Crown Castle Inc. (CCI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good afternoon. I'm Mike Rollins and I cover the Communications Services and Infrastructure categories for Citi Research. It's a pleasure to be back at NAREIT REITweek and to host today's discussion with Crown Castle. Joining us today from the company is Interim CEO, Dan Schlanger and CFO, Sunit Patel. Dan and Sunit, great to see you. How are you today?

Great.

Great.

Thanks for doing this Mike.

Great. Well, thank you. Before we get officially underway, I just want to mention that we have these disclosures up here. And if you'd like to...

Shall I get one?

Yes, sure. Here is one for you, Dan. And if you would like any of these disclosures, please come up at any time for your copy. And also, if you need another copy, you can e-mail me at [email protected] and we will get those for you. So with those.

You definitely want one of these.

With those details out of the way, Dan, maybe to get us started. It's been a busy number of months for the company. Can you give us an overview and update on Crown Castle's asset portfolio and strategy?

Sure. Again, Mike, thanks for doing this. I appreciate you hosting us. So Crown Castle has been through a bit over the course of the last 9 months. We are a digital infrastructure company with the vast majority of our revenue and cash flow generated out of owned towers. We own 40,000 towers across the United States. Our business model is that in each tower, we rent space out to the large carriers for them to put antennas on and other equipment on to deliver a signal to your cell phone. The wireless part of your cell phone network is from your phone to that tower. And then it turns into a digital signal that gets sent through the Internet and workings via fiber optic cable. We also have a business that's a different segment that we call a fiber segment that is a combination of small cells and fiber. Small cells are the exact same thing as towers just shorter. Towers are typically 50 to 300 feet tall. Small cells typically have an antenna on top of some sort of existing street furniture or architecture, whether that be a lamppost or a telephone utility pole or a traffic light, something like that. The height is important because in order for the signal to reach you with any -- with a minimal obstruction, those antennas need to be at height pointing down to you to carry the data to you. The great part about the tower business is that all we do basically is own that infrastructure. And our customers, at this point, the large wireless carriers in the U.S. pay us for access to the space on the tower so that they can put the equipment up that they need that they own, that they also pay to operate to deliver the signal to you. So we are basically a real estate company. The real estate just happens to be vertical as opposed to in a 4 walls. And within that real estate, just like any other company, when we have a single tenant, so think of it as Verizon has a set of antennas that go around at a single place on the tower, a vertical space of the tower is dedicated to Verizon. Another would be dedicated to AT&T, another would be dedicated to T-Mobile and so on. That with one customer on our tower, just like if you were to rent out a floor of an office building, you don't make money, you need enough tenancy to make money. The first tenant on a tower, generally speaking, makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 2% to 3% returns for us. The second tenant gets into the high single digits and the third tenant gets into the mid- to high teens on returns. Our towers we have owned for the most part, since -- the vast majority of them since the early 2010s. And so those tenancy ratios are relatively high and the returns on our tower business are significantly in excess of our cost of capital at this point. The growth driver of our business is continued wireless demand -- data demand in the U.S. The demand growth in the U.S. is in the neighborhood of 20% to 30% per year. And our customers need to add equipment to add capacity into the network to withstand that increase in demand, which puts us at growing in 2025, our guidance is about 4.5% at the revenue line for our tower business. As I mentioned, we also own small cells and fiber solutions. That business we have announced a sale of, which is why we focused almost solely on the tower business. We are going to close that sale sometime in the first half of 2026. And we are going to pursue a strategy of being a pure-play U.S. tower only company. We will be the only public company that is focused only on the U.S. We believe that profile gives us a superior business model and a superior ability to deliver returns, especially on a risk-adjusted basis. That 4.5% revenue growth translates into higher cash flow growth because there's very little incremental operating cost to us of adding additional equipment to our towers. As I mentioned before, our customers own the equipment, they pay for the electricity on it to run the equipment. We basically have a fixed cost structure of owning the tower, paying the ground rent under the tower, which is the vast majority of our cost structure. But that's a fixed amount no matter how much revenue we have. So as we add revenue, we don't add costs, so our flow-through margins are extremely high. When you put all that together, we believe that 4.5% growth drives greater than 4.5% growth in cash flows. And we have set a future dividend policy of paying out somewhere between 75% and 80% of our cash generation on a per share basis. That leaves 20% to 25% of our cash flows over to do whatever it is we think is appropriate to drive the best returns. Given that we are going to focus on being a U.S. tower company, what we believe will happen will be to utilize the majority of that cash flow to repurchase shares over time. With regard to the sale of our business, we will ultimately pay down debt and buy back stock with the proceeds to put us in a position of driving what we think are very good solid returns on a risk-adjusted basis going forward and underpinned by very long contracts with the major wireless carriers in the U.S., we're all investment-grade rated. So we have a very long profile, a very stable, growing cash flows to drive very stable growing dividends. And that's what we're excited about. The separation that I talked about has been a long time in the making. We have some work to do to get it done, but we believe like I said, it will close in the first half of 2026, which leaves us in a very good position and something we're really excited about going forward.

Thanks. It gives us a lot to dig into. We also will have an opportunity to take questions from our group today. So if you do have a question, just if you could please line up on the microphone just because this is getting webcasted and we'll get to your questions. So maybe just to dig in. You talked about the pivot of going from what could be called a domestic infrastructure provider to a domestic tower pure play. Can you talk about the strategy and the opportunities to optimize your performance at tower pure play going forward?

So there are quite a few benefits. One is just strategic focus on 1 business is the management team versus 3 different businesses. Second is just optimizing the effort and overhead it takes to manage the business. These 3 businesses were very -- are very different. The tower business is a highly profitable, low capital intensity throws off a lot of cash. The fiber business takes up a lot of capital for low-digit single-digit revenue growth. A lot of the assets that you deploy electronics that have short life. And then the small cell business is high-growth, early stage, still a lot of investment required. So a totally different set of assets. So I think just managing 1 business will allow us to drive efficiencies in the short term shortly after the divestiture. Secondly, over time, I think we can focus on the margin more investments in platform systems to try and get more efficiency, productivity and also deliver a better customer experience. So I think those 3 things right there will help us drive, as Dan was saying, very high incremental margins without adding much cost at all to our business.

And if you could discuss the management changes over the past 18 months and how this new team may be looking at the business, the strategy, operations, capital allocation in a different way than maybe in the past?

Well, in the past, we have had a capital allocation that was directed as Sunit said, 3 different businesses. Going forward, we are going to be focused only on the tower business. And what that is and what's really great about it is we have growth embedded in that tower business from the data demand we talked -- I talked about earlier. But also because in our contracts, we generally have escalators that increase our revenue in the neighborhood of -- in the high 2% to near 3% range per year, which doesn't take any capital. And then the growth that we have generally doesn't take a tremendous amount of capital from us either because we have capacity on our towers to add additional equipment, adding another additional equipment brings revenue. So the capital allocation of the business gets significantly simpler going forward than it has been in the past when we were building assets and trying to drive additional growth on a different set of assets as Sunit has just discussed for small cells. Going forward, it's a relatively limited amount of capital we have to spend to get the growth on the tower business, which leaves us in, I think, a very good position of having free cash flow available after all capital and dividend payment to figure out what to do with. And as I said, because our focus is going to be on the U.S. and the towers only, we believe that the highest and best use of that capital will likely be to buy back shares. That's a very clear message going forward. And I'm in an interim role now. The Board is in the process of looking for a CEO. And I would be -- I would imagine with a lot of certainty that the Board is going to make sure that whoever is in that CEO position on a full-time basis will buy into being a U.S. pure-play tower company that is focused on returning value to the shareholders through a dividend and share repurchase because those are the major strategic decisions that have already been taken in having decided to sell the small cell and fiber business that we own now that won't by the first half of next year. So the capital allocation at this point becomes more of how do you optimize that additional cash flow to drive the best risk-adjusted return possible. And that's something that -- there are not a lot of different levers to pull in that situation. So I think the good part about our business is relatively easy to understand, relatively easy to execute, which we believe actually drives a significant amount of value because the tower business is a very long-term business and growing at 4.5% this year, turning it into higher than 4.5% at the cash flow line that really is the focus of the business. How do you get the 4.5% to be as high as possible, the growth of revenue be high as I as possible? And how do you get that incremental revenue to turn into as much incremental cash flow as possible? I'm sure the Board is going to stream the CEO to ensure that they are aligned with that outcome and the objectives of being a best-in-class operator of towers going forward.

Maybe switching gears to the tower leasing environment. Is domestic leasing activity improving over what you saw last year? And are you seeing a difference in the mix between colocation and amendments?

Yes. So our guidance for 2025 a 4.5% growth on the tower side is very similar to what we produced in 2024. So there's not a significant increase in the amount of demand right now. And we believe that the revenue growth of our business over the course of 2025 will be relatively level loaded. So there isn't a SKU first half, back half. It's basically level loaded for the year. And in terms of the comment about amendment versus colocation, just to back up for a second, our customers add capacity to their network by utilizing more spectrum, which is the amount -- the radio frequency they use to deliver wireless data to a phone. By delivering that spectrum over equipment, that sits on our tower at height as I explained earlier. In our business, that happens in 2 phases, generally. And the first phase is they add that equipment to towers they already have equipment on, which is what we call an amendment because it's amends an already existing lease on our tower. Those amendments tend to happen at the beginning of a cycle of an upgrade -- a generational upgrade as you've seen, 5G has been deployed in the U.S. The beginning of that 5G upgrade is usually a tremendous amount of amendments, adding equipment to sites that already have equipment. Then there's another phase of deployment that our customers go through that we call co-locations could also be called first-time installs where they put equipment on towers, they don't already have equipment. And that is something that is not amending an existing lease because there isn't a lease on the tower. So that's the first time installer co-location. I'm exactly sure why it's called the colocation. I think it's a bit of a difficult term. So I'll use first-time install here. That second phase of deployment to densify the network by adding first-time installations, we have not seen that pick up yet in the 5G cycle. If you look at the cycle that happened for 4G, which started in the 2010 period, the amendment cycle came and then it dipped down and colocation was years later. We're in the kind of steady state of in between the 2 right now. And as we see activity change, we'll talk about it, but that's not something we're seeing at this point.

And how would you just rate the visibility of the business based on the carrier conversations you're having and the outlook for leasing compared to historical periods?

Yes. One of the great things about the tower business. We generally have contracts with our customers that are 10 to 15 years long. They generally have, as I said, the escalator plus some amount of additional revenue from the activity that our customers provide or the activity they generate to put equipment on our towers. And generally speaking, we have a pretty significant amount of visibility because it takes from the time that they request going on a tower at the time that we actually install that equipment somewhere between 6 and 12 months because of regulatory reasons. We have to go ask the bunch of different municipal governments for the right to put additional equipment on these towers. So let's just call it 9 months. That means in 2025, we have a significant amount of the 2025 revenue growth identified already. And we have a fair amount of 2026 identified because of the underlying base of revenue we have plus the ability that we already know some of the contracts we're signing now will lead into 2026, which gives us a tremendous amount of visibility over a pretty long period of time about what our revenue is going to be with the real variable being how much growth there will be in the revenue, not anything else because once it's in the run rate, it stays for a very long period of time, which is what we've seen in our business over time is a very steady growth regardless of economic cycle or macroeconomic environment. So generally speaking, and that is true today as well, we have very good visibility into our growth -- into our revenue and the growth in that revenue over time.

And maybe just getting to customer concentration, if you could discuss the exposure, let's call it, your big 3 carrier customers versus your exposure to recent customer over the last several years, EchoStar. And maybe just in terms of context of how much revenue EchoStar contributes a year? And how much of the annual growth is contributed from this customer as well?

Yes. So we have a contract with EchoStar that is a 15-year contract that goes through 2036. So a long-term contract. They are right now in the neighborhood of 5% of our total tower revenue. And we won't -- I won't get into the amount of growth that they provide that gets into too much of the economics of our agreement specifically. But they are part of the growth of our business because we have structured that contract as an amount of money they pay us every month that escalates over time, very similar to our other contracts. The other 3 wireless carriers are in the neighborhood of 80% of our revenue and the other remaining percentage are small internet -- wireless Internet service providers or governmental agencies that need to use our towers for communication purposes.

And how does Crown differentiate itself versus your competitors, whether it's geography, rents, service levels and are there opportunities to enhance revenue performance with the refined focus on the tower portfolio?

Yes. Again, another great thing about the Tower business is, generally speaking, there are not towers next to each other. Most municipalities don't allow that. I would imagine wherever you live, your City Council has an ordinance that says, if a tower exists, you can't build another one. That means that I would not say that we go up against competition specifically. And I think we have complementary assets that cover the U.S. in a positive way. There is obviously competition in places throughout the country. But we are very good about what we believe is maximizing the revenue potential of the assets that we own. We do think there are some things that we can do to get better as we focus as soon as we're talking about earlier, on providing the highest level of customer service we possibly can. We believe we can shift small amounts of revenue towards us when there are competing structures at least for our customers. Hopefully, we can shift more our way than our fair share, that would be great. And any little bit matters when we're talking about 10 basis points of growth is important for a 7,500 year asset. So we're doing everything we can to increase the revenue growth rate of our business making it as easy as possible on our customers, being as fast as we possibly can be in getting the like I talked about that from the time they say they want a piece of equipment on the tower until we put it on the tower we want to shorten that time. So they get the benefit of having more capacity being added to the network faster. We also believe that we can -- as Sun was talking about, reduce our cost structure so that we can get more of that revenue drop to the bottom line. That really is the growth of the business going forward. But I think that our reputation in the market is very good for being a very good partner for our customers trying to solve their issues quickly and easily and making sure that we tend to whatever it is they care about at the site as quickly as possibly we can.

Are you seeing any changes in the competitive landscape, whether it's the smaller independent tower players, start-ups or even just the emerging satellite coverage that come a source of advertisement for some of the carriers?

The short answer is no. We don't see a change in competitive environment. Low earth orbit satellites do not compete with towers. We, as consumers, expect very quick connectivity. I would challenge you to say, okay, turn off the 5G on your phone, go to 3G and see how long it takes to load things and how frustrated you get. Lower orbit satellites have a long latency because the signal has to go to low earth orbit and come back. Whereas the tower provides a 0.25 mile or 0.5 mile distance that the radio wave has to travel. So the lower orbit satellites are more expensive, slower and more latency. Generally speaking, we all want faster and cheaper, not slower and more expensive. So it's not a really competitive technology where lower orbit satellites have a significant positive impact is where we don't have networks already built. So think about very rural areas or remote areas in the U.S. or more importantly, for the lower orbit companies, countries around the world that don't have significant tower terrestrial networks built out. Those are really good for lower-orbit satellites downtown New York City, Midtown New York City, it wouldn't compete at all. So we don't see lower orbit satellites as a competitive threat. And we haven't seen the competitive environment change very much.

And what are you seeing on the churn front in terms of the organic side of the business? And is that an opportunity where churn can stay lower for longer for Crown?

I mean after a period of the churn from Sprint, which this will be the last big year, I think incrementally, we have $20 million a year of churn from Sprint over the next number of years. But overall, we think we'll be 1% to 2%. And I think that, as you know, things have intensified with wireless carriers more than anyone else in that sector, and they love to compete on price coverage and speed. The latter do require more investment on towers, which we see as a good thing for us over the next number of years. So that could help our churn within 1% to 2% is where we see things settling down.

Just to remind our audience, if you have a question, just please come up to the mic and we'll get to you. Maybe switching gears to capital allocation. So as part of the announcement to divest the fiber assets, you're taking the target leverage range up to 6 to 6.5x. Can you talk about that decision? And why that's the right range for Crown Castle?

So a lot of considerations went into that. As you know, I was on the Board of Crown Castle until I stepped into the CFO role. I was a member of the Finance Committee, Audit Committee, the Fiber Review committee. On the Finance Committee, we spent a lot of time with Dan and Chris on the corporate finance team to really think carefully about capital allocation. And I think that the conclusion of that is we achieved several things. We, one, significantly improved our financial flexibility. We took a big cut to the dividend down to $4.25 million, which has already been announced effective this quarter. We also said that we also lowered our dividend payout ratio. We said it would be 75% to 80% of AFFO which means 20% to 25% of our is free cash flow. There's a bridge we included that shows about roughly $400 million of free cash flow available, which gives us a lot of financial flexibility. So from a capital allocation perspective, there does several things. One, for our shareholders is the dividend level that set that does grow over time as AFFO grows. And then we also reiterate our commitment to be investment grade. So we think that this leverage ratio we talked about, given the fact that the underlying -- the tower only business is both stable and steady in terms of revenue growth rate for a long period of time, high amounts of cash flow that it generates that we were very focused on risk-adjusted return. So keeping with investment-grade delivers puts our shareholders in a position where returns are both safer maybe than other comparable investments and pretty steady. So we thought that was the right way to go. And we're also paying down debt as part of the transaction, $8.50 billion of proceeds, so $6 million, so a $6 million of debt pay down. We also said we'd look to do about $3 billion of share buyback. So it balances both keeping the balance sheet strong, but also delivering a lot of results to our shareholders.

You referenced some of the post-close financial targets. Curious on timing. So can you walk us through how investors should think about timing to get to the close of the transaction? And then how quickly you can achieve the post divestiture financial objectives that you've outlined in some of the slides that you've shared with the investment community.

Yes. So currently, we've said divesture would occur in the first half of next year. The bridge that we provided assumes it occurs at the end of June, just for the sake of assumption, and shows you a rough 12-month forward look on that. I think the -- whenever the transaction closes, the debt pay-down is fairly straightforward and we see receive proceeds at closing. Now we have debt maturities and other things to balance out, but it shouldn't be too long, meaning it should be around that. And then secondly, on the share buyback, we would look to announce a share back buyback program upon the closing. Now the timing of exactly how that works, we'll have to see depending on the shares are, other things. But we do out of the $8.5 billion, we're allocating $6 billion to debt pay-down that still gives us another $2-plus billion of proceeds available. So that's how we're thinking about it. So some of it depends on exact timing of close, what the interest rate environments look at the time being -- look like at the time.

And so maybe one other question to kind of -- and we'll get to maybe 1 question and the final one. So changes in the macro environment, changes in tariffs, how is that, if at all, impacting your business and impacting your customers?

Well, one, I think this is one of the advantages of us being a U.S. towers only company. It's a simpler model. We don't really spend much capital on things that are impacted by tariffs. So that's the other advantage vis-a-vis other businesses in the telecom or REIT sector, we're not impacted by tariffs. Change in macro environment. I mean I think if you look at our history over the last 15, 20 years, we've grown every single year in the tower business, whether it was the financial crash, COVID, which I think just speaks to the resilience, I mean people's cell phone is their lifeline. Some people might rank it above their gas supply, electricity. So I think it's essentially a utility service and everyone needs, all of us do every day all the time. So I think the macro environment has not impacted us historically nor do we expect it to do so other than the interest rate environment, as I mentioned.

And to wrap this up, Dan and Sun, anything else that you like our audience to know and walk out of here with?

I don't think there's anything additional, but I just want to reiterate where we are. We're excited about our path forward. We think it is a cleaner, simpler story, focused on a fundamentally growing business in the U.S., which is wireless data demand from all of us as consumers translating into growth in our business, which we believe we can translate into cash flow growth, dividend per share growth and repurchase of shares to return money to our shareholders over time in a very attractive risk-adjusted return basis. And it's something that we've been working really hard towards over the course of the last year or so, and we're excited to have that opportunity in front of us by the beginning part of next year. I look forward to being able to talk about it and deliver on it going forward. So thank you very much for attending.

Thank you, everyone.