixed wireless and convergence strategy? And maybe you can expand a little bit more. I know you touched on this on how AT&T is differentiating itself relative to its peers and how that translates into long-term revenue and EBITDA growth.

So I mentioned it earlier. It's a very competitive marketplace. It has been and it will continue to be. I always chuckle a little bit. As I read notes and I see things, and there's always this commentary of well, things seem to be less competitive right now or things are intensely more competitive. My days don't feel a lot different from week to week for some reason, but...

I'm glad we could be a source of...

It always seems to be pretty intense. And I think it's pretty intense now as it has been. Now the good news is, I think what I would say is there's a lot of investment going on in our industry, and that's good. And I think it's good for those who set up policy that have driven some of that. And frankly, some moves that have happened recently with the current administration are probably going to sustain that. Clearly, I've made decisions from my company that are taking some of the benefits of tax reform and what's gone on there and reinvesting them back in the business. I expect others in the industry may do similar things. And what I think is good is that rationally as people are making those investments are being mindful of getting returns on those investments. And they're taking actions that are appropriate for that to happen. I do see a degree of consistency around that. I don't see people just pouring money down a rat hole for the sake of pouring money down a rat hole. There does seem to be action on the part of everybody to do the right things of invest, build better services, build better capability, but at the same time, extract value from doing that. And I feel really good about that. And I actually think the policies that are in place from a regulatory perspective enable that to happen even more. I mean it's a really good thing from my point of view where if I can invest heavily and put newer technologies out. And at the same time, a regulator allows me to get cost out of the business on stuff that's been around for 40, 50, 60 years and pull that out, that's a good equation. And that's the right thing for consumers. It's the right thing for U.S. infrastructure, and it's really good for AT&T investors if that kind of a combination is out there. And I see that. And so I believe that's what's happening in the industry. Now my strategy, what AT&T needs to do, I just characterize what I think winning is by the time we exit this decade, which is to be leading in our share of revenues available associated with this industry in the United States, and that's my goal that on a consolidated basis of how customers buy telecommunication services in the U.S. that we will lead in that position. And I'm less concerned around how much of it comes from a mobile device versus a broadband connection. I want the aggregate winning portfolio on that. And that means that we should pick our customers very carefully. Because we should pick our customers that line up to the infrastructure we have to ensure that we get preferred share in places where our infrastructure is great and lines up well. And in those places where we've got to be wireless only, that we attack the right segments and we think about customer acquisition, the way that we can justify the SAC associated with it because we know the services that we're going to offer have sustainability that we're going to keep the customer for that period of time. And when you're in that situation, it's not every customer and a geography that matches that profile. And so you have to be very, very specific around how you do that and your offers and how you build your marketing strategies around it. And I think that's the next 5 years for us. And I want to be differentiated and being really good at lining up my asset base to the customers that are sustainable and build the confidence of those customers with how we position the brand with the AT&T guarantee and what we're willing to do to remove friction from their life, give them confidence that the provider that they choose to get on the Internet with will stand behind the product and service in a very straightforward and transparent way and establish our company as that distinguishing ability moving forward. And I believe we've taken some really good first steps in that regard. We have more to do to get the brand in the right place to make that happen. But I think it's a winning combination that we're seeing come back in the data as we talk to consumers. As we start to execute on these things that if we do this right, we'll be in a good place.

Yes. As you mentioned, one of the results of the corporate tax reform is that AT&T has been able to accelerate their infrastructure investments in the United States, including the doubling of fiber passings through the end of the decade. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about your confidence operationally that you can accelerate at this pace at the right cost profile? Is it going to become more expensive as you enter into less densified areas? And what are some of the things that give you scale and visibility into the returns on those investments?

Yes. My confidence is high, partly because we do this. We are the largest builder of fiber at scale in the United States today. That's not something we have to earn. We do it every day, and we've been doing it for several years, and you've all seen the data points on that. We shared last December, what our cost profile has been on that building. And yes, there are increases to cost on a year-over-year basis that are driven by things like inflation and densification, and we shared with you that -- what we've seen in aggregate is about a 2% increase in our build costs on a year-over-year basis at a time when, as many of you know, inflation was certainly running much higher than that in places. And we also explained to you the build costs are not the only thing that factor into a business model of running fiber infrastructure. There's certainly the cost to build. There's also the cost to acquire a customer connect them, and then there's the cost to maintain the network over time. And as we shared with you in that session, our cost of maintenance are dramatically improved as we put this infrastructure out, and we believe they're superior to other technologies that are in the market that competitors use. And so if you get a run rate over the 30, 40 years of that asset is in place and is there and you can operate it more effectively, that's great. We have seen in places where we've been present with fiber longer or cost to connect, and that dynamic starts to change pretty dramatically. I think some folks keep looking at the improvements in our margin structure in that business. So where is that coming from? Well, part of it is coming from the fact that when you ultimately build a base of customers and you have those homes connected, you don't have to reconnect the homes. And in many instances, when customers come into those homes that have already been connected and the new tenant moves in, we're not even sending anybody out to connect that customer. They're just plugging in and going. And so there's a lot of goodness that comes from operating a scaled network like this that is dedicated in nature where it doesn't require a lot of manipulation in the network facilities to deal with managing capacity and fiber allows you to do that. It allows you to over-provision to every household that's out there, and it gives you a lot of operating flexibility moving forward. In addition, look, we said we'd be at about 4 million homes -- 4 million billed home rate at the end of 2026. We've been close to that level before at a period of time in operating our business. We were the high 3s. We ratcheted down a bit from the high 3s as we were kind of moving through our last build cycle. So getting to 4 is like not a stretch from what you've seen us do in the past and what the engine is capable to go and do over an 18-month period of time as we scale that up, we'll move a little bit past that over time. But what we do know is when you're the largest scaled provider of doing something, people pay attention to you, people who sell fiber care about what you're doing in your business and they want a stake in your success. People who contract and do services want to work with the largest player in the market because it gives them continuity. And if we can use our portfolio of professional services that we need across our entire business, including what we do in wireless, along with fixed there's a lot of stability that you bring into your third parties that you work with. And so when we're going to go out and say we're going to build another 1 million or 1.5 million in a given year, we're smart enough business people that we don't go out and say, here we're going to do another 1 million or 1.5 million, and we're just going to keep paying you what we're paying you today. We usually go in and say, what are you going to do for the privilege of working with us a little bit more. And there's -- those things that occur -- there's changes in technology and design that make you more efficient that you factor in. And so when inflation is occurring and costs are going up and density is changing. At the same time, we're getting better. We're getting into other parts of the learning curve. And we don't always offset 100% of those costs of density, but we do offset some of them. And so they're not nearly as dramatic as some might lead you to believe that it might be as you start to move into less dense areas. And frankly, we're operating better. We're penetrating faster. We're keeping customers longer. There's this big debate around what terminal penetration will be. We've been relatively conservative about that as we've talked about in our business case modeling, we assume a 50% terminal penetration rate over the long haul. As we've talked about, I know at different times, if you have the best product in the market, is that adequate? Maybe it should be north of 50%. And if it is, then that will certainly be additional gravy. But the point is we're not stretching the economics to go out and build some of these areas. We're only building where there's return. And will the return in the last 2 million be marginally lower than what it was in the first 2 million? Yes, it will. They're not quite as profitable in your less dense areas. But that's been the nature of running networks from day 1. It doesn't mean they're not profitable. It doesn't mean they're not returning. They're just not quite returning as much. But it's one hell of a portfolio when you put 60 million homes together in terms of the franchise. And the customer base, it demonstrates and the brand lift that it gives and the ability to sell wireless on top of those things, it's one hell of a portfolio. And when you stop building and you have that portfolio, and the bills are still going out every month and customers are paying you. It generates a lot of cash.

Maybe you can touch briefly also on the wireless infrastructure side of things, open architecture O-RAN. It seems like declining CapEx investments in wireless are going to be used partly to fund the acceleration in fiber?

Yes. Look, we're doing -- that's part of why our footprint is getting bigger. It allows us to sell more services in other places where we're doing that modernization. The network is performing dramatically better, which is raising service levels and customers are noticing that in markets where we maybe had infrastructure that wasn't performing as well as it should. In some cases, that's great. The other exciting part about it is we're making good progress on busting those interfaces open and building an open network. And when you're sitting here looking at an opportunity to build a new air interface at a spectrum band that maybe you didn't have in your network before, and you're going to go out and change a bunch of radios out. There's -- we have 700-megahertz spectrum out there. We're maybe building 600 megahertz spectrum now. You can build consolidated radios. You have end of service life on a lot of the 700 megahertz radios coming up anyway because they've been hanging for a long period of time. And the fact that we're building open interconnection at that point of the network means that we can have a competitive process of how those radios get built and how we think about them. And that probably allows us to build it less expensively than we might have 5 years ago. So those are the kind of flexible things that are going on, married with what we're doing to modernize the core of the network to collapse all of our routing infrastructure on a common architecture. So whether it's a mobile core or it's a business core or whatever it might be, that that's all on a homogeneous consistent routing infrastructure on general purpose compute that dramatically lowers costs associated with that. That's a big dam deal because it allows us to treat products differently associated with that. And when you start to open up those interfaces and capabilities, you have the ability to build APIs into your network that allow for your customers to use it more effectively and have the flexibility to go and all that work is underway right now and feel really good about where it's taking us.

In the last couple of minutes here, I was just hoping you could tie it all together for us. You have these goals through the end of the decade. What does AT&T look like exiting 2030? Do we see all this cash flow start spinning off from these investments that you've made right now? And the long-term investments that you've made in the company?

Yes. I would say the same thing I'd say to the employees right now yesterday when I was down in Los Angeles, I had this conversation with the group. And we are now -- after we have made the moves that we've made after we made this most recent announcement on spectrum, we have all the components and the piece parts we need to achieve that objective I talked about earlier, which is being the leader in service revenues in our industry as we get out of this decade. I don't worry about the asset base, and I'm not out there thinking I need something else to be successful. And if you ask me today, if I had a choice, if somebody wave the magic wand and said, you could lead this company, AT&T or you could pick any other one in the industry to work the next 5 years to ultimately drive value and be successful. Would you pick another company? And the answer is absolutely not. I would not pick another company. I love the asset base that we have right now. And what we are effectively at this juncture is an execution question. In an execution story, and you're right to ask the questions you asked earlier, can we execute on that asset base that's in front of us because it's entirely in front of us. We have everything we need. We just need to go run the place. We need to build the 60 million fiber homes. We need to finish the modernization of our wireless network. We need to do what we need to do in the core to get the flexibility of delivering the right product sets moving forward. We need to retool our distribution in the business market segment to make sure we can hit the small and medium segment the way we are -- those are all things that are entirely in our control. We don't have regulatory impediments going after these things right now. We've managed to get ourselves in a position where the regulator is supporting all the transition that's necessary in this business, including what we need to do to take out $6 billion a year of costs associated with legacy infrastructure. It's open field running around those things relative to exogenous external dynamics. It is now on the management team inside AT&T to make the magic happen. But I love the fact that it's about everything that's in our control that we know how to do, that's kind of right down the power alley of the things we've done for years that I think we can scale ourselves on and do effectively. And when you end 2030 and you're in that position where investment levels are subsiding because that asset base is where it needs to be, and you're generating the kind of growth on new customers that I described earlier, that's a really magic equation right now of how this business generates cash.

John, it's been a privilege to have you on stage and thank you so much for coming to our conference and speaking with us. This is great.

Mike, thanks for having me, and I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you, sir.