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T-Mobile US, Inc.

TMUS • NasdaqGS

$168.18
ā–²1.73 (1.04%)• REGULAR

T-Mobile US, Inc.

$168.18
ā–²1.0%
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TMUS Q4 2020 Earnings Call

February 4, 2021 at 12:00 AM

Company
TMUS
Quarter
Q4 2020
Date
February 4, 2021 at 12:00 AM
Speakers
1
Word Count
~7,220

Transcript Content

null
Hey guys, thanks a lot. One for Mike, one for Pete. Mike, can you talk about your customer strategy this year, I see aggressive two-year free line offers in the market and that should help units. How should we think about that going after accounts as well? And then second for Pete. Maybe dig into the EBITDA guide with double the synergies and a similar mix of cost reductions year-over-year versus avoidance. I think people wonder why it can't be better. Thank you. Mike Sievert (CEO): Hey Phil, thanks. You were a little muddled there. I think the first part of your question was about the competitive environment and customer growth and account growth. We really like what we see. We probably aren't surprised to hear that, because our model has proven over and over again to be flexible. In times when there's incredibly intense competitive pressure, we find a way. And at times when there's a more muted switching environment, we find a way. That's what we're doing. That's what you see in the very ambitious guidance that we put in front of people today, with all the normal and usual caveats. So, we're really excited. What we expect to see will be the 2021 year that hopefully transitions us back out by the end, some of the dynamics that have dominated the competitive landscape in 2020 due to COVID-19, muted switching, challenged payment environments, recessionary circumstances, etc. We'll have to see how it goes. But the thing you should take confidence in is that our plan is nimble and flexible. We're able to call the audibles as we see them. As you saw with three quarters of very, very strong performance that we just capped off since the pandemic began. Now I think you were going to turn to Peter as well for the second piece. I'll switch over to Peter. Peter Osvaldik (CFO): Yeah, thank you, Mike. Phil, you were a little muffled there. I think you were asking about EBITDA, as well as synergy capture, and whether both could be better, is that hopefully that's right. So, let's start with synergy. We're targeting $2.7 billion to $3.0 billion. Remember, just nine months ago is when we closed this merger, and to already be delivering much faster than we anticipated $1.3 billion in 2020 alone and the guidance of $2.7 billion to $3.0 billion in 2021 shows the rapid pace of what's happening here. It's a multi-phased approach. The vast majority of the synergies still come from the network and decommissioning the cell sites, some of the associated backhaul leases, etc. The first step in that is to build the anchor network. You see the rapid pace that Neville and his team are just dominating the delivery, the ramp up of the machine that's going to flow all the way through 2021. I've got to tell you, I'm fundamentally extremely excited about the $2.7 billion to $3.0 billion in synergies for 2021 as well as the rapid pace on the network piece, which really sets us up for the back end there. In regards to EBITDA, again, let me give you a little more color. First, as you know, we were the only major carrier to show meaningful growth when comparing 2020 to pro forma 2019. Our '21 guide highlights our commitment to the three priorities of profitably acquiring the competition, unlocking synergies bigger and faster, and investing in our business to set us up for long-term growth and free cash flow generation. A couple of things that we want to highlight when thinking about 2020 and 2021. First, as you know, 2020 saw slightly over $500 million of COVID-related costs, which were excluded from adjusted EBITDA, with the majority of those now being part of the run rate of the business. 2021 also has a higher non-cash straight-line lease expense associated with that agreement with American Tower—an agreement that has significant positive NPV cash savings from day one and operational flexibility for Neville and his team to continue the rapid pace that he’s deployed. We also anticipate, as Mike said, a gradual return to higher switching in 2021. That comes with higher upfront sales expenses, of course, as the share taker in the industry, but also sets us up for that customer lifetime value benefit to the enterprise value of this business. We're growing core EBITDA year-over-year while we make investments in 2021 to enable the long-term success of the company. You heard about it from the network perspective, and you heard Mike talk about an enterprise as well as distribution expansion to capitalize on the network. So, if you consider all of those factors, it makes the guided core adjusted EBITDA that much more compelling, highlights the success of a profitable growth and synergy-backed model we are executing on, which is also beginning to deliver on the free cash flow unlock promise of the business, as you can see from that element of our guidance. Hopefully, I captured all your questions and got that right. Mike Sievert (CEO): That's a new strategy. If you come in muddled and we can't hear you, we just start talking about whatever we want to say.
null
Thanks for all that. All right. null (Operator): Certainly. Our next question comes from John Hodulik with UBS.
null
Great. Thanks. Hopefully you guys can hear me better than before. Hey. I guess first follow-up, any way you can sort of size each one of those categories that Peter gave? So, call it the $500 million for the COVID cost. Just give us some sort of relative important spend on each one of those items, I think will help a lot. And maybe Matt you can talk about how it sets you guys up for maybe better growth in '22? And what we can expect in terms of benefits from that? And then secondly, separate questions. Just can you talk a little bit about the competitive environment and what you expect in '21, especially in the last week we heard Comcast talk about moving into the wireless market. Just how do you expect to see the competitive markets evolve as we go through '21? Mike Sievert (CEO): That sounds great. I'm going to get Peter in a minute to second to unpack that. So, Peter, think about that EBITDA question and I'm going to go straight to Matt there because I think, John, this competitive environment is something we really should double click into. There are some things to say about Sprint churn as a tailwind, there's also some things to say about looking at the totality of our competitive environment across Verizon and AT&T. So, Matt, why don't you pick up here?
null
Yeah, I'll take that. Thanks Mike and John. It's interesting you asked about 2021. I think the important thing to do is go back a year and look at the competitive environment a year ago in Q4. You had a competitive environment where one competitor was taking a lot of nets, and one competitor was taking not that many nets. Fast forward to a year in Q4, and you saw them flipped. But in totality, the number of nets being produced in the competitive environment is more or less the same. What we anticipated is a robust competitive environment that is evolving and changing, with certain carriers taking more or less share, and that's continuing to lead growth through that as we navigate the flexible model to really lead it. The other piece of the question when you look at where we've guided in '21, the next phase of our integration with Sprint is really churn. It's a churn story. We've yet to start to get to work to really do what we did on the T-Mobile branded business, going from worst to first on churn with our Sprint business. That's in front of us. We’ve got something taken care of with the brand transition, stores and sales and gross adds, and we're starting to get into the space followed by the work on the network—delivering the entire value proposition in the Sprint base—and so we see that as we start to move forward. It's not going to happen overnight, so we're really going to get to work, and I feel great about our recipe to deliver great churn into this front base. So that's where you're going to see some of that as well. Mike Sievert (CEO): It's really important to hear that message. People have asked, what's going on? Isn't somebody moving? Isn't AT&T producing more nets now? What you just heard from Matt is that the totality of phone net adds from AT&T and Verizon was the same this past Q4 as the prior year. Those two tend to go back and forth. At any given quarter, there are just dynamics. AT&T is putting in a surprising amount of money into some short-term customer loyalty things—if you want to call them that—to be generous. Verizon on the other hand, they didn't spend as much and therefore didn't have the same kind of nets. We don't know what they are doing. I don't know where that money went. It wasn't being put into net adds to the same extent as before—they beat on earnings, but missed on net. This doesn't change our game plan at all. Our game plan is to continue driving genuine loyalty, as you see in our T-Mobile brand being the lowest churning brand in the industry and then reapply that same playbook on the Sprint customers. This is a really exciting tailwind for our business. Before we move on, I know you asked a question about EBITDA from Peter, so let's switch over to him. Peter Osvaldik (CFO): Yeah, thanks John. I'm not going to be able to guide to every one of those elements quantitatively, but we did highlight a couple of them. Again, the $500 million of COVID-related costs, the vast majority of those are now run rate costs in the business. We talked a little bit about some incremental debt from the key premier connect the pledge in Q2 that was a very small component to lead, so the vast majority of those $500 million are run-rate costs in the business now. Regarding American Tower, I think we talked about at least a couple hundred million drag from 2020 to 2021. It depends on how quickly and variability builds and what the priorities are there that could create some variability. But that’s how I think about the conceptual magnitude there. The other elements, the switching costs, the selling cost, as well as the investments depend on what the environment looks like in front of us, and of course what we do every quarter—what we do best is deliver profitable growth and meet or exceed our expectations that we put out, therefore you and we adjust, and that's what we're going to do here.
null
Okay, thank you. Mike Sievert (CEO): All right, let's go back to the phones, and then I'll ask my team here for one or two that if you feel like we need to hit will be widely appreciated to be heard by others on the call. I'll go to Twitter as well. So, take a look at those and see if you want to see one of those. Janice, I'll assign that to you if you want. Operator? null (Operator): Thank you. Our next question comes from Jonathan Chaplin with New Street.
null
Thanks. One for Peter and one for Neville. For Peter, I'm wondering if you could characterize your approach to setting guidance and how it might be different from Braxton since this is our first guidance under the Osvaldik regime. I’m particularly interested in the net add guidance, which is about double the average guidance that you guys have set for net adds for the last five years. Did you seem to beat that by sort of 50% to 100%? Look at the net add guidance and think if this is a back-stream guide, the real number could be a little crazy. Then for Neville, are we still looking at 200 million pops covered by the end of the year with fast 5G on 2.5 gigahertz or does it look like things moved a little bit faster than expected in Q4 with CapEx deployment? Could you exceed that? Thanks.
null
Let's start with Peter. Peter Osvaldik (CFO): Well, let me tell you this, Jonathan. It actually isn't the first time you're hearing it. You heard me give guidance on Q3 as well as Q2, actually second half guidance and then updated that in Q3. Look where we came in—again, what our commitment always is, is to profitably outgrow the competition and deliver against what we put out there. I love how you're asking me about 4.0 million to 4.7 million postpaid net add guidance next year and getting excited about it. Because if you look at 2020, that guy did midpoint is over twice what AT&T did in total postpaid and almost three times what Verizon did. So that's the guidance. That's the excitement here. There are a couple of factors to play out in front of us, as we said. One of those is what is that return to in the switching environment? We obviously are still impacted by COVID. The question is, how fast does that come in? That will change the playbook for us, as we said. You saw us deliver in Q3; you saw us deliver in Q4. That’s our commitment in the future.
null
So, let me pick up Jonathan. I love the question. Before we go to 200 million this year, just got to celebrate the 100 million that we secured in 2020—106 million people covered with Ultra Capacity mid-band 5G. To do a competitive comparison, it's about 50 times the Verizon high-capacity footprint, which is pretty stunning. It’s almost embarrassing when you think about it. It’s exciting that we have a huge lead. You're asking if we can get even further in front of our competition and do more than we said we would do in '21. Obviously, we’re going to push on every target, Jonathan. But I’ll tell you this: the most exciting thing for me in '20, which Mike referenced, is the fact that we built an incredible network machine in 2020. We have to build and upgrade a lot more sites in '21 to get to that 200 million covered people with Ultra Capacity. We have the machine, we have the resources, the supply chain, the commitments; we have the processes. This machine is moving at real pace. Getting to 200 million is going to be a huge lead against what our competition has talked about or said they can do. We’ll keep pushing on it, but I’m super excited to be able to sit here with high confidence and talk about delivering a nationwide high-capacity network in the coming 11 months on top of a coverage network, which just blows the competition away. Our extended range 5G capability gives us more coverage on 5G than AT&T and Verizon combined. You have to let that sink in a little bit to really understand the position that we’re in. We made incredible progress in 2020, but we’re just getting started on this thing. Mike Sievert (CEO): I talked about this a little bit in my remarks, but I just want to underscore how remarkable the rate and pace that we’re operating at right now because it's a real competitive differentiator. This isn't something Neville and the team are, they're doing something that's never been done before operating at this scale. It was many, many thousands of sites that had to be touched and upgraded with advanced 5G technology to get us to 106 million, let alone the 280 million people that are covered by extended range 5G. Now that's moving to tens of thousands of sites in 2021. It's a massive undertaking. We started it way back in 2018, planning, citing, permitting, design, in order to create a contiguous leading network. It’s not something that can be created overnight, and as I said, it’s a real advantage. I think we're going to have an opportunity to talk a lot more about this. So, terrific! Let’s go back to the phones. null (Operator): Thank you. Our next phone question will come from Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson.
null
Two questions if I could. First Peter, I'm going to steal a little thunder probably from your Analyst Day. But as I think about longer-term margins, there are some differences between your business and say Verizon’s or AT&T’s in that you tend to lease more backhaul rather than own it. You have lower retail prices. How do you think about the long-term margin potential of the business relative to your peers? And then, Mike, I wonder if you could just update us a bit on your progress in the areas where you have traditionally under-indexed the business services market or business wireless market, and then rural markets? And where you've been growing? Can you give us some progress metrics in those areas? Mike Sievert (CEO): Yeah, sounds good. You’re right, Craig, we'll double click into both of those at Analyst Day next month. I’ll give Peter a chance to respond if he wants to steal his own thunder from next month. We've said for a long time we see fantastic cash production from this model at the margin rates that we already communicated we aspire to. We don't have to achieve the margin rates that Verizon has. In fact, your question is premised on the idea that they’ll be able to hang on to that, and I don't know that that's the case either. I don't know where theirs is going. I know ours is going up. The cash production that we're able to produce in this business model with the margin rates that we've aspired to are just phenomenal and exciting, creating a very valuable enterprise. There are differences in our model, and one of them is the internal growth rate. When you think about our faster growth and the investments in present periods to get there, there will be differences between how we pursue our business plan versus theirs. It shows that we're more bullish because we have better assets and, therefore, are willing to invest in a longer tail and a better terminal value. That's going to be experienced in this five-year planning horizon as one of the big differences. But Peter, why don't we go to you and then Matt, I'll turn to you about how we're doing on things like prime and small-town rural businesses. Peter Osvaldik (CFO): Well thanks, Mike. I don’t want to steal all my own thunder from Analyst Day because Craig, I want you to come and attend, so I can’t do that right this moment. Everything that Matt and Mike talked about earlier and what Mike just expressed now from a margin perspective, is exactly that. Our plan doesn’t predicated that we need to get through a Verizon-level margin, one could question whether they will be able to maintain it when you have the combination of the premium product in the form of our network and the premium value, how they’ll be able to justify that with their customers? That’s not what we’re here to do. We’re here to continue to profitably outgrow. There are some incremental costs in the short run that come with that, particularly on the sales side, as you accrue much higher terminal value for doing that. We talked about some of those structural differences, which are absolutely key, they come out in CapEx versus OpEx as you see it. That’s why it’s so important and exciting to think about what the ultimate free cash flow generation of this business is, which really takes out some of those differentials and focuses on the cash productivity. I’m really excited to highlight and update some of these figures for you next month. I’m looking forward to doing that.
null
Yeah. Craig, that’s a great question. We’re going to dive deeper into it at Analyst Day, but just a couple of things: one is an overlooked part of our record results we had this year was success in business, in particular, in education and the public sector. One thing you should know about our business is that we are nimble and flexible and show up to solve needs when people have it. That's why we're able to do things through project in million—delivering solutions for kids to deal with the pandemic. That opened up a lot of doors, but today we're answering our call, in part because of the network perception is still lagging reality. But now we’re in the door proving how fast and agile we can be in serving businesses in the public sector. We are seeing great progress here. When you talk about rural, on the heels of what Neville built out with extended range 5G, one of the big things that’s going to be a paradigm shift this year is bringing the performance we’re seeing from the Ultra Capacity network to rural areas, as we move up market into prime customers who require the best of the best network. To date, we have not had that. We’ll get that very quickly on the heels of this build, so we see a lot of upside going forward in these areas. Mike Sievert (CEO): Hopefully, Craig, that answers your question. Can you give us more insights on consumer versus business? Both are killing it. Our big opportunity in consumer right now is that ahead of us is small town rural—where I said, we have half our national market share. This is a huge swath of the country. A big, big potential tailwind there. In business, we posted double-digit growth, which shows we’re winning share. Everybody’s got a smartphone already, so when you have a business posting double-digit growth, it’s because you’re winning share. As I said in my remarks, we’re winning share not just as a price cut, please throw us a little piece so you can reply to your AT&T deal. We’re winning strategic accounts, the whole account, and we’re winning it based on our quality, which is a game changer. Very excited about the potential. null (Operator): Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the T-Mobile U.S. fourth 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.