Charter Communications, Inc. (CHTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Ben Swinburne, Morgan Stanley's media analyst. Quick disclosure statement. Please note that important disclosures, including my personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, all appear as a handout available in the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. I am excited to welcome as our keynote lunch speaker, Tom Rutledge, Chairman and CEO of Charter Communications. I think you all are aware, but just in case, Charter is a leading broadband communications company and the second largest cable operator in the United States, servicing over 30 million residential and commercial customers. Tom, it's great to see you, and thank you for being here.

Good to be here alive and live.

Exactly. We made it.

Why don't we start sort of high level and try to touch on some of the big investor debates around Charter in the outlook? You guys have had a pretty consistent operating strategy for a number of years, really centered on the consumer. I wonder if you could just spend a minute talking about that operating model, why it's working, and also how it may be evolving now that we're hopefully coming out of the pandemic.

Sure. 5 years ago, and a little over 5 years ago, I guess it's almost 6 years now.

It may, yes.

That we put the company together, the combination of Legacy Charter, Time Warner and Bright House, our view was that we were an underpenetrated business, that we could put great products together and packaged in a way that created value in terms of the total value proposition of the products that really couldn't be replicated by providers like satellite that could provide part of the service. And that by providing all the services together and making each one of them as stand-alone products better than the competitive product and priced together in a way that created a lot of value for consumers that we could drive penetration. And if we drove penetration and treated service as a product, that we could get a happy customer base, have less transactions, take cost out of the business as a result of that and be able to grow the business, grow cash flow without having the same kind of expense profile as our competitors. And that would actually get more efficient. The deeper we penetrated, we'd have a single network that -- the deeper we penetrated, that the cost of that network would be shared over a larger customer base, meaning that individual cost per customer would go down and transaction costs would take cost out of the business and we'd be competitive. And we grow our business by growing our cash flow per passing. And we still view the business that way. And yes, technology has changed, the opportunities have changed, the competitive environment has changed. But the opportunity going forward, as I look out over the next 5 years, is very similar to where we've come from the last 5 years. We have a mobile business that we've launched successfully. We have an opportunity to package that with a great broadband and continuously improving broadband in an environment where people are using more and more data. And to actually save customers money at the household level by reducing their overall telecom spend. And at the same time, creating more value for the consumer and that we can drive deeper into the marketplace. So the other things that have changed over the last 5 years is that when it comes to broadband, I think the pandemic has shown and accelerated to some extent the -- how much data people actually want or need. And that means that the penetration opportunity of broadband has gone up, gone up from the level of consumer behavior that existed previously to probably approaching the vacancy rate. And everybody is going to get it.

Right, right.

Which means there's more upside in terms of penetration. And because our product is easy to expand from a capital perspective and the capacity is easy to -- relatively easy to expand, I think we can continue to grow that penetration. And in terms of the technologies that are being deployed against us competitively, I think our technology is better and provides more throughput. 25% of our broadband customers now, our broadband-only customers, consume a terabyte or more of data per month, and that continues to go up. And television continues to become more and more Internet-driven, and television formats moving toward 4K and other kinds of higher throughput data regimes means that more and more bandwidth is needed. And so I feel good about the upside and the opportunity. And then there's the edge-out opportunity that comes from -- we've been building about 1 million passings a year over the last several years, including SMB passings. And that's just household growth inside our footprint and around our footprint. But there's also the opportunity now to build low-density areas with subsidies. And we've been doing that, and we'll hope to continue to do that. So there's a bigger pie with more people wanting to use it, with more people wanting to use high-capacity services, which I think continues to bode well for us. And our products still can be packaged at much less cost than our competitors sell them, and we can make more money per household doing that and have more households attached to us.

That all makes sense, Tom. And I wanted to ask you about investors are clearly increasingly concerned that the broadband business is slowing or maturing. You just obviously laid out why you remain constructive long term. But what's your perspective on competition? We had T-Mobile on this stage earlier today, we had Verizon a couple of days ago. Between fixed wireless and fiber, a lot of investor focus there. You have a lot of experience in the industry. What do you see when you look at Charter's position, the sort of competitive environment you're operating in?

Yes. Well, I like our competitive position. Obviously, if you spend enough capital, you can replicate what we have, but we have a widely distributed -- universally in our footprint distributed asset that is high capacity and could be upgraded for very low cost to even greater capacities. And I do think if you look at DSL and VDSL, I think we have a superior business and we're taking that -- those businesses away. And I think the same will be true if fixed wireless -- I don't think it really will stay with us from a competitive point of view, not that it will have no impact and not that DSL doesn't have impact and not -- it will, but I think that we can be better and more competitive. And then packaged and taking advantage of our position, which allows us to continue to lower cost by growing. And so we continue to have a market share strategy. And I think as a result of that, we can have good pricing and better products. And I actually think we can make our mobile product be superior to that, which is sold by a mobile company only, by using the way it interacts with our WiFi network and the way it interacts with CBRS, to actually giving more throughput than you would get otherwise. So better products, better prices. It's -- those are good things to have.

Yes. Yes, yes. I want to get to the wireless stuff in a minute. But before we do, this slowdown in subscriber growth the industry has seen over the last, let's call it, 2-plus quarters, seems to be largely a function of lower customer activity. And you have talked about that, [ Brian ] talked about that on Monday. Just spend a minute on what's happening there, why it's the headwind to growth and why that sort of normalizes over time and turns around.

Right. Well, obviously, it's an unusual phenomenon. And I really never thought about a pandemic before and what it would do and how it would change behavior. But at the beginning, we had outsized growth based on historic trends. And if you sort of look at the last 2 years and average them, they're a little better than average. But the basic trend line continues. So what happened? Well, you had a lot of people just sort of stop and sit in place. So all the friction in the business, the transactional friction where people are without service, they're moving, they're going to college again, they're coming home, they're about to move, they're about to get married, they're about to do this, make lifestyle changes, that all inhibits a certain amount of penetration and leads to even a higher vacancy rate in general. So when that all settled down, penetration went up and growth went up. And you sort of have to unwind that, too, to get back to normal. So you have to add friction back in, which is negative, and resume sort of normal behavior. But the reality is that when people are in motion, there's less inertia. And when there's less inertia, there's more selling opportunities. And so there's a certain amount of growth and a certain amount of market share shift occurs as a result of that increased activity. And that isn't really occurring at the moment or it wasn't in the last couple of quarters. And I think it will normalize. And I think those selling opportunities will arise and that our superior selling proposition will materialize in growth. But it's been a very unusual circumstance. And there is a little unwinding that has to occur, and then there's the reestablishment of sort of normal patterns of behavior. When I look at our -- like our company's data, our disconnects are lower than I've ever seen. And at every kind of disconnect: nonpay, competitive, move, they're at record lows. And so sales are lower, too. The growth is okay, but it's not as big. But the financial upside of that is significant in terms of the activity that's come out of the business, and therefore, the increase in EBITDA as a result of that. But my guess is that things gradually go back to the way they were.

Yes. And important for investors is the attractive financial model of broadband and connectivity continues. Do you see any change, again, from the fixed wireless competition prospects and more fiber changing the pricing environment or how companies behave in the marketplace? Because, obviously, ARPU becomes an increasingly important part of the revenue algorithm.

Right. Well, when we look at ARPU, I mean it's -- I really try to generate as much cash flow out of the passings we pass as possible, sort of is my primary objective. The -- we have the ability to sell a lot of mobile. We have the ability to take mobile pricing down from the way it has been in the marketplace and grow our ARPU and actually reduce the consumers' spend. So our ARPU can go up as a result of our current strategy. And it doesn't have to go up through pricing, it can go up through customers buying more products from us and having more revenue per customer. And I think there's a couple of ways we can do that. Mobile is one of them. Upselling the speed levels that we provide in broadband and moving customers up through that is another opportunity. We still have video. Video is actually a big revenue business under a lot of pressure. And we've continued to sort of run that business like we have historically. We passed through the cost increases and basically keep the same margin in the customer base that we have. But that customer base is under pressure from a price point of view. So the mix can change, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're negative from a cash flow-generating capability. But as a general practice, we'd rather sell our way into ARPU growth than to just do it by fiat.

Right, right. But it doesn't sound like you think the competitive environment is changing your ability to necessarily take price sort of as you have in the past.

But we've never been a big price taker.

Understood.

And never looked at that as the big opportunity. The opportunity is to -- there are times when you change your prices and people's perception of value changes. Right now, mobile is priced high relative to how much data you get through it. Really high compared to broadband. It's on a bits per second basis or total bits used perspective. How you mix that in with customer perceptions and how you package that is an art. In the end, it's how much cash are you getting per customer and actually how much per home passed, how much against your fixed investment.

So let's shift gears then to convergence and mobile in a little more detail. You launched Spectrum Mobile, what, back in 2018, I believe. And you've had healthy subscriber growth every year. You ended last year with -- or you added 1.2 million lines, I think, in '21. So you now have over 3.5 million. I think investors are trying to figure out how -- what success looks like in wireless for a cable company. I mean there's different ways you can use that product to drive the business. Let me stop there and ask you how you...

What is success? Well, we have 54 million passings and probably 120 million mobile customers inside our footprint. So that's the range of our success opportunity, the 120 million.

But are you running it for profits or to use as a way to drive broadband or all of the above? How do you think about that?

Yes. We're running it to drive customer relationships that are valuable. So it's interesting in that it is profitable as a stand-alone business. And the way it's priced, the way we price it and the way we continue to see the cost structure of that business developing, it will get even more profitable as we grow. So we're really incented to grow deeper and faster, and costs will come out of the business on an incremental -- on a per customer basis going forward for a variety of reasons, including our ability to offload traffic, but also because if you think about marketing and operating costs of managing a customer base, to the extent you're selling that in a packaged way, in an integrated way, all those costs get allocated over the bigger base of units and revenues that you drive when you sell them in a packaged way. So we look at it as a very attractive business. But -- even as a stand-alone business, but you don't have to look at it that way. You could look at it as just we have a customer and the customer has all these attributes associated with the product set that we've given to the customer and the customer pays us X and our margin is Y. And we've just got 1 customer and 1 unit, and mobile is not a business. I can actually hold both thoughts in my head at the same time.

And you launched your -- Charter launched, I think, late last year, unlimited offerings at $30 a line, starting with 2 lines. How does that position you guys in the marketplace versus other offers? And talk a little bit about what converged connectivity means.

Yes. Well, it's pretty good. You think about what the average customer pays for a mobile phone per month, about $60. So they can save -- the average household can save high hundreds of dollars and maybe $1,000 in some cases per household per year. That's a lot of value to most consumers, and they get a really good mobile product, but it's not just a good mobile product. It's a product that when used with our WiFi and used with our future license spectrum, CBRS and other license spectrum that we might come across, will allow us to have an even better value proposition in terms of the utility of the product, how much capacity and speed are on it at any one given moment. So we have a product called speed boost. So when you're our customer and you're our mobile customer, we'll open up your mobile phone to gig speeds whenever you're near one of our radios. And so most of the use of the mobile phone, by the way, is in a home or office environment, in a sedentary environment. So we can actually have a better product at much lower prices. So it's a twofer in that sense. So we're very excited about it.

Yes. And you can see the volumes picking up certainly in the reported numbers in the fourth quarter. Is there an opportunity to pull through more broadband customer growth as wireless -- because we haven't really seen that yet, but is that...

It's hard to say because we're still at the beginning. But if you look at the wireline business 15 years ago and when we did voice over IP and we priced it low, we packaged it...

$99 triple play.

Yes. Well, yes, yes, $29, $29, $29. We never even said $99. So outrageous. The reality was Charter and Comcast are the 2 biggest wireline-owned companies in America today. I think that mobile presents a similar opportunity to move those customers, and that's a significant upside.

Yes. You've touched a couple of times, Tom, in your comments about using some owned but licensed spectrum with CBRS. So that's in your CapEx guidance. Can you just talk a little bit about what you guys are doing this year, how that's going and how substantial that could be to the business over the next couple of years?

Yes. It's not that we have to do that to be successful with our current strategy, but it's an upside. The upside is that you -- when you build these radios and you put them out on licensed and shared spectrum in an opportunistic way, when we have mobile customers, we know where the mobile customers are when they use their mobile devices physically and what particular geographies have what kind of traffic in them. And so if you put the radios in high-traffic areas, and we've done the math, you can get an offload where you put that radio that makes -- that's greater -- your savings on your MVNO bill are greater than the cost of the capital to deploy the radio. And so it's a cost reducer. It could also be a product enhancer, but we've looked at it really as a cost reducer. And so to the extent that we can deploy capital smartly and lower our costs to provide that service, then we have a better opportunity in the marketplace to make more money or to have lower rates or to be more competitive and drive our share.

And which of those options are you guys considering?

Well, all of them. Share will get you competitive advantage. It generates revenue. It doesn't necessarily generate ARPU. You can grow more customers without changing your average revenue per customer. What really matters is how much cash flow are you generating out of the asset. And so we look at -- that is the opportunity.

Yes. It's just interesting as the incumbent wireless companies, ARPUs or prices are quite a bit higher if you guys can use this to even go more aggressive, obviously, you can drive even more share.

Right. Right.

And since you mentioned it, I'd ask, what kind of product enhancements would CBRS potentially enable if you're willing to talk...

Well, similar to like what I talked about with speed boost, to the extent you have excess capacity available to a mobile customer and you want to give it to them and the customer can perceive that value, then that's something you can do if you have your own spectrum. And you have to think about WiFi as really just a bunch of small cellular networks with tremendous capacity. And when you really think about where people use those devices and how they use them and what they use them for bandwidth-intensive purposes, if you want to be in the metaverse, you're probably not driving cell-to-cell, you're probably in a sedentary environment. And that's where we -- our assets are really deployed and where they're superior.

You mentioned earlier that there's about 120 million lines, I think, in your footprint.

Yes.

One of the investment...

Could be 130. I'm not...

I'm not going to hold you to it. We've got a long way to go from 3.5 million, so lots of room to run. But one of the questions investors will bring up or the wireless comments will mention is that without a national footprint, there's some kind of structural limitations for a cable operator in the wireless business. And with an MVNO, without your own network, that also creates limitations. What's your answer to those sort of...

Well, no, it's true. There are some limitations, and we're not a national carrier. We're not a national broadband provider. We're a regional player, and it has -- I don't buy a lot of national advertising. But I'm well penetrated against from a coverage perspective of the DMAs that we do operate in. And it's like 96% of the places we operate. We can use mass media effectively. So the assets are in good shape from that perspective. But 120 million is still...

117 million.

Or 117 million more than we have.

Right.

So once we get off that runway, we'll have to figure out about what to do with our limitations.

All right. I want to talk a little bit, without getting too nerdy, about the network. And partly because I think there's more investor concern about DOCSIS and the life left in DOCSIS relative to fiber than we've had in many years. And that European cable companies are going fiber-to-the-home even in the U.S. Some of that's happening. So tell us about Charter's network evolution plan to add capacity, which does not include fiber-to-the-home, and why you think that's the right strategy to continue to grow the business and send off all these competitors we've been talking about.

Right. Well, look, we have a lot of fiber in our network and we may have more fiber than anybody has. All of our incremental construction is all fiber. So all the RDOFs and rural development funds, money is fiber only. That said, we have tremendous capacity in our existing infrastructure at a very cost-efficient way to continue to upgrade our capabilities through time to provide massive increases in capacity and we think virtually equivalent to what fiber can do at lower investment costs. And if you think about the way the world actually is, fiber is interesting. It's a little less expensive in some ways or about the same cost of new construction. But incremental success-based capital, meaning the capital used to connect people if you get a customer, is much higher. So you might say, what's my cost per passing to put out fiber, and that looks attractive. But if you think about it from an operating perspective, it's much more expensive to operate incrementally, especially in a high churn environment. And if you're low penetrated, you've got to do a physical installation of new fiber every time you get a new customer and put out new optical networks and so forth. So we have a deployed base of installations across almost everywhere we operate. We have a great self-installation business. We have a pathway using 3.1 DOCSIS, which is not the new 4.0, but what we've just deployed a few years ago. And to take that up to multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds and to do that very inexpensively without having to change out any of the CPE or without having to change out the success-based capital that goes to the house and without having to disrupt the customer and to actually do a self-service upgrade model. So we think that, that makes a lot more sense and that we can stay competitive and that we have a pathway with DOCSIS 4.0 and its successors to 10G. 10G is our sort of [ NordStar ] technology infrastructure, which is really massive capacity in a bidirectional way with the capabilities to build products that really aren't going to be in the market for years to come. So we think we can build that capability in evolutionary, cost-efficient way that we can match what fiber can do in the meantime, and we can deploy very quickly and ubiquitously and make new products work on a national level because there are other cable operators out there that have the same architecture as us or are on the same path as us, so that those new products can be nationally distributed.

Yes. How important is offering symmetric speeds to consumers, in your view, if you think about the next 2 to 3 years? Because Verizon, obviously, with Fios makes a lot of marketing noise on...

They do. It's a marketing claim. It's a claim without much reality from a use perspective. So I think to the extent that we do things for marketing claims, we can and even 1 gig down is, to some extent, a marketing claim from a reality perspective. We feel pretty competitive the way we are. And the way we are competing in the fiber areas that do exist with us, we're gaining share and growing. And so we think that the overall mix of our product set and the way people actually use it is important, most important, and what the value proposition is, and we think that we can maintain that. But we have a pathway to continuously upgrade at very low cost. And the other thing that's interesting about the 3.1 upgrade I just talked about, we can do that and also quit spending money on other capital that we might have had otherwise. And so I don't think -- I think we can do that without changing much about the capital intensity of the business in a material way. And so from a price and cost perspective, we can have very good products and be very competitive and be ubiquitous. So I think we're in pretty good shape competitively and have the ability to get ourselves in front of any competitive situation quickly.

And you guys have opted, I think, to begin, I think, deploying some extended spectrum DOCSIS to help create some more capacity.

Yes, we have been. That's another path. And really, there's a couple of tranches. There's the 3.1 symmetrical multi-gig capacity upgrade that you can do without even changing your spectrum much. The network essentially is just an electronic drop-in. And then you can do extended spectrum and you can also then do DOCSIS 4.0, which is full duplex symmetrical. And there are some other technologies, distributed access architecture, which is really taking what's now in the hubs and putting them out in the neighborhood right at the hub -- at the node, excuse me. And I don't want to get too wonky, but there's an architectural strategy that allows us to keep deploying capital in very efficient ways and continue to take speeds up and also take not just speed up, but capacity. Remember, I said the average customer -- 25% of our customers now are using a terabyte a month. I think that's going to continue. And so we've already sort of forecasted that capital into our business, the augmentation capital necessary to keep growing capacity. Well, if we do these splits, these high splits, we won't have to spend that augmentation capital. So in some ways, you get it free, one way to think about it. And -- but the reality is we can have very fast, very high-capacity networks at much lower costs than going all fiber.

Yes. Okay.

If there's a specific application to go all fiber, we would do it if it were lower cost and it got us the same capacity.

Yes. Makes sense. Let's talk a little bit about your rural network plans, and you guys have some pretty big projects underway...

We do.

Getting started. Charter participated in the RDOF auction. How do you guys view this project or generally the rural expansion opportunity for the company?

Yes. We look on several layers. One, it's -- if you think about us as a company and our obligation as a company, we think that the country wants us to wire rural areas, and we think we should try to do that and participate in that. We think that is in our interest as a company and it's in the country's interest to have that done. And we think we'd be better at it than anybody else. We think that we can get very high penetrations in these rural areas. And the reason we think that is because, what I said earlier, more and more people are using more and more capacity, and I think we can get kind of penetrations up approaching the vacancy rate in rural areas. And so we can have a good, stable business. It's like building a brand-new cable system. We've committed so far to build 1.1 million passings. It's a little over 100,000 miles of construction. That's a lot of miles. We have 800,000 miles of plant today. It took 50 years to build in various iterations. And so it's a big commitment. And we're also bidding on lots of state money that's been filtered down through the stimulus bill and winning some of those in a significant way. And there's another $42 billion to come. So we think that if we are smart about that and bid properly and win those things, we can build new customers, create new revenue streams, new returns on investment that make sense. But you have to really look at it as kind of an incremental new build cable company.

Yes. And also, in addition to sort of the subsidies, there's been a lot of subsidized plans out there for consumers.

Yes.

EBB and now I think it's called ACP. Are those helping or hindering your growth? Or how are you leveraging those offers?

No, I think it's pretty interesting. We've been a big proponent of those programs, and we've been significant participants in them. And we've made it easy for our customers to enroll in those programs. And we think that it has the potential of taking permanently activity out of the business for us. A lot of low-income people live paycheck to paycheck, and if they -- somebody else gets the check, you don't. And so there's churn in that environment. And to the extent that the subsidy programs reduce that churn and you keep the customer base you have created in lower-income areas, that's a pretty positive thing. It means less activity, which means lower cost for the same customer base.

Got it. Okay. Let's shift. In the time we have left, I wanted to ask you about the video business, which is still a huge business, but obviously, we spend less time on it these days for obvious reasons. But...

We still think about it a lot.

We think about it. And people consume a lot of it, and you've talked a lot about it in this conference.

We do.

It feels like we had Roku here on Monday. I think there's something like 7,000 or 8,000 apps on Roku. I mean there is a clear, I think, desire on the part of the consumer for some aggregation, curation, et cetera. Is that something that Charter should play a bigger role in than we've seen so far?

Yes, I think it's an opportunity for us. I think there's more damage to come in video. But yes.

Can you expand on the damage?

Well, I just think there's nothing about the old model that's really changed. I mean sports is...

Other than the price.

The price keeps going up. And if you look at all the rights fees that broadcasters paid in the most recent NFL deal and you look at baseball players want more, everybody wants more, so there's nothing to really constrain the cost of sports, and that's still the linear business, and that's still the glue that holds all the linear business together. So I see that business continuing to get more and more expensive for consumers. It's still all held together pretty much by the owners of the rights. They insist on being carried with each other or not carried at all. And they really haven't gone direct-to-consumer with significant packages. So entertainment has gone direct-to-consumer to some extent in a somewhat successful way. I'm not sure there's much margin than what's gone forth.

Not yet.

No. So I mean if you really think about what the video business was a few years ago, it was the perfect distribution model. It's hard to imagine it ever getting back to being that good. Everybody having 100 million homes and both license fees and advertising. Advertising will shrink in the direct-to-consumer model. Distribution will shrink. And so -- and it's really hard to find anything but -- and yes, there's an opportunity...

Good thing you're not in that business.

Yes. Well, I'm not -- I'm sort of a pass-through.

Sure. Yes, yes.

But the opportunity going forward for the right -- for somebody who managed to pull it off is to start to reaggregate and to use that aggregation to give a better, more cost-efficient consumer experience to more people. And we think about that every day and how that might happen. But I don't want to be overly pollyannaish and say that it's about to happen because what -- the current model is still very much in force and still acting like it has been acting, and I don't see that disappearing in the next couple of years.

Is there anything on the product side? Or do you guys invest in product development and video to try to be ready for that once the suppliers get there?

Well, we've been -- yes, we've been developing the technology platforms. And interestingly, like take a Roku, we distribute on Roku. And I believe that on the Roku devices we're on, we're the predominant used app, and we're the most highly rated streaming app in the stores. So -- and we have over 11 million to approximately 12 million customers who subscribed to us through an application as opposed to a set-top box. It's taking CPE out of our business, and that's good and bad but takes it out of our capital structure. So I guess the point of that is the upside is still yet to be realized and the reaggregation is somewhat far away, but we've been thinking about how to build a platform that will allow that to occur in a convenient way for customers in an efficient way.

And then just lastly, Tom, I wanted to ask you about the commercial services or business services opportunity. This was a business after you acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House that we thought could be a double-digit revenue grower. It was sort of -- you had to reprice a lot of that business.

Yes.

That seems like it was about to inflect, and then we had the pandemic. But what would you say the opportunity is in that part of your business from here?

Well, I think it's good. And yes, we had -- the pandemic did more -- was more difficult in that space than it was in the residential space. And we have 1 million hotel units, for instance, that we had to quit charging for during the pandemic. And we worked with our customers. And as you can see, things are filling up. But we're still underpenetrated in those areas, and we have good products in the enterprise space. We're doing managed services. The drag in the enterprise space for us was that we were early on big into backhaul carrier products. Some of those have been renegotiated down. And there may be some upside in that going forward, but that's been an anchor in terms of growth for us. But in terms of creating new customer relationships with new businesses, we've been doing quite well. And I do think that, that can grow more rapidly than it was growing before the pandemic. And I also think our SMB business, to the extent that, that SMB is healthy, is also a big upside for us still. And in both of those areas, we're underpenetrated. So there's more to -- I think that is a good future business. But the pandemic really messed with the trend lines.

Right. Is that an area where you're pushing Spectrum Mobile yet? Is that -- can that help in that business?

We are. We don't have an enterprise solution yet for large businesses. But for the SMB space, we are promoting it, and it's doing quite well.

Great. Well, Tom, we covered a lot. As I think back to when you guys made those acquisitions, I think the stock has roughly tripled since then.

Yes.

When you look ahead at the opportunity for the company, do you -- are you still optimistic there's a lot of growth left even though a lot of these products we've been talking about have been maturing from a penetration point of view?

Yes, the reality is, for all the reasons I said, more people are going to take it. We can build more passings than we have in the past. And we have new products that are really valuable, that save customers money and make us money and can help us drive to further penetration. So I don't see anything different in financial terms over the next 5 years than we saw over the last.

Great. Well, that's a great note to end on, Tom. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Please come back.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.