Charter Communications, Inc. ($CHTR)

Good morning, everybody. Good morning to those of you who are joining us on the web and welcome to our conversation with Charter Communications and Chris Winfrey. Chris, good to have you back. I think we've had Charter every year at our conference and you just about every time.

Let's -- we have to start with the elephant in the room, which is, your stock price fell 25% when you reported first quarter earnings and has continued to fall even further since then. We attributed the drop not just to the year-over-year increase in broadband sub losses, but also to the discussion of, I don't want to call it guidance precisely, but let's call it guidance, about broadband ARPU growth. And in particular, the wording you used on the call with respect to broadband ARPU was that it will be "close to -- or close either way" in terms of where we end up with growth, meaning it's about flat. First, is your diagnosis of what the market's reaction to your earnings results were the same as mine, that it was not just the net adds, but people were surprised and concerned about the ARPU story? Or is it something different?

Yes. I think the net adds variance wasn't big relative to consensus. And so clearly, the market reaction was centered very much around broadband ARPU. On one hand, disappointing to see that kind of market reaction significantly. But I also don't think that more than 1/4 of the value of the company was destroyed by an in-year ARPU outlook. I think more importantly, if you think about how we've always managed the business, we've never managed it for short-term ARPU, much less product ARPU. And it's not something that we've typically guided about. I think Jessica answered a question about it based on -- and she answered it honestly at the time. But clearly, that had a pretty significant impact. But we manage the business, as you know, fixed network of passings to try to drive the highest terminal penetration of customer relationships, the highest amount of products in the household, and as a result of that, having the highest revenue and margin at the household level. And by doing that, you lower the operating cost per household or per customer, and you lower the capital expense that's associated with that customer. We have the highest penetrations in the marketplace, as a result of that strategy working well. And depending on how you allocate the revenue inside the bundle, your single-play product ARPU is going to be all over the place from time to time, particularly as you're trying new things and going to market and you're [ retaining ] inside the quarter. So yes, I think in the end, I think that was the -- clearly, the market reaction. It was disappointing, but we're very much focused on customer lifetime value, maximizing penetration on the network, and using all the tools and assets we have with other products to go drive value into the system.

Part of the reaction, I suspect, though, was probably this tension between, is this an intentional -- we're doing this in order to achieve this outcome? Or was that we just don't have the visibility right now to be able to say that we can grow ARPU? And -- because I think those are two very different messages.

Yes. Look, Again, I don't think it's a great metric to be giving guidance. So what I will tell you is that converged ARPU is more relevant than a single product Internet ARPU, and that is growing. And when it comes to broadband and you think about broadband, there's so many different things happening inside of the quarter. And we have a multiproduct selling strategy. There's price locks that are taking place inside there. Inside of a quarter, we also have different levels of retention activity that's taking place, which we talked about a little bit on the call. And then perhaps one of the bigger ones was that inside the first quarter, we didn't take the level of cost pass through that we had done in previous periods inside of the first quarter for a variety of different reasons. And we will do that towards the end of the summer. And so there'll be some of that cost pass-through. We're not just going to take it and push it through. We're going to do it attached to some value increase along the way. But I think all those things drove a single-play product ARPU output that wasn't representative of the long-term growth potential of the company. And so we focus much more on converged ARPU, and we think about manage the business from a customer lifetime value. So I don't think it's productive or helpful to get in an environment where you're forecasting or guiding to a single-play product ARPU.

So we'll get to all the details. Usually, I wrap up with a question about the overall growth picture. But let's go to that first. Give investors a reason for confidence that you can be back to being a sort of normalized levels of growth in revenue and EBITDA? And what are those normalized levels?

Sure. Look, let's start with what we know is we're operating in a highly competitive moment in time. Our issue hasn't been necessarily the level of competition because we compete very well against fiber and we have for more than a decade. It's the level of new competition that's taking place in the market, combined with one of the lowest market move rates that we've seen, which reduces your selling opportunities. So that's putting significant pressure on the short-term growth. But in the end, if you step back and take a look and say, do you have the best network, do you have the best products, do you have the best pricing and save customers money and can you provide the best service? And the answer is yes to all that. We are ubiquitously deployed symmetrical soon and multi-gig network converged. We have the fastest products in the marketplace, Internet and Mobile, the video product. It's not the most sexy thing today, but it is the best product inside the marketplace. And for those that are interested together with Mobile and our Internet pricing, we can save customers hundreds and thousands of dollars every year. And the service investment has already been made. Does that mean that we should sit back and do nothing? Absolutely not. We have areas for opportunity, areas of improvement. The two biggest ones that I've talked about are go-to-market, finding a way to articulate that savings and quality to customers in a way that resonates and creates traffic. And then the second one is reaping the benefit of the investments in service that we've made. I mean, for example, if you call us today, probably half the time, we're on your doorstep within 2 hours. Nobody can do that. 100% U.S.-based in-house sales and service, 24/7 and a response rate that beats just about -- beats anybody. And so all that says, in the end, I think our products and our capabilities win, but we've got higher new competition along the way, and we've got opportunities that I think we can do better than we're doing today with our go-to-market and NPS. If none of that resonates, right, which I think it should. But if none of that resonates, I still don't think you can ignore the free cash flow that exists today, the free cash flow takeoff that's coming from a rarely provided by us multiyear CapEx guidance, which we will deliver and the free cash flow yield that implies? And then when you couple that with the fact that this infrastructure asset is unique. It's not something that can be replicated, the amount of traffic that we carry for ourselves, but also for the entire rest of the industry is mobile offload is something that's very valuable and it can't be replicated. So that's what I would say in terms of our ability to return to revenue and EBITDA growth, our free cash flow profile and the underlying value that is our asset.

So I want to -- there's a lot to unpack there, and we'll come back to some of those things.

You prompted it first, so.

But I want to go back to just the sort of the competitive dynamics of the broadband market, and we'll come back to convergence in a second. But with respect to broadband, do you think of FWA as a product or a market segment? That is -- is it -- is there a certain segment of the market that says cheap and cheerful at 100 megabits per second was all I was looking for anyway. And at $50, that's where they're going to go. And -- or is there something about the product that says they're doing this something different that we need to learn from?

I think that market exists, and has existed, and we compete really well with it from a product set. I mean we have an Internet advantage product that's $30. We have low income products that are much lower cost than that at similar speeds to what you're describing. And then you couple that with the ability to add Mobile at a $30 per line, as opposed to $60 or $70 per line, and I would say, yes, that market exists, but we've always served that market, too. We don't heavily market it. We target market that to the right type of audience. So I don't think there's anything that they're doing that's unique there other than representing it as a cheap product when, in fact, the only way you can get that price is by overpaying significantly on your mobile service. That's the -- really the only one way you...

And so selling convergence is the answer to compete?

I think selling convergence is the answer to compete for us, but also being careful. We've created that marketplace almost single-handedly. And so making sure that we don't forgo the opportunity to have an Internet sale because we're trying to shove Mobile down somebody's throat either. Because even unattached to Mobile or Video, our Internet product is better. It's faster and it's very competitive on price. And so those are the type of things that we're working through as well. There are things -- you asked about other things that FWA has done. Their installation setup is pretty easy. It's pretty straightforward. And we took that as a challenge to go time the installation on FWA and time our own installation that we were behind them, and we're now much faster than them. And so we put a lot of effort behind the NPS, not because we're chasing a metric, but the customer perception is significantly impacted by the point of sale and the point of install. And we've gotten much, much better on that front. And so I do think competition makes you a better operator. And we tear down everything that everybody is doing and try to learn from it. And if we need to mimic it, we will, but generally, we want to try to beat it.

So you were the first person that described to me once that your -- what was then the Spectrum One free line offer was not a promotional plan. It was a new product category. The convergence and selling connectivity everywhere is about educating the customer to think differently about the bundle of comm services. How is that going?

You saw the early results and what it did for Mobile. We've created the marketplace, I think, for convergence. Now everybody is talking about it and everybody is saying that they have it. And as you know, and you regularly point out, there's only a small fraction of the network of Verizon or AT&T that will ever be able to do convergence. And as much as T-Mobile says they don't believe in convergence, they're doing it every day. They're just doing it on the back of the same network. The difference with us is that we have a fully deployed ubiquitous network that has wireline and wireless. So nobody else can provide it the way that we do. And we already offload all that mobile traffic anyway. And so the only thing that we're doing is say, look, we're already offloading your mobile traffic. We might as well have a service relationship with you, earn a great margin on it and lower your cost as a consumer to provide more value to the holistic relationship that we provide inside the household. So convergence works, it's helpful for saving money. It's helpful for reducing churn. We are taking a look and making sure by creating the marketplace that we lean so heavily that let's not -- let's make sure we haven't created speed bumps to actual Internet acquisition. But no, I think if your question is, does it work? It does. And everybody wants to have it, whether they say it or not.

And if you think about the logical end game, and I'll ask the same question that I asked before about FWA. Is convergence a market segment or a product? That is, is there 20% of the market that wants to buy their services that way and maybe that will grow, but 80% is still single product? Or is it just no, this is actually where the market is going...

Some of it depends on how you build it into the household. But at the end of the day, Mobile today is an extension of our broadband service. The dirty secret when you hear a lot of the telcos talking about need for Spectrum is 75%, 80% of their traffic goes over our network to begin with. And so it is just the mobile product is just an extension of our broadband product, and I think we can save customers a lot of money with it. And I don't know, in terms of where people ultimately go, but I think inside of our footprint and with us because we can uniquely provide it, I think it becomes more and more the way that people take it from us.

You know my favorite topic is always the economics of fiber overbuilding and fiber deployment.

Yes.

When we were on the stage a year ago, you ventured that the capital being deployed in fiber was probably already earning a negative return. We're obviously seeing lower density, and we're seeing lower ARPU, all of which would say it can't be getting better. And yet we're expecting as many as 2 million or 3 million more passings this year than we saw last year if -- for the next 5 years, if that's feasible. Is it? And what do you think happens from here?

I mean you know this as well as I do. I think if you look back the past 5 years, the projection of what was going to be built ended up being less than what was actually built. And so we're -- in our footprint, it's all I can speak to. We're seeing a steady pace of build. I think it should be coming down because I don't think they're going to make any money off of it.

And the number of fiber miles has to grow a lot...

Yes, and the density is going down dramatically. And so the costs are going up, and it is more competitive because of us, because of FWA. So I don't think there's a return there to begin with. I do think the amount of passings are that are announced of what people want to do, by definition, is duplicative. And I think that's part of the reason that the forecast is always higher than what's being actually done in actuality is because it doesn't make sense to go in there to begin with. It certainly doesn't make to go in there at the same time as another fiber overbuild. And so I think you'll see more and more of that. The thing that I think it's interesting to watch for me is if you think about the existing fiber operators, there's been a lot of sales. And so a lot of the smart money is exiting, or has already exited. And I think that should tell you something because some of the people that were in it, they timed it right, they got out. I think there's something to be said for that.

I was really interested in some data that OpenVault released in the fourth quarter of last year, that showed that the average fiber customer is actually getting significantly slower speeds than the average cable customer. That's not because fiber is not capable of offering higher speeds. It's because people who are choosing fiber are opting into lower speed tiers, which would suggest that the real selling proposition for fiber isn't, we're better. It's, we're cheaper. Is that what you're seeing?

At least in our footprint, that's not what we're seeing. If you look, we compete well against fiber at every single speed and price point, and we'll go where the customer wants to take us. In fact, our penetration of gig and multi-gig services today is only about 25% so much lower than the number that you had. And it was actually, dramatically lower just 2 years ago. Because we let customers -- we'll advertise a gig, or we'll advertise 2 gig, and soon we'll be advertising 5 and more. But customers are solving for the speed they need and the price point they're looking for. We compete really well against all of that. The reason our gig plus speeds have taken off so much isn't because that's what we're putting in a single-play environment. It's because of our bundling strategy, which says if you take video or if you take mobile lines with us, we'll kick in the gig for free, and we'll put that inside of your service as a way to create more value inside of that bundle. And so we're driving it in that way, but not from a competitive pricing or speed need. It's just about packing more value into the bundle. And we do that at point of sale. We do that with migration, and we do that inside of retention. And yet it's still for gig and multi-gig, it's still only 25% of our total footprint. And we compete really well against fiber. We are -- just as a reminder, inside of our footprint, generally, when we compete against fiber, we're still the market share leader inside of our footprint. And so I don't think it's about speed selection or price, we compete well across both.

One of the overarching themes of this conference has been the expected arrival of more competition from satellite in every part of the business of connectivity. What are you seeing with respect to Starlink and eventually Amazon Leo? Are they a direct competitor existing subscribers? Are they just carving up the more rural and low-density markets potentially before you get there. Talk about what you're seeing from satellite?

So I think in a low-density rural environment particularly when there's not another alternative, it's a fantastic product. It works really well at low density. And we have seen in some of our more recent rural builds, where we get in and Starlink has got a pretty good penetration in these rural environments. And we're having to -- instead of being the greenfield and welcomed, we're having to convert those subscribers. And so we're still hitting our penetration targets in the most recent rural builds, but it's taking a little bit more time than it was early on. And the big driver that I think probably is Starlink. So in a rural low-density environment, I think it works really well. In a suburban or urban environment, as you know, there's capacity constraints, although you can see how they price competitively in certain markets where they do have extra capacity. So, do I think it will be the competitive solution for those? No. But I also understand they are very well capitalized today and tomorrow. They're incredibly technologically savvy. They have a tremendous amount of governmental support, and we don't take that for granted. And so we're watching it very closely and try to keep a close eye and make sure we stay a step ahead of it.

Does that -- do you think that satellite ultimately competes for the same segment as FWA? Or are they layered competition that they each take their own share and the market gets smaller as a result?

I don't know that it segments out separately. In the rural community, I think it's probably more of a substitution that exists because they both have capacity.

And WISPs never get counted by most people. There's a lot...

Correct. So I think it's interchangeable in that environment. And I think you're then coming down to the ease of an FWA installation versus putting a satellite dish on the outside of your home, versus branding and things like that, versus the fiber provider, which is us in these rural environments together with Mobile, that actually provides a better product, better price, saves you a lot of money. So I think it's very much competitive in that environment. I don't think they're fishing in the same space as you get into suburban or urban. But we'll see. I'm not here to forecast their business other than tell you, we're watching it very closely. And I think there may be more opportunities to cooperate with some of these providers than direct head-to-head competition.

Okay. Let's talk about Cox. First, just the logistics. California is the last hurdle remaining. You've reached settlements with Cal Advocates and CETF. Are there any substantial objections left? And you've requested a decision by August 13. Is that the likely deadline? Or -- I mean, it's not obvious to me why it should take that long?

Yes. But look, as you mentioned, we've reached settlements with two of the key intervenors. All of the other states in the federal government were complete inside of March. And this transaction brings significant benefits to consumers and to employees across the entire country. I would not underestimate the uncertainty that, that creates for employees at both companies, but particularly Cox. And so we're hopeful that we can get out of there with California as quickly as possible. And beyond that, I'll just say that we very much respect the process. It's an important state to us. And so I'm going to not say more about it just to respect the process that they -- and we have to go through.

One of the benefits that you've obviously made the case to California about is that your pricing is lower and you're going to offer customers lower prices. Take us through the mechanics after the deal closes, of how you roll out lower prices because I think there's a lot of anxiety about the fact that Cox is broadband ARPU. I know it's a stand-alone ARPU, but broadband ARPU is just too high and it's going to have to come down.

Look, it's true. The broadband ARPU is too high, and it's going to have to come down. I think the way that investors are going to have to measure us is as follows. One is customer growth. Two is PSU growth. And three, is total customer ARPU. I said what I said upfront, just to be a little bit provocative. But the total customer ARPU today is about the same, and they're way underpenetrated to us on video, and they have essentially no Mobile penetration whatsoever. So our strategy here is going to be to have lower pricing across all products, with better quality of product, and to have a better customer ARPU at the household level, but most importantly is to have a higher penetration across the passings so that you can generate the most long-term terminal value of the network. So watch the customer ARPU, watch the converged ARPU. First and foremost, watch subscriber growth, then customer ARPU. Converged ARPU, although that may take at least a year because of the free mobile line Spectrum One offer. So for that to kick in. The good news is there's a lot of history around that so people know exactly how that's going to pan out, and there were doubts about that at the time, and it's proved out to be very good.

And I assume you'll be reporting those separately?

Yes, just like we did with TWC and Bright House. We're going to provide transparency everywhere we can. Capital and OpEx, once you scramble the egg, it's hard to pull apart. But subscribers and revenue, certainly, we'll be providing that type of insight to shareholders. It's important to see how the respective cohorts are developing along the way. But we're going to -- the thing I want to make clear, we're going to grow. We're going to grow Cox just because the video penetration is low. The mobile penetration is non-existent. The quality of the product is better, and that is going to contribute to Internet. And so, yes, there may be some single product ARPU volatility along the way. But...

They released some high-level financials for the third quarter of 2025. We haven't seen any sub counts since -- what, 6 months before that. Have they started to do any of that on their own in anticipation of changing their go-to-market strategy in a way that we can't see?

Not that I'm aware of. They're an independent company today, so I can't get in there and talk about explicitly their results or their financials without their explicit permission. So I won't. But the facts haven't changed. Their subscriber losses are higher than exist at Spectrum and their ARPU is higher, as you've already highlighted. And all of those things are the pieces that we're going to go address head on. I want to be clear. Managing this transition isn't something new. We did this with Bresnan. We did it with Time Warner Cable. We did it with Bright House. And we've actually, over the past 1.5 years, we've done it to ourselves with the Spectrum pricing and packaging rollout that we did in whatever, September, October '24, in a way that you as investors really didn't notice that amount of total ARPU change, but it accelerated growth for TWC, Bright House and Bresnan, the goal is to go do the same on Cox.

And you've hinted or maybe teased, I suppose, that video attach rate is so low at Charter that it's not -- I mean, at Cox, but it's not unreasonable to imagine that you actually get nominal growth in video out of Cox. Is that still your expectation...

It's a forward-looking statement, and I'll use one -- we will grow video. It's hard to come off the floor. And I don't mean that it's an insult to Cox. They didn't have the economics and they didn't have the scale, and that's the whole reason that we're doing this transaction. But actually very different from the current spectrum markets. When you think about the video product that we're going to roll out, and the same applies to Mobile. When we rolled out Spectrum TV app inside of Spectrum's footprint and at the Xumo Box, and the seamless entertainment and the activation of the apps. They all came out really good, but they needed significant improvement along the way to actually be really honed in, and to work, and to hang together. And in the Cox markets, we'll launch a Spectrum, a brand-new name that people don't know, but it's a new competitor in the marketplace. With a Spectrum TV app, with Xumo, with seamless entertainment, all that works at its peak capabilities today. And the customers aren't going to have to endure some of the improvements that we've made along to those products because they already exist. So we're going to come out with a, I think, a really good reception from a fantastic product on video and attaching. It's not for everybody, but for those who can afford that product because of where the programmers have been, it's going to be great. We're going to grow video. And the Mobile product, similarly, it's at a higher quality level through the Verizon agreement that we have. I'm not going to say much about their contract or economics, but we have good margins on what we deliver. And we're going to aggressively -- as a result of all that, we're going to market it very aggressively as part of our Spectrum One play, so.

I was always struck by on the video side, when we did see the financials, their video ARPU was really high again. But their video margins were really low, which tells you their costs were just much, much less attractive than yours. Is that a big driver? You took the run rate operating expense synergies up to $800 million from $500 million that you had originally said. I imagine video is a piece of that.

It's a piece of it, but because the penetration is so low, it's not as much as you might think. And so really, as we started to look at how the two organizations come together, the locations of different groups and facilities. And most importantly, the non-programming procurement opportunities that exist, that was really the drivers for the increase. And I think there's more. We're being intentionally careful about how we articulate until we know the time line and the scope. But there's, I think, more goodness that's going to come...

So what are the big upside opportunities that...

I think they're all, call it, 20, 30 different items. Most of it centers around procurement as we get in and find things that are either being duplicated or better rates. A good example would be B2B circuits, and that one hasn't been fully priced in yet. I don't know how big it will be, but it's just a good example of areas where we know that there's going to be significant overlap and expenditure that can be reduced.

Let's go back to wireless and wireless convergence for a second, zoom out. You just passed 12 million lines. Once you talked about this kind of converged product. I was saying to Steve Croney from Comcast in the last session. You're -- based on what we might guess your churn rate is, your share of gross adds in the wireless market is now close to 20% of the market. Your market share is still single digits. What do you think the long-term runway is for wireless, and your sort of fair share of the wireless market?

I don't think there's a specific target that we have in mind other than why wouldn't it be every single cable relationship that we have. And the reason I say that is because the product is faster. It actually works better because of seamless connectivity, and it is a much lower price point. And so you give a product that gets speed boost to a gigabit everywhere it connects to our network. It has seamless connectivity. It's the fastest mobile service, and it's the lowest cost for that type of quality in the marketplace by a mile. And so why wouldn't every single customer that we have taken multiple lines of this product? And so I think it will be for everybody. Now there's friction in the marketplace, and there's things that others do, and that takes a long time to make happen. But economically, there's no reason it shouldn't be everybody. So I don't know that I want to put an artificial target out there in terms of where we can...

Just based on your attach rates and the number of subscribers you have, it's pretty clear you have fewer lines per account than your competitors do. What's the strategy for bringing whole families over and getting the line count up?

Yes. I think you first -- when you think about the way that Spectrum One worked early on, really was about that free mobile line to get you started. And then after we convinced you that even after a year, it's a $30, the product works better than anybody else's in the marketplace, it's a faster product. Then you gain the confidence from the customer to convert over additional lines. We have a heavy program in place that we go back to customers and try to get them to up the number of lines in the household. And over time, as the brand reputations improved, and the word of mouth exists, and customers' experience with the product gets better, that's moved up, as you can see in the numbers. But we still have a long way to go, not just on penetration per household, which is now penetration to Internet is just over 20%. But in addition to that, instead of being 2 lines per household, the national average is what, 3?

Above 2.5.

Right. So let's call it above 2.5. There's huge headroom on both the penetration of Internet and the lines per household that we can go get. And you see us doing that with pricing and packaging and trying to identify when another phone inside the household is up for an EIP renewal, for example. And that's the friction that exists is you can have a household that has multiple lines in place that has multiple EIPs on cascading time lines. And so you've got to dig each one of these out at a different point in time. And that's what we do.

Can you update us on your wireless offload? You've taken your number of wireless access points. It's really -- it's sort of doubled from 2022 to today. Some of them with the dual SSID modems, and that sort of thing. Talk about where wireless offload is and where it can eventually get to?

Yes. So it's 88%, 89% today. I don't remember where we started, it was around 85%, yes, something like that. We now have about 65% of our Internet customers have...

Which by the way, if -- that doesn't sound like a lot. That's about a 30% reduction in what you're sending out to the...

And we're only at 65% of our Internet customers who have the advanced Wi-Fi, that's capable of the dual SSID. Just for those who don't know if you're -- as a Spectrum Mobile customer, if I walk around the neighborhood here, I'm probably not going to be on the Verizon 5G signal and probably going to be on Spectrum Mobile signal due to somebody else's dual SSID. And chances are I'm getting boosted to a gigabit for a second. That provides not just cost savings to us, but it provides a better quality service. And the software dictates which is going to be the better connection that they get. So we don't do it at the sacrifice of quality. So if we got to 65% of our Internet customers that have that advanced Wi-Fi capability, and that's got us to 88%, 89%, how much further -- there's probably a couple of points left that we can do just on Wi-Fi. And then as you know, we're rolling out CBRS to really push even harder. We're always going to need access to the 5G network. Think about the most obvious examples, you're driving up and down I-95, watching Peacock, hopefully, that's a passenger and not the driver.

Give it time.

But yes, I agree. In Tesla, it matters. So that's the environment. It doesn't make any sense for us to go invest in macro cell towers, and that's the beauty of the strategic relationship we have with Verizon on residential, and T-Mobile and B2B, the ability to piggyback there and provide that service.

All right. Let's jump to the topic that's on every Charter investor's mind. And that is, I get constantly the -- okay. I know you're going to reduce your leverage ratio a little bit for the Cox deal. But is it time to reduce it more and the tension between -- but your stock price is so low, you could lean into buying it back. And how are you thinking about it right now? And what's your North Star in terms of leverage?

Look, I think there's multiple ways to look at it. And thankfully, the deal we did with Cox kind of solves a lot of that and takes the debate off the table. First, I would tell you that from a personal perspective, you can see what a bunch of Board members did when the stock price sold off the way that it did, not just this time but even last year, and voted with their feet or voted with their wallet, so to speak. So the natural personal tendency is to be aggressive and to lean in. The countervailing thoughts to that are really twofold. One is we have an investment-grade structure that we're going to protect. And it's very important to us that we maintain the IG status. And so we're not going to do anything that runs the risk of priming other investors along the way. So we've got to balance that. And the third piece to that is the -- there is a technical argument that because of where the enterprise value is that the thin layer of equity trading value is actually working against us and creating volatility in a way that's not helpful to any of us as shareholders. And that would -- versus what I said at the beginning, that would offer the alternative purchase. Now you've got to create temporarily, you've got to create a little more headroom here. So you take out the volatility and you don't make yourself a target along the way.

And by the way, when it's down a layer, buying back -- paying down debt looks an awful lot like buying back equity because of the valuation...

We could get into a whole corporate finance debate around that. But yes, I understand what you're saying. The good news is that because the Cox deal is deleveraging right out of the gate so we're going to automatically deleverage at the point of close. We're going to have a boatload of synergies to benefit from. We're going to get growth inside that footprint. We've committed to over a 3-year period to bring that into the 3.5 range. And...

Is there a conversation about no, maybe given the competitive environment, it ought to be 3 or below?

Our confidence in our ability to grow and the free cash flow that we throw off says that at this point in time, there's no reason to really think about that and have that conversation. We don't have our head in the sand. So we'll go do the right thing at all times. The good news for everybody to know is that we're incentivized as much as you can be with the success of shareholders. And so we have our head on straight, but that's not a topic of conversation for us today, and I don't think it needs to be.

You've got Nick Jeffery joining in -- I think it's September if I...

Yes, September 1.

He obviously brings a tremendous amount to the table. What do you think his role is going to be? And what are you going to have him focus on when he gets started?

So thrilled with the hiring of Nick. It's a first for us to really go from the outside. And that's because we've got such a strong bench of talent that existed at Charter and that exist at Cox. But I really thought Nick brought something unique to the table. So he's going to be the Chief Operating Officer for Charter, a position that essentially I've done both of those for the past 3 years, and we didn't backfill it when I moved into the CEO role. So excited about him doing that. He'll have marketing, sales, field operations, customer operations. And that will give him the full remit to go focus on the two big areas that I think us and the industry could really benefit from, which is go to market, and improvement of our service reputation measured by our Net Promoter Score. And if you take a look at Nick's background, he did a lot of things really well at Frontier and we hated that as a competitor. But he also did a lot of good things at Vodafone in the U.K. and then globally from a B2B perspective as well. So Nick will have all of what I described for both residential and for business. So it really acts as an accelerant to the team for all the things that we're doing anyway with the ability to take a little bit, maybe even a radical approach to really getting faster in the marketplace with the go-to-market and with improving our Net Promoter Score so I'm excited to have him join. But that's what I'll do.

In this short period of time we have left, let's go back to where we started. Give us some confidence that Charter can be a growth company again?

Yes. It really kind of ties back to what you asked earlier on in the conversation, which is we have the best network, fully deployed, ubiquitous convergence, symmetrical multi-gig service and that applies to not just the wireline and Wi-Fi service but also to our Mobile. Our products are the fastest in the marketplace. We save customers thousands of dollars a year between Mobile and Video when it's put on top of our Internet product. We're making significant improvements in our go-to-market and Net Promoter Score in the meantime. And if -- and the biggest issue that we face right now is the level of new competition and market growth rate, which I still think will return to a normal environment. But in the meantime, the things -- the changes we're making can put us on a different trajectory. And if none of that like I said before, really convinces you just go take a look at the free cash flow today, take a look at the free cash flow for the next 2 years and beyond, the yield that, that produces. And the underlying asset here is the workhorse of the entire industry, not just for our wireline and wireless services, but for the wireless services of the rest of the industry as well. And so we're sitting on a very important infrastructure asset that is valuable that is -- that can't be replicated. And we don't want to rest on our laurels. So the things I said before about the ways that we're going to win customers one at a time, still prevail. But I think we've got a bright future. I'm confident in our ability to return to growth. And we sit on an amazing asset and free cash flow profile as well.

It's a great way to end it. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate you being here.

Good.