SBA Communications Corporation (SBAC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everyone. It's still morning. Well, it feels like we've already been running a marathon, right? You go up and down the stairs and running all around. But hey, welcome to the 46th Annual Raymond James Institutional Investor Conference. I'm Rick Prentiss, Head of Telecom, TMT Research. And as Brett and I like to say, our definition of TMT is T for Towers, and SBAC is here to talk about towers, m for Media and T for Telecom and satellite services. And Frank and I got a lot of those companies here this week. This will be my 29th IIC. So seeing quite a few of them as we've grown over time. Good to see all the friends in the audience that we've known through all these years here. On personal note, I want to thank everybody that we did get ranked II communication services, which is pretty cool because we don't do anything to ask, beg, plead or steal for those votes. So when we get that word that we got a II, we're like well, we really appreciate it because that's winning a right in ballot when we get something like that. So special thanks to all the people in the audience for that. Yes, from the Tower side, we've got Brendan Cavanagh here, CEO of SBAC to kick off our Tower discussions, and we'll do a brief presentation. We'll do the fireside chat to save some time for Q&A, and then we'll go down and do the breakout. Brendan, welcome back.

Thank you, Rick. Appreciate it. Good morning. It's nice to be here. And congratulations, Rick. And you guys always do a great job for all the years we've been connected to you. So I appreciate that. So this will just be a very quick overview, so we can jump into the Q&A. That's really just to kind of give you an overview to the extent you're not familiar with SBA or the tower industry just briefly on who we are. SBA has been in business now for almost 36 years, founded in 1989. We are headquartered here in Florida, down in Boca Raton. We're basically a -- we are a REIT, but we're kind of a specialized sort of REIT. We're not the traditional real estate. Our real estate consists of wireless macro towers. And we are basically landlords that lease space to tenants who take up space on those tower facilities. Our tenants happen to be the wireless mobile network operators. We are the third largest of the public tower companies here in the U.S. We trade on the NASDAQ and have been a public company since 1999. The basics of the tower industry, as I mentioned, landlord tenant business model. But what makes this business so it is; one, the underlying business of our customers and the growth of their businesses. Obviously, wireless has been something that has grown tremendously. When I first -- I've been at SBA for over 27 years. When I first joined, I thought, well, this is a great business. But at some point, we will out networks that will cover the nation and people will have phone coverage, and that's kind of it, the growth sort of stops there. We did not appreciate in the early days mobile broadband and how everything was going to change and the fact that as technology has evolved and phones have become obviously much more than phones, the amount of traffic that is passing through these networks has required so much more infrastructure. So many more antennas and radios at our tower sites that it's allowed us to continue to see a very heavy growth cycle where we've added -- our customer have added equipment to our towers every single year since we've been in business and that growth has allowed us to keep monetizing that through amendments to existing leases. So that's one of the things that's made it great. The other thing is that nobody wants a tower in their backyard, because of that zoning restrictions and other permitting limitations make it very difficult to get towers built in much of the United States. And as a result, when you do get a tower built in a particular area, it's often the only option that the carriers have for coverage in that place. And as a result, it changes the dynamic of the relationship a little bit and we have a little bit more leverage there and are able to monetize those assets as a result and frankly, have limited competition in some of those locations. There are other things that are great about it, too, but those are the 2 primary ones that have driven growth for us over the years. As we look forward, there's an expectation for mobile data growth to just continue to grow at a very nice pace. The recent Ericsson report on North American Mobile Data Traffic says that it should grow about 16% per year over the next 5, 6 years. And that underlying growth and consumption means that there's a requirement for more spectrum to be deployed and more equipment as a result on towers. And so that's why we expect to continue to see growth in our industry and SBA specifically. Basics on how tower works. I think I've probably hit this, but just basics, as I said, it's really where we're a landlord renting space to our customers, the wireless carriers, who put antennas and other equipment on the towers. All that equipment belongs to them. What we own, I'm going to actually skip to the next page. This is the picture of it. You see the entire complex there for a tower compound. But really, it's just the tower structure itself and sometimes the land that we own. Everything else is generally owned by somebody else, all the equipment that's on the ground, all the equipment that's on the towers. And what is great about that is that that's what is affected by technology so often and was constantly having to be upgraded. So that ultimately is a responsibility and therefore, the cost of somebody else to do. And our facilities largely stay the same. We have to do, obviously, basic maintenance, keep it in good shape structurally, which we do, but most of the cost sits with our customers. So it's a great business, to make sure I haven't missed anything important here, long-term lease agreements, fixed escalators in our leases here in the U.S., very low churn historically. So it's got a lot of great dynamics. And actually, the interesting thing about all these slides are, I could use these same slides 25 years ago because it really hasn't changed very much. So it's been the same story for a lot of years. You're probably wondering why I don't tell it better since I've been telling it for 25 years, but it's really been the same story for all of these years, and that's one of the things that just makes this such a great business. And with that, I'm going to come over and give it to you, Rick.

Okay. Great.

I'll leave this one up.

Yes. So truly, truly, I guess, I was the one that coined BBE, Best Business Ever. It really is not cyclical, it is high with consumption of wireless. Consumption of voice, text, data. Is AI going to come to towers and when?

Well, that's...

Because that's not in the Ericsson numbers probably.

No. No, it's not. And I think -- but I do think it is maybe inherent in a sense. I mean, the value for towers of AI, there's 2. There's the 1 that applies to most companies, which is, how do you incorporate AI into the way that you operate into your own internal processes, efficiencies, that sort of thing. And we're, of course, doing that, and I think it will make us better and help expand our margin. In terms of it as a driver of our businesses growth, I think it's really about applications that get developed and the use of AI as it becomes more prevalent for the end consumer and as you are using your device and you're using AI, that's going to require more broad-end consumption, more network capacity and that growth in network capacity will obviously drive the same things that we've seen through the other evolutions of mobile broadband growth, which is the need for more equipment and more spectrum to be deployed which ultimately benefits us as an infrastructure provider. So I think that's the real driver.

Right. And clearly, data centers are seeing it first because you've got to put the data through the data center, you've got the power issues there. It also feels to me like maybe we need to see more than just texting in words, maybe see video. Is that kind of where you think also where AI really will put the stress on the networks?

Yes, I think that's a fair point. And I think we've seen it in previous generations, pre-AI that as you move from basic texting type of applications to something that is video driven, where people are streaming movies to their mobile devices, that in some cases, in some areas, we've seen that take down the entire tower site, 1 person doing that. And so it's required them to densify their networks in a much greater way. And I would believe in the same manner, you would see that as AI becomes more video oriented, just the bandwidth consumption is so much greater.

And the movement from what you do on your desktop to your phone also probably continues.

Yes, for sure.

The growth rates. Where do you think long-term growth rates and let's do with the U.S. first. Where do long-term leasing growth rates go? You've got the churn issue with Sprint coming up. But kind of as we look at over a 5-year horizon, what kind of should we be thinking at ballpark because you're not giving guidance, but ballpark, are we looking at mid-single digit, high single digit, low single digit?

I think once we're past the -- Sprint churn is a temporary thing. It feels like it's not been temporary because we haven't talked about it for a while, but we're really kind of just getting to the heart of it now. But when you get beyond that, which is basically for those of you that don't know, obviously, you've had T-Mobile and Sprint combined, the impact of that consolidation means that you have some overlap in their networks. And so we have an elevated amount of churn as a result of that, that we're just experiencing primarily now this year and next year. But once you get beyond that, I would expect mid-single digits is a reasonable level. And basically, it's escalators that are fixed escalators here in the U.S., around 3% or so, actually slightly higher than 3%. So that you have embedded as a growth item. The organic lease-up today, as we are becoming -- it is more mature, we have sites that are obviously bigger numbers. It's probably between 2% and 4%. 2%, when it's a slower year, 4% when it's a busier year for our customers. And then you have some amount of churn. I think that normalized churn has typically been in the 1% to 2% range. So you're looking at somewhere around 5% is probably the normal level. It could be a little lower or a little higher.

And it does feel like the legacy churn, the non-carrier consolidation churn continues to come down, though. It seems like that 1% to 2% range was we might be at the 2%, while we might be at the 1.5% now it feels like maybe we can go below 1% at some point.

Yes, I certainly believe that's possible because I think you get to a certain -- maturity happens in terms of growth, but it also happens in terms of churn. You get to a certain steady state you've had consolidation largely happen across the market among our customers. So you have less of that impact. And we are seeing actually it actually coming down internally. We feel like it's a little too premature to jump to, oh, yes, it's going to be lower than what it's historically been. But it's trending in that direction. And actually, I do think that's very possible. But let's talk again another year too and see where we are at.

Yes. And you take it conversion from revenue to EBITDA or free cash flow, pretty high conversion rates, what kind of AFFO for [ trigger-able ] AFFO per share kind of can we see from that mid-single-digit organic revenue?

I would say it's probably on a normalized basis. We've been up in the double digits in the mid-teens for a lot of years. This year, we're obviously guiding to something that is a down year, and it's really because of churn and more importantly, interest rate headwinds. But I think when -- if you normalize for interest expense and FX risks, you end up in the high single digits, mid- to high single digits; it depends on the year, but I think that's a normal level.

And 2 things that have been interesting to me. One is how large the inverse correlation has been between tower stocks, SBAC and interest rates?

It's not that interesting.

It's -- but I'm surprised by it. I talk to a lot of REIT investors, obviously, too, and they've been surprised by it. [Audio Gap] Other REIT sectors have higher leverage there; 5 turns of leverage, 6 turns of leverage. So why do you think there's that significant inverse correlation particularly for tower stocks to interest rates?

I think it's hard for me to answer exactly. We obviously are higher levered. As you said, there are some other REITs that are also in a similar category. Certainly, the higher leverage has an impact. We have more maturities that come along more often, I think there's more shorter-dated debt that we had in place. And I actually think the impacts of the interest differential is greater for us because, for example, our next 3 securitization maturities that will come up not this year, but into the next couple of years, all have a 1 handle on them in terms of the interest. And so you're looking at interest expense on those instruments, just same instrument tripling or even more possibly. And so the relative impact of it, I think, is quite significant. But I actually think that one of the other reasons is that it also affects our customers. We're very dependent in terms of our organic growth on the CapEx of the wireless carriers, and they also are impacted when interest rates are higher. You see a little bit less spending or spending in different ways. And when that happens, our organic growth is impacted at the same time that our own balance sheet is going to be impacted. And so I think that -- it's almost like a double whammy. But as you see interest rates come back down at some point, you have the same thing happen in the other direction, though.

And somewhat related, but one of the other things that's been interesting to me has been the difference between private multiples and public multiples. I mean private companies have to finance also. Many times they're levered much higher as a private company. They feel they can go not just 5 or 6, but high single digit, maybe even double digit. Are you still seeing the private multiples well above public multiples? And why do you think it's been persisting if it's still there?

Yes. Well, I'd say in the U.S., we are still seeing it. Internationally, we've seen a lot more rationalization. If you look around, you see particularly in emerging markets, you see very little deals getting done. And I think that's the sellers and the buyers haven't -- the sellers haven't come along to where the buyers have gone in terms of their perspective. Domestically, I think the difference is that you have just such a small supply of opportunities and a lot of money that's been chasing these opportunities. And so that supply-demand imbalance has driven it to some degree. I think there's also a sense that, hey, "I'm always able to accumulate this conglomeration of assets and tell them at a higher rate down the line." there may be different perspectives in terms of organic growth, too, it's hard to say for sure. But I think it's more just the lack of supply and competitive nature of these folks that are already in and feel like their only path to grow. Whereas the bigger companies haven't necessarily -- we're not in that same situation. We don't feel that. But we do also have to report every single quarter. And so it's more impactful to us to do heavily dilutive deals, and it is a private company who has time to kind of wait that out and see how things play out. But yes, I mean, at some point, you would think there will be rationalization. And I do think there will be greater rationalization, but it's taken a little bit longer than we would have thought.

And so when you look at the ability of your balance sheet for growing that AFFO per share, you can look at external growth with M&A, you can delever, you can do stock buybacks. Help us understand the calculus of how you're looking at that currently and where it might head?

Yes. So a big part of how we've value over our entire existence has been through, I think, pretty good capital allocation decisions. And I was -- I've been there throughout all of that. So I have the same perspective that we've had for many years. And I think the challenge is just this environment is different. We haven't -- what we just talked about is a huge part of it. It's affected our ability to do the same kind of what we call mom-and-pop acquisitions that we have done throughout our history in an accretive manner right away. And so that has limited what we've been able to do there. And as a result, we had to do more other things. We've actually delevered. So debt coming down has been a part of it. We've also done some buybacks along the way. And I would expect going forward, you will see a mix of all of these things, somewhat dependent on the opportunity set. All things being equal, our preference is to add assets to grow our portfolio, but it really depends on the opportunities and the price of those opportunities. We could talk -- we just signed a big deal in Central America to spend close to $1 billion on over 7,000 towers down there. A lot of great things about that deal. We could talk about that in a minute if you want. But that -- that's an example of -- we saw something that makes a big difference to our portfolio, strengthens us in a market where we already are, improves our relative exposure to the U.S. dollar, long-term lease agreements, all those things. And so when we see those opportunities, we're going to do that, and that's our first priority. But if we don't see them, you should expect to see more buybacks and even some delevering, further delevering.

So it's going down there. So Millicom, big operator globally, some people in the U.S. maybe haven't heard them. Why was that the right deal to do? And why were you the winner?

Yes. I think it worked very well for both of us. It was kind of a win-win for both Millicom and SBA. One, we were already in basically all of these markets. This deal allowed us, this is Central America across 5 different countries in Central America. We already had a presence there. Others who didn't probably weren't anxious to go into some of these markets now. So that gave us an advantage, I think, in the conversations in terms of who is really going to be there and willing to pay for it. But the second thing, and it allowed us to get a good price, by the way. But the bigger thing is as we were looking at our international portfolio, we've recognized over our years of operating what makes us successful in markets and you really do need to be in a leading position in these places. You need to be one of the top providers of infrastructure. We have other markets where we are not. And it is very challenging to get the carriers' attention. It is very challenging to secure any sort of meaningful growth projects that they might have. And so having that sizable position, this puts us as the #1 operator across the entire region and pretty much ensures that forever. It aligns us also with the leading carrier in the market. Millicom is the #1 carrier across most of these markets. That means that you've got a long-term player, stronger financial situation. We've had other markets where we've been over-indexed to a weaker carrier. And as a result, it brings in consolidation, churn risk and other things. So the alignment with the #1 carrier in the strongest position is a huge part of why we did it. But it was also accretive immediately to AFFO because we could do it at an attractive price at 11x multiple. It's all U.S. dollar-denominated currency, so there's no FX risk. We got 15-year leasebacks from Millicom. So we have a long-term committed tenancy with all or nothing renewals, by the way, on that. So really, in fact, I think it's a longer-term commitment. And having all of that in place allows us to become -- we also got extensions to our existing leases with them in the market. I know I was forgetting one. So all of those things made this a win for us across the board. It did all the things we were strategically trying to accomplish and it strengthened our position in this region. And other regions, we'll see whether we can accomplish something similar. And if we can, right, if we can't, we may look to exit, and we've announced that in a couple of our subscale markets already.

It does feel like the tower industry is looking at pruning. Should we take a look at what branches haven't borne fruit. Walk us through a little bit about that process that we see from you guys and where it implies for capital allocation?

Yes. So well, particularly on the international markets, we've been going through a strategic review, which is ongoing at all times, but a very targeted one around each of our markets and what are the real potential paths that we could go down and might occur and that is informing how we think about what's the right long-term decision to make. All the things I just mentioned that I won't reiterate around the positioning and who we're aligned with, that's a huge part of it. And in some markets, we've found that we don't believe that, that's probably something we're going to likely be able to do because of what others have already done, other competitors, whatever the situation may be. And in those cases, it's better to exit those markets, get out whatever we can and recover our investment, if we can ideally and just move on. It's not all that material to the financials, but it allows us to focus better and I think to be a better organized, better disciplined company. So that's the decisions that we're making there. And I think that applies to other businesses as well. It's not just our international operations, but we look at other things that we're doing, too, and we say, how can this be meaningful, material and additive to the business that we're in. And if it can't be that at some point, it's probably something we should move to the side.

One of the questions we get very topical lately is, isn't Elon Musk going to make towers and wireless go away with satellites?

I don't think he's going to do that, no. But yes. No, I mean satellites, the funny thing about satellites are I've been -- and you've been around as long as I have, you've been hearing about satellites probably for the entire time. I've had that question 20 years ago, we used to get it. Now it's obviously become much more prevalent because of -- they've made advances. You have the -- obviously, you have somebody in particular, who is -- has the money, the smarts and the influence to help them advance this. But there are certain limitations that still make it impractical. What they're really doing that this thing is offering something or hoping to offer something that is largely complementary to the terrestrial networks. And that is coverage in areas that's just not cost-effective to cover today. So more rural areas, maritime coverage, things like that is where the satellites are the right fit. And the reason that it's not a great solution in your typical area like this is the spectrum limitations, the power limitations, the amount of penetration of buildings, all of these things. And while advances can be made in those areas, they've pretty significant gaps today. And even as they close some of those existing wireless, delivery technologies continue to advance as well. And so the gap, we don't stay in the same place as they get closer, we both continue to move. I think there will -- it will be interesting to see how it plays out over the long term in 10 years where we are. I think there will be some marrying of satellite and terrestrial networks in a more coordinated fashion but we'll have to see. I don't really worry about it as a risk.

We did have Mark Dankberg, CEO of ViaSat in about an hour ago, I asked him the question, he goes, no. The latency, the delay in his answer was immediate. No, satellite are not making terrestrial networks go away. But it is a question that people that are generalists or people that aren't living and breathing towers and wireless that they see influence. They see the money. They see the issue. So I appreciate that answer. As you look at your stock, what is it you think, are investors missing anything that you'd like to take this opportunity to say, "Hey, guys, just think of this."

It's hard to say what everybody is missing or seeing. I think sometimes it's a matter of comparison to other things at a moment in time for a lot of folks. But when you look at what we offer, the long-term stability, there's no risk in our stock. I know our stock has underperformed. There's no risk in our business, I guess, I should say. The cash flow continues to grow. We continue to see wireless expanding. It allows for us to constantly have organic growth. So that stability that -- the significant amount of cash flow that we produce that we're able to put back into the business or return to shareholders in some form of remuneration, whether buybacks or dividends. Our dividend growth is one of the leading percentage growth in the entire REIT industry, not just in the tower industry, where we're the leader. So there's a certain consistency and stability to it that I think in some markets makes it extremely attractive. The other thing is today, where it's valued, I mean, we're basically at a historical low valuation. So if you're looking for a time period where it's a good time to get in, this would seem to be a good one to me, and it's something that we certainly look at even internally when we're making decisions on our own capital allocation. So those would be the things I would say. There's a lot of other great things about the business. But I think it depends on what the investor is looking for. If you're looking for a consistent, stable performer with steady growth, and this is it, if you're looking for something that's going to double in its size next year? I'm talking about the cash flow or the revenue.[Audio Gap]

So the question is 5G, there was kind of a first leg of growth and then it kind of pauses, there a second leg or where are we at in the 5G deployment? And is there more to come?

Yes. So we look at -- from our perspective, we look at 5G based on the mid-band spectrum that's been rolled out or the upgrades that have taken place at our sites. And between the 3 big carriers here in the U.S. we're about 55% of our sites have been upgraded, but it's not even among the carriers. One of them is closer to 80%. That would be T-Mobile because they had mid-band spectrum through the Sprint acquisition earlier. And so they're further along. The others are at lower levels. And so there's a lot of upgrade activity that's still left to happen there. I think the dynamic that I mentioned earlier in terms of the broader cost of capital has had an impact. Plus the fact that there hasn't been sort of that killer 5G application that has created the competitive tension that we've seen in previous cycles. It has driven them, I think, to accelerate that pace. But we are seeing now, even though there has been a bit of a lull, we are seeing a pickup in activity. We ended last year with the highest level of application backlogs that we had all year, and we're seeing better executions in terms of dollar amounts signed up at the back half of the year and really even into the beginning of this year. So we expect to see it actually accelerate all throughout the year.

And last one, I'll piggyback on that as we wrap up; colocation versus amendment. Co-locations take a little longer but they're probably worth a whole lot more.

Yes. I'd rather have more colocations and amendments because it's more points of presence and more opportunities to see upgrades and expansions in the future, right? We are seeing a greater mix of our new revenue being signed up, come from colocations and from amendments. And historically, at least the last 10 years, it's larger than the other way around. So that shift is very positive. The 1 thing that you mentioned is that typically with a brand new lease installation, the time from signing it to when it actually starts to commence revenue is a little bit longer than when it's an amendment, it just takes longer to actually get that installation in place. So you're looking at typically a 6- to 9-month lag between execution and new lease revenue recognition.

My words, not yours. It feels like that tone should set for a better '26 than a '25, which is what investors kind of look for is they're accelerating growth? My words, not yours, because I'm going to put you in that box, but...

Yes. I mean we expect the contribution to the P&L to be higher each quarter in the U.S. each quarter throughout this year. So obviously, we'll see where we are at the end of the year, but that would be a logical assumption.

Thanks, everybody. We'll take it down to the breakout. We'll get some microphones.