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TMUS Q1 2020 Earnings Call

May 6, 2020 at 12:00 AM

Company
TMUS
Quarter
Q1 2020
Date
May 6, 2020 at 12:00 AM
Speakers
1
Word Count
~10,106

Transcript Content

null
Thank you for the update. Good evening. I appreciate all the insights. Mike, could you share where you currently stand with the integration after a few weeks of working with the Sprint team? Given the challenging circumstances, what positives have you observed so far? Are there any areas where you find things are taking longer than expected? And Neville, it's good to see the 5G rollout. Can you provide more details on what we can anticipate from the fixed wireless initiatives in 2020 and beyond? Thank you. Mike Sievert (CEO): Well, sure. Yes Simon, I have to say that one of the things we're most excited about is, as I said in my remarks upfront, is that after five weeks as one team, if anything, we see more potential to go faster and to go bigger on synergy attainment and growth than we had been expecting. And there are a number of reasons for that. Among them the fact that we see opportunities to move faster on certain things like network. We had a long time to prepare for this merger. And we left a lot of track when it comes to permitting and leasing and we're moving fast. And as we start to knock this down, it does appear that there's going to be a pace to this that may be able to stay ahead of schedule relative to our now two-year-old plans that calculated up all these synergies. Retail rationalization might go faster than expected. We had always expected to get after marketing one brand pretty quickly, but getting the retail fleets rationalized due to systems issues and people issues, et cetera was something we always thought would take a little bit more time. We may be able to move faster, and that could accelerate synergies. Procurement looks like an area of possibility to exceed plan. On the customer side, the churn level of Sprint customers is one of the most financially sensitive things. And we certainly have hopes that we can see faster movement there as we tackle this network integration at a faster pace. Already we've lit up more roaming for Sprint customers than we had expected to be able to do, and we're starting to see how they respond to that. And you know what? They like it, which is great. So we're not in a position to guide on it or to give you anything concrete yet. I can just tell you that, five weeks in we're really optimistic. And you saw from our print today that standalone business is very strong. You saw our Sprint subscriber numbers a couple of days ago. Those were better than most people expected. So we also walked into this with some momentum. Now, as Braxton pointed out, COVID took a bite out of that for everybody. And there are temporary impacts on our business. But you know what? They're just that, temporary. And our view is that if anything, there's opportunity in the environment that we're going to see when social distancing lifts. As I said in my remarks, people are going to be looking for value. They're really going to be hungry to make sure they've got the right value. They're not going to drop this category. I mean, no way. This category is so important, but they might be asking if they've got the right carrier. And if switching comes and is elevated versus these low levels, we will be prepared to stand up and give customers what they're looking for. So we're feeling very optimistic. Even though it's the premise of your question, look, there's some aspects to it that have knocked everybody in this industry off their stride. Comparatively speaking, we feel very good. And over the mid and long-term, we perhaps feel even better than our deal model that we contemplated two years ago. Your second question, I think, was for Neville and I might follow up too about the network conditions and as it relates to broadband, right?
null
Sure.
null
Yes, I’ll take that. It's great to see Simon, and as you mentioned, the rollout of 2.5-gigahertz spectrum is crucial. This gives us a significant advantage in the mid-band 5G space. Mike highlighted that T-Mobile now has over 300 megahertz of sub-6 gigahertz spectrum, and my team is eager to move forward with this rollout. We stayed active during the deal, engaging in leasing and zoning activities. We were already building out 2.5 in Philadelphia and parts of New York before the deal was finalized, allowing us to activate some of this infrastructure immediately upon closing. As we mentioned, the 2.5 rollout in New York is going live this week. Regarding broadband and fixed services, that 2.5-gigahertz spectrum is essential. As we increase this rollout, it will enhance our capacity, providing strong 5G service not only in traditional mobility and wireless but also in broadband. While it will take time to roll out completely—months to a few years—I believe we'll start delivering that broadband service to our customers as we outlined in our planning. This is a significant factor in how we plan to shape the competitive landscape moving forward. While we may not see much progress this year, I am optimistic about making strides next year and beyond. Mike Sievert (CEO): Simon, the cable companies are good companies. They're good people, but it's the least competitive market in the history of man. I mean, everybody knows that. And so to us, as you know, you know how we're wired. I mean, we're competitors. And as Neville says, we're itching to get in there, because we've got a value proposition that I think is going to resonate with millions of people to be able to bring 5G-based home Internet access to people that have never had a choice, never one single choice for many of them. And man, that's going to be fun. So we've got to get the network in condition. As Neville said, it's more next year and beyond than this year, but we're rearing to go, and we see a very big opportunity to change that landscape in that market forever. Great. Thanks a lot. Jud Henry (Head of Investor Relations): Hope another one is coming from the phone operator. null (Operator): Thank you. Our next question comes from Brett Feldman with Goldman Sachs.
null
Thanks. I actually want to follow-up. Mike Sievert (CEO): Hi, Brett.
null
Hey, guys. I want to follow-up something Mike you were just talking about, the ability to bring Sprint churn down maybe faster than you initially hoped. You alluded to one tactic, which was more rapidly making roaming onto the T-Mobile network, which has superior coverage available to them. But what else do you have to do? Is there a lot of outlets you need? Are there certain vulnerable customers who maybe aren't on the right rate plans and legacy Sprint churn on the phone side was twice legacy T-Mobile churn? I mean, what's the bogey here? Can you get it down to T-Mobile levels? What's realistic? And then just a quick one for Braxton. I don't know if you have it or not, but do you know what the pro forma cash position of the company was at closing, net of all the closing fees and so forth? Thanks. Mike Sievert (CEO): Well, I'll take the first one. And yes, Brett. As you know, the number one driver of churn for any carrier and particularly for Sprint is network. And that's what drives people away more than anything. Network. And then the second one is value. And then you bump those two key drivers of churn up against the value proposition that we're building, we're building the best network at the best value. No one's ever been able to offer that before, the lowest prices and the best network. And those are why people churn, bar none. That's it. Those are the top two out of two. So I can't predict for you how fast that will dawn on Sprint customers, as we start to give them at their incredible rate plans, the best network in the country. But they're going to turn out, because of this merger to be some of the smartest shoppers this industry has, because we're not going to force them to change their rate plans. We're going to honor those rate plans. And yet we're going to serve them up the best network that this industry's ever seen. So we're starting to see some benefits of that already, and people like it. So that's great. But we've got a lot of work to do. To your point about rate plans, we don't think we have all that much tuning up to do. It turns out that the differences between Sprint ARPU and T-Mobile ARPU don't have much to do with the fact that Sprint's prices are higher. It has to do with artifacts like, T-Mobile has more lines per account, and therefore more added lines on average than Sprint does, and a different penetration of business, and different numbers of unlimited customers, other artifacts, but not really a dynamic that would suggest that Sprint's prices are higher. So I can't wait to get at it. As we talked about, we're going to start to unify this summer under one T-Mobile flagship brand with an integrated retail fleet and integrated brand that we're going to do everything we can to get that network experience tuned up for Sprint customers faster than they expect. And I think we're going to like what we see from all that. Braxton Carter (CFO): Hey Brett, regarding the pro forma opening cash or the actual cash for New T-Mobile, we had $7.5 billion after settling all merger-related expenses on April 1. We also have a $4 billion undrawn credit facility in place for five years. This gives us a total liquidity of $11.5 billion. Interestingly, two to two and a half years ago, when we projected the opening balance sheet, we estimated $11 billion in liquidity, which included that $4 billion credit facility. This means we are actually $0.5 billion ahead of our projections. I appreciate your question. With our financing secured and the opening liquidity, we have a fully funded business plan to achieve everything necessary for our run rate synergies. You heard Mike express our enthusiasm about accelerating these synergies, which will also involve some upfront costs, but this will enable us to realize those benefits sooner. Particularly in light of COVID-19, we are intensely focused on speeding up these synergies to mitigate the impacts we are facing due to this unprecedented global crisis. Mike Sievert (CEO): Thank you. So, let's go over to Twitter since this is a Twitter conference. And again you can send us questions #TMUS or @MikeSievert. Neville let's bring you into the conversation. Walt Piecyk has a question. Actually there's two questions you might address simultaneously. Walt says what percent of macro have 2.5 gigahertz in the city Neville. I assume he's talking about New York. And then Ronald @ronald_809, I love this one because again we launched last night. Okay. We launched last night in New York City the first example of our full-layer cake. Hey Neville when will the new T-Mobile layer cake expand to fully cover NYC like the Bronx and Queens and Staten Island didn't you leave out parts of Brooklyn? So, how about it Neville?
null
I wish I could say everything would happen this week, but yes to both questions. We're just getting started and are excited to make this progress. We are only five weeks into our combination with Sprint, and we're already deploying. We were determined to move quickly, and I think people were surprised at how fast we're deploying the 2.5-gig spectrum. We're making a strong start in major cities. For instance, if you consider the square miles of the area we launched in Philadelphia, we built and activated it within 30 days of the deal. That area is about two to two and a half times the entire footprint of Verizon's millimeter wave 5G across the country. They’ve been rolling out their 5G for around two years, but we’ve more than doubled the footprint in just one month. In terms of mid-band 5G versus millimeter wave, our coverage will be superior. We're moving quickly, especially in key Northeast markets. I want to acknowledge my team and the Ericsson team for their excellent work in making this happen. Looking ahead, we plan to launch and expand the 2.5-gigahertz spectrum across thousands of sites this year. We’re off to a great start, building on last year’s efforts, which we undertook at risk. The rollout of 2.5 is set to progress rapidly. We’ve managed to navigate COVID-related permitting delays while ensuring the health and safety of our teams. Our status as a critical service provider has been crucial. In April alone, we built over 1,000 sites, adding new spectrum. We plan to ramp up significantly as we move into May and beyond. There’s a lot of 2.5-gig coming, with New York, Philadelphia, and other Northeast markets as priorities, along with major metros across the U.S. We have many more developments in the pipeline, and we’ll keep everyone updated. New York just went live, and there were tests showing speeds of 600 to 700 megabits per second, even with a limited amount of deployed 2.5-gigahertz spectrum. Remember we secured around 150 megahertz through our merger with Sprint, so we have significant potential for performance improvements ahead. What we currently have in place is incredibly exciting, vital to our deal, and essential for enhancing consumer experience as we aggressively move forward this year. Mike Sievert (CEO): And Neville, while you're on a roll, I ask this at some risk and peril because I know you're enthusiastic. But I responded to Brett's question a little bit by discussing the roaming situation and we're getting questions now on the site. Could you tell us more about what's the roaming experience like for Sprint customers, how much of it is happening? And roaming itself is kind of a funny turn because they're all our customers. But we're essentially using roaming technology while we operate two networks. Can you just very briefly touch on the day-to-day experience that Sprint customers are experiencing now that we've turned that up so extensively?
null
Yes, absolutely. Kudos to John Sore, Prasad, and the team for their work on momentum and integration. We launched nationwide LTE roaming across all our sites on April 1, which required significant effort beforehand. This means that Sprint postpaid customers, regardless of their location, now have access to the T-Mobile network when they are out of range of Sprint. We know that this network churn was a major factor in Sprint’s overall churn, and we are seeing a significant increase, with about 10 million unique Sprint customers utilizing the T-Mobile network weekly. This accounts for more than one-third of Sprint's postpaid phone subscriber base. Recently, we've also activated nationwide 5G access on our low band, and that coverage continues to expand, now reaching 250 million people. We've just launched in the Bay Area, and our 5G strategy's foundational layer is growing rapidly. The teams are doing an excellent job building out 600, and Sprint customers with 5G-capable phones can access this expanding footprint as well. We are very focused on ensuring that all of our Sprint customers benefit from the combined Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Mike Sievert (CEO): Well, thanks everyone. That's all the time we have. Thanks for joining us today. Operator, let's take the next question from the phone queue. null (Operator): Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Rollins with Citi.
null
Hi, thanks. Good afternoon. Curious, if you could just provide some additional color as you're approaching the midpoint of the quarter just in terms of this environment. A little more of what's happening to sales activity and maybe the customer payment behavior. Some companies have disclosed the number of pledges their customers have taken. And you mentioned earlier a cost for COVID-19 that will be excluded from EBITDA. I think it was about $450 million to $550 million for 2Q. Could you just expand on what would get incorporated into those expenses? Thanks. Mike Sievert (CEO): Braxton, let's begin with you on the details of what is included and how to consider the cost. Matt and I can then collaborate on the insights we have from the marketplace. Braxton Carter (CFO): Yes, absolutely. So Mike with really busting down the COVID guidance you have about $350 million-ish of supplemental pay and paid time not worked. And we were paying hazard pay for some of the critical infrastructure that we had to put up. It's an amazing accomplishment of what happened in customer service. At the start of this crisis, everyone reported to a call center. Callie has now well over 90% of our customer service reps fully connected in the home and not working. But during that time period, we absolutely were paying hazard pay as well as supplemental pay to support and keep our team intact. That also happened in the retailer and dealer community. So that $350 million is really dissipating at this point. As Mike said, we're significantly opening up distribution as the country steps out of this. And that won't be a significant reoccurring item. The second item is facilities and cleaning and PPE. And that's roughly a $50 million ticket. Very extensive protocols in place, extremely important to protect our people and to protect our customers, and a very understandable and worthwhile expenditure. The final item on here is a range on bad debt, specifically related to the FCC pledge. All other bad debts, of course, aren't included in here nor regular pay for people who are working. And that bad debt range is going to be somewhere in the $75 million to $125 million. What's happening is the inability to disconnect; you're building up multiple layers of payments that need to be due. And at this point, this is our best estimate that we've seen that we were able to come up with about the ultimate cost of this pledge, which has now been extended through June 30 on our business. We are certainly taking mitigation items. We got a significant number of customers that are paying. But we do have customers who aren't paying and thus we anticipate that additional bad debt. So that's really the breakdown for you on that. Any other questions before we go to the other part of your question?
null
That's very helpful. Thanks. Mike Sievert (CEO): Yes. The second piece, we're a share taker. And a share taker likes a competitive environment with a certain amount of churn. Everybody's been home, and churn itself has fallen quite a bit. And so obviously, we like an environment where people are able and have less friction to being able to switch providers. And notwithstanding that, we've been competing very hard and finding really innovative ways to get that done. So we were killing it in January and February. And then, of course, things came to a pretty fast stop in March. We were quicker to execute slowdowns and shutdowns of our retail in March. We felt it was very important to be decisive. We're based here in Seattle where the whole thing started, and we took it probably more seriously than others did. So we moved faster. And we may have been more effective in March than some. All that has equalized now. But Matt, why don't you give us a little color on what you're seeing? And then very briefly, I may ask Jon to talk a little bit about virtual retail and curbside and some of the things happening to mitigate market environment from Matt Staneff.
null
Yes. Thanks, Mike, for the question. As Mike Sievert just said, we saw a pretty rapid slowdown in our business because we took these proactive measures around retail stores for the health and safety of our employees and customers in general. And the market had a pronounced decline right off the gate. And what you're seeing, what we're seeing in the marketplace right now is generally consistent with what you're hearing in the news and in other places is that things are starting to rebound, and things are starting to turn a corner. It was closed down and slowed for quite a while in the first part of the month. We're seeing generally speaking some of the categories that you naturally would expect to react in a marketplace like this to rebound faster interpret that as the prepaid market is starting to rebound a little bit more. There's stimulus money in the marketplace. Consumers are coming out and starting to shop again and switch. And as Mike said, we really enjoy a marketplace where there's a lot of industry switching and that's important for us to continue to grow our net adds as we move forward. So we're starting to see some signs that the marketplace is rebounding in the areas I've talked about, but we've got a long way to go to get back to normal levels of industry switching and consumer buying behavior as we see this thing out throughout the quarter. We've also seen some particular strength in some of the other areas public sector as an example. Lots of students need connectivity on learning and things of that nature. So we've been pretty active in participating in those parts of the markets as well. Mike Sievert (CEO): We're not waiting for the market to just return to normal. We're changing how we operate. Jon Freier just very briefly about the rapid work we've done to change what retail means in this company.
null
Yes, Mike. Thank you. On March 16th, we made a significant decision to close around 80% of our company-owned retail stores. Instead of waiting for the situation to resolve on its own, we took proactive steps to transition many of our retail employees into virtual retail mobile experts. This allows customers visiting tmobile.com to chat with an expert for more information or to add lines to their accounts. In a time when many families were adapting to remote learning, we wanted to ensure we remained available while our stores were closed. As a result, we experienced a 500% increase in virtual retail engagement by shifting our mobile experts from physical stores to this online platform. Additionally, we introduced curbside delivery, a capability that didn't exist prior to COVID-19. Working with our product and technology teams, we established this service at all of our company-owned stores, enabling customers to communicate with T-Mobile through the app and conduct transactions for contactless pickup. I am incredibly proud of how quickly we adapted to serve our customers. Our frontline teams across all stores and customer care have shown remarkable dedication; I can't emphasize enough how proud I am of their efforts to ensure business continuity while serving our customers effectively. Jud Henry (Head of Investor Relations): Well, terrific. Well, operator, let’s go back to the phone for next question. null (Operator): Certainly. Our next question comes from John Hodulik with UBS. Mike Sievert (CEO): Hey, John.
null
Great. Hey, how are you doing Mike? Thanks for the question. I guess, first on that postpaid net add guidance for 2Q for New T-Mobile zero to 150,000. Typically postpaid phones are a subset of that number. So I know you don't typically guide to phones, but should we understand that how the stores are closed that you guys might actually lose postpaid phones in the second quarter? And then maybe if there's sort of some background in terms of what are your assumptions within that number in terms of bringing those stores back online? Mike Sievert (CEO): No, we expect postpaid phones to be positive, not negative. And we're seeing nice trends develop. So we gave the guidance that we gave. I'm very hopeful that we'll see strength through the rest of the quarter. And it does assume that we continue to see some increasing momentum slowly happening through the quarter as social distancing ebbs a bit. But it doesn't assume a wholesale change in customer behavior. We would assume that June would have more going on than May and May more than April, but not step changes. And Neville, do you want to hit the second one very quickly? Braxton Carter (CFO): Let me just add really quick too. John, you know our playbook. And our playbook has not changed. We're conservative in the way we position to The Street. We got an impeccable track record of doing what we said we were going to do, and nothing has changed about that. Neville?
null
Yes. So thanks John. We doubled our speeds. I mean, I think the additional 600 was great kind of country, and our customers needed it during COVID-19. We've obviously extended our pledge commitment. We are working with many of those 600 providers to see if they will extend. I'm hopeful they will and continue to enable us to better serve our customers during this period. So more capacity and more speed is exactly what was needed and allowed us to deal with a lot of peaks and increases in traffic that we saw on the network during a very difficult time. So big shout out and thank you to the FCC and Chairman Pai and also the holders that loaned us their spectrum. And as I said, we're hopeful they'll extend a little longer with us as the pledge continues.
null
Thank you. Jud Henry (Head of Investor Relations): All right. Let’s go back to the phone, operator. null (Operator): Certainly. Our next question comes from Philip Cusick with JPMorgan. Mike Sievert (CEO): Hey, Phil.
null
Congratulations again on getting the deal done and Mike on your promotion. Great. First Braxton, assuming your EBITDA was stable from 1Q to 2Q at T-Mobile, the guide would imply Sprint EBITDA ex-leasing of about $1.4 billion to $1.55 billion. So about $6 billion run rate, which is about what we expected maybe a little lower. Do you expect to restate EBITDA that Sprint's doing from this methodology? Or is this guide a good way to look at the run rate going forward? Braxton Carter (CFO): Yes. It's a great question Phil. We are in the process of aligning over 200 accounting policies that are disparate. And you can be informed on the significant items in the pro formas that we put out. So, we know the material ins and outs, and those are certainly embedded in here. But there's a lot of miscellaneous stuff that we're working through. We also have the very significant exercise of the purchase price allocation. And what assets, how do we value the assets are going to create differences that are not known at this point throughout the geography of the income statement. We don't anticipate any material deviations from the purchase price accounting on the EBITDA numbers that are already baked into this guidance. But what we haven't worked through is all the valuation of the assets including capitalized lease devices things like the wireline business, so on and so forth. And that can create some issues when it comes to what the valuation and what the depreciation run rate is. But we're not providing net add or EPS, but there will be changes that come out of this. We also have a significant KPI alignment to the T-Mobile policies. And in our disclosures, as you pour through everything, you will see that we have specifically mentioned that there will be significant adjustments to the Sprint subscriber base. And until we finish that work, we're not in a position to quantify it. It will be significant. It will be reductions in multiple categories. And of course, that will have impacts on various KPIs as we're looking at the business. Hopefully, that's helpful.
null
That is helpful. But going back to the guidance, since you provided guidance on total EBITDA and then ex-leasing, can we say that none of the changes you mentioned would be sufficient to move it outside of the range you've given? Braxton Carter (CFO): We have an excellent track record and we are cautious in our guidance. However, we are confident in its significant representation or we wouldn't have provided it. Mike Sievert (CEO): Yes, we didn't quantify it because we work with every customer. A significant part of our operation is that we support customers with very tight budgets and those facing challenging circumstances. It's part of our normal routine to engage with every customer and meet their needs, and we have continued to do that. Callie Field and her team have managed this while transitioning 15,000 employees to work from home, which constitutes 92% of our workforce. We are honoring our commitment, and while it has been costly, it's challenging to count every individual customer because we focus on how we treat them. We won't disconnect them but will encourage them not to accumulate bills they can't manage and ensure they are on services they can afford. Our customer care team has been exceptional in this regard and has adapted under Callie's leadership. I'm proud of their efforts, but it is difficult for us to quantify this in numbers. We have, however, ensured that you understand the overall potential financial impact. Let's go to Twitter for a question, and then I will take two more from the phone. I will need to step away for the last few minutes of the call, and Braxton will take over. I don’t want to overlook Twitter, where Bill Ho is asking about enterprise and the integration and ramp-up of T-Mobile Business Group. Mike Katz and Mike Sievert, what are your thoughts on enterprise segment growth and competition? Is it an easy opportunity? Just to clarify, when we mention day one, we're referring to mid-summer for consumer, but Mike Katz and his enterprise team have achieved day one by integrating the combined Sprint and T-Mobile sales force under one value proposition and the T-Mobile brand this week. We're making progress rapidly, and I’m very proud of what our team is doing to seize this opportunity. Mike, do you want to briefly share your insights on what you're observing?
null
Yes. Thanks Mike. Yes, I think one thing that's important is at stand-alone T-Mobile we already had a lot of momentum coming into the integration. We had record quarters in enterprise and large government for the last couple of years every single quarter, so a lot of momentum. So now this larger, now integrated team has a lot to work with. And this trade-off that Mike talked about at the beginning of the call, customers historically had to trade between great network and great price and service experience, that is as important to enterprise customers as it is to consumers. And what we're seeing so far is we interact with enterprises. And they're really, really responding to that. And I think the timing for it couldn't be better as we're in the middle of COVID and big macroeconomic impacts as a result of COVID. We're seeing many enterprises going through big cost transformation exercises including what they spend and how they structure their spend in this category. And we think that positions us for a lot of opportunity considering that AT&T and Verizon control 90% of the revenue in the enterprise space. So, we think it's a big, big growth opportunity for us and we're really well positioned post-merger. null (Operator): Thank you. Our next question comes from Jonathan Chaplin with New Street.
null
Thanks for taking the questions. Braxton, is this the last earnings call, we get you on? Braxton Carter (CFO): Mike, are you still on? That's a question...
null
That's why I asked. Braxton Carter (CFO): Okay. Let me put it this way: I was supposed to retire two years ago. I've extended three times. We have nothing to announce today. Ultimately, I love this company and I'm not going anywhere. I will definitely be part of the future in some form. Just stay tuned for future announcements.
null
Rooting for a fourth extension. Just very quickly, if you guys are completing the retail integration by sometime in the summer, does that mean there’s about $1 billion in SG&A synergies that you should have captured by the end of the year? Braxton Carter (CFO): We're not prepared at this point to really do quantifications. If you really listen to what we were saying about guidance, we are right now operationalizing accelerations of what original plans were, specifically driven by COVID. And quite frankly, Jonathan, we just need some time to work through it and then we'll be able to provide color. And that color, we plan on providing in the second quarter earnings call, which will be the first New T-Mobile earnings call and we're just going to have to wait at this point. I don't want to give you an estimate that's not fully baked, but we're very focused on that, as we are on acceleration of other synergies, and that's all good news. I want to reiterate, we are extremely confident that the opportunity is actually more than $43 billion. And some of our acceleration moves at this point are only part of that. I mean, to the extent that we can accelerate during this time period, it's going to increase the net present value. But, quite frankly, we got pressures because of COVID, as you're saying. And we're super focused on addressing those pressures and making up for them, and we've got a lot of material here to work with. Jon, do you want to add anything?
null
Yes. Braxton, I will just reiterate exactly what you said. We're working this really hard. And I think Mike Sievert had an opportunity to say that one of the benefits of this transaction taking a little bit longer to finally getting approved and to cross the finish line is that we've had a longer runway to plan. And that's exactly what we're seeing. We've had a number of discussions with independently owned and operated operators around store closures. We're working through that, have been working through that, have gotten through them very, very quickly. Also, we have a lot of integration, internal integration efforts that we're doing that we once thought would be impossible because we're not physically together. We're having to do all of this work virtually, but I've just been incredibly pleased about the amount of interactions that we can do with the team virtually. We've got tens of thousands of employees across the country in retail between the two legacy companies that we're bringing together. And that's just gone incredibly well thus far, in terms of having people do the necessary training, getting people up to speed on installing our systems into the legacy Sprint stores, taking legacy Sprint systems installing them into legacy Magenta stores. So that we can say, yes, we can help you no matter if you're a T-Mobile customer or a Sprint-branded customer, regardless of the store that you visit. So we are in a really good place, call it six weeks, not even six weeks, five-and-a-half weeks into this integration after close. So we're very confident. We're moving fast. We're ahead of schedule in terms of the discussions that we've had. We're very bullish on realizing our distribution-related synergies this year. And we're looking forward to showing you some results here very soon.
null
Thanks, guys. Braxton Carter (CFO): Okay. Next question, please? null (Operator): Thank you. Our next question will come from Jennifer Fritzsche with Wells Fargo.
null
Thank you taking my question. Braxton Carter (CFO): Hey, Jennifer.
null
Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to ask maybe this is more in Neville's area. We've been led to believe that wireless requires wires and a significant fiber component. I think you mentioned that you plan to connect thousands of 2.5 sites this year, which will necessitate fiber and substantial backhaul. How confident are you in your partners? Or would you consider following one of your competitors' approaches and pursue an organic fiber build? Additionally, what are your current thoughts on DSS capabilities? It seemed like you were not very optimistic about them during our last discussion. Has your perspective changed at all?
null
I’ll address these quickly, Jennifer. Our model is based on leasing fiber. We typically don’t build fiber ourselves; we let others handle that and receive competitive pricing for the services we need. We have been preparing our backhaul for a 5G environment for quite a while. The performance from the sites we are upgrading with the limited volumes of 2.5 spectrum today is supported by multi-gig backhaul. We are in a strong position, and our providers will continue to create significant competition in this area, which looks promising. Regarding DSS, while I noted discussions in the industry last call, I don’t feel significantly more positive than before. I made it clear that one vendor is lagging behind, and they are still not catching up. Ultimately, DSS will be implemented, and we anticipate something from our competitors this year as well, but the important point is that our 5G rollout does not hinge on DSS. Our nationwide coverage is already established and expanding rapidly, as I mentioned earlier. This is the optimal way to deploy 5G with fiber spectrum, avoiding the need to share bandwidth between LTE and 5G users. Our extensive spectrum gives us comprehensive coverage without reliance on DSS. That said, we will still implement the technology, though there may be some challenges.
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Great, thank you. Mike Sievert (CEO): Okay. Jud Henry (Head of Investor Relations): Well, terrific. That concludes our call today. Operator, we appreciate your participation. Everyone, thank you for joining us and your interest in T-Mobile. Please stay safe and healthy. And we look forward to connecting with you all soon. null (Operator): Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the T-Mobile U.S. First Quarter 2020, Earnings Call. If you have any further questions, you may contact the Investor Relations or media departments. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect, and have a pleasant day.