We'll get started now. Thanks everyone for joining us. I'm Batya Levi with the communications team at UBS. Our next speaker is Steve Vondran, EVP and Global COO of American Tower, and soon to be CEO. Thank you so much for joining us, Steve.
Well, thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
Awesome. Great. You know, just given the time of the year and maybe your new responsibilities as we head into 2024, can you talk about what the strategic focus of the company would be, and what should we expect in terms of some changes as you take on the new CEO role?
Sure. Well, I'm in a transitional role as COO right now, so it's probably a little premature for me to talk about any changes that I would make. But what I would say is, you know, I've been part of this leadership team as the head of U.S. Tower for the last five years, and I've worked very closely with Tom and Rod and the rest of the executive team in developing our strategy. So you can expect a lot of continuity from me in terms of how we'll look at the business going forward. In terms of what our strategic priorities are, you know, I'll, I'll start with kind of what we said on our last earnings call because we laid out some of our near-term focus.
So in particular, for the near term, you know, what we're focused on is, you know, number one, driving organic growth. Number two is some cost controls and margin expansion. And those are both very helpful to our one of our stated priorities, which is delevering. And so we're focused on bringing our leverage down to the upper end, the top end of our target range of 3%-5% to 5%, as quickly as we can. So in addition to the organic growth and the cost controls that we're doing, you've seen us be very disciplined with our capital allocation. So if you look at our CapEx program for 2023, at the midpoint of our guidance, it's about $1.7 billion. That's a little bit lower than it was last year because we're reallocating some of that capital to help delever.
We've also messaged that we plan to keep the dividend flat year-over-year from 2023 to 2024, and so we'll keep it kind of that $3 billion level that you saw this year, and that's to take that additional cash and put it toward delevering. And then you've also seen us do a little bit of capital recycling this year. So we divested our fiber business in Mexico. We divested our small portfolio into Poland, and then we've said that we're under a strategic review of our business in India. And the proceeds from those capital recyclings have also gone to reducing our leverage. Now, the reason we're doing that, it's a couple of reasons. One is the cost of capital, the cost of debt is higher right now, so it makes some sense to do that.
But we're also make sure that we have our balance sheet in great shape to take advantage of whatever opportunities do present themselves. So when we look out over kind of that medium to longer term, we want to make sure we have the lowest cost of capital in the business, to make sure that we're in a position to take advantage of anything inorganic that might be out there. But we'll also weigh, at that point, once we get down to that five, we'll weigh, you know, the best uses of our capital and whether it's gonna be something inorganic, share buybacks, further delevering, you know, kind of everything will be on the table at that point, and we'll make the assessment then about what we'll do, once we get there.
Great. Let's dig into all of those and maybe starting with the domestic business. You've been with the company more than 20 years.
Twenty-three years.
23 years. I hear that you have tremendous experience in writing these contracts with the carriers, and they have evolved quite a bit over the last, you know, 10+ years. How would you characterize the current structure of the more recent comprehensive deals that we've seen versus the prior plans, and what's good, what's bad?
Sure. So they're, they're all a little bit different depending on what the carrier's needs are and kind of where we were in our evolution with them when we negotiated those agreements. But the whole purpose behind these, these comprehensive MLAs is to really provide a better user experience for our customers and, and frankly, for our employees in administering them. Now, it does have also the, the benefit of smoothing out some of the peaks and valleys you see in the carrier spend cycle, but we don't discount to get these agreements in place. The reason we do them is to take that business as usual that we were gonna get anyway and just create a much better experience for both sides. That's kind of the origin of them.
So when you think about that in that kind of context of how you're gonna negotiate one of these, we're looking at what the carrier's plans are over the period of that comprehensive portion, and whether that's, you know, four or five years or a little bit longer, you know, it's different every time. And so what we do on our side is we look at what the carrier needs are gonna be over that time period. And, you know, so if you're deploying a new G in particular, you kinda know what the carriers are gonna need to do. You have the anticipated growth factor that's already kinda baked in. So right now we're anticipating mobile data usage growth in the U.S. to be, you know, in that 20%-30% range.
And then we also have a really good idea about what spectrum they have available and also what equipment's gonna be available. I mean, there's nothing that's gonna go on a tower in the next five years that's not already in the testing and development and certification phase. So from our side, we take a look at all those factors, and we project out what's that carrier gonna need to do on our portfolio over that period of time to meet the projected demands. And that gives us a good kind of BAU to look at on it.
Right.
And that's evolved over time. The earlier U.S. caps changed. The earlier iterations of some of these MLAs, they really came about because we were, you know, kind of haggling back and forth with the customer, and you kind of end up in the same place that you knew you were going to. And we were a little bit less sophisticated in the early days in terms of doing that BAU case, but we were still pretty darn good at knowing what they were gonna spend. So I'd say the way it's evolved is, we've gotten a lot better at kind of doing our due diligence and figuring out exactly what it's gonna look like at a much more granular level.
And then I think the customers, now that they've gotten comfortable with this way of doing business and these agreements, they've gotten better at making sure that they execute on their side, and that they're, what they're signing up for is something that they can do. So I think it's really been a win-win for both parties on it over time.
Great. And I guess this also gave you the opportunity to, with that visibility, to guide to, through 2027 of about 5% domestic growth, including the churn that we could-- we'll see from Sprint.
Sure.
Can you just remind us of the drivers of how we get to the 5%, and what could change it from here until 2027?
Sure. So we kind of reiterate the what we said publicly. What we said is, we anticipate that our organic tenant billings growth in the U.S. will be at least 5% on average from 2023 through 2027. Okay? That, that's the guide that we've put out there. And that would have been about 6% if you normalize for Sprint, because we are seeing some outsized Sprint churn from the consolidation. So if you look at the components of that, yeah, we have about a 3% escalator, is one component of it. And then our normal churn runs in the 1%-2% range, and then the Sprint churn has been a little bit over one over that time period. And so that would imply growth from co-locations and amendments of about 4%-5% to kind of offset those, those churn impacts.
So those are the components of it. When you look at our guide, what we've also said publicly is we have about 75% visibility into that 5% over that, that period of time, and that's underpinned by those contractual obligations that we have in place, both from the escalators and from the comprehensive portions of our MLAs. So when you look at some of the variability, you know, again, so when we think about that visibility of 75%, it's higher in the early years. You know, I think we said at the beginning of this year, we had about 90% visibility, and it goes down over time. That's because some of those comprehensive portions of the MLAs roll off. And so we are expecting a certain level of business outside of those. That comes from a few areas.
Again, we think we have a very good handle on what needs to be done on the existing networks to, to augment them, to hit those, those anticipated data growth usages. And so we feel very comfortable in that level of business over that period of time. There could be some variability year to year, and that's why we've guided to an average.
Mm-hmm.
I would point out that, you know, we look at that average, and it could be a little bit above five, a little bit below five. We don't foresee wild swings, so we're not expecting a three and a seven. But there is a range around the five that it could be year to year, depending on some of those individual customer, you know, ups and downs once they're out of the comprehensive agreements. We also have a portion of our business that is outside of the big three, plus Dish.
Right.
And so, you know, and they're actually underpinned by a lot of government grant programs this year. We're seeing some good growth in that area. And then with Dish, we've included the minimum contracted portion of our comprehensive agreements, so there's nothing baked in for any upside from that or from new entrants as well.
Got it. And in terms of the. Maybe if, when we look at the towers in the U.S., I think roughly 50% of them, of those towers have been upgraded for 5G equipment. Is that true?
Yeah, it's a little over 50%, and each carrier is on its own path. So some are going to be a little bit higher, some are going to be a little bit lower, but there's still a lot of runway. And I would just, you know, point out, when we deployed 4G and 3G before that, it's a decades-long deployment. We expect the same thing with 5G.
So how long more do you think it will take for them, for the rest of the country to get the 5G equipment?
I don't know exactly how long. You know, the carriers are. I'll let them speak to their own deployment plans. But I think what we've seen in prior Gs will hold true for this one, and that is you've got this first phase, where there's a big ramp-up to kind of get them to 200 million POPs or somewhere thereabout. Then you have a little bit of a pullback while they're looking at their networks and saying, you know, "How do I optimize this? Do I have any holes in the network?" And then they go to the next phase, which is pushing out coverage, but also adding some capacity.
Right.
So I'm fully expecting, you know, that activity level to pick back up. You know, it won't be as high as it was a couple of years ago, when we saw $42 billion in investment. We have seen the carriers pull back a bit. But, you know, I think the number that we've seen for this year is about $35 billion.
Mm-hmm.
We expect that to kind of be an average rate going forward for the next five years from the carriers, is $35 billion. That's about $5 billion higher than we saw in 4G.
Right.
So we still see very healthy levels of investments by our customers, and we think they'll continue in a, you know, a very methodical way to build out.
Got it. In that sort of, like, pullback environment, do you anticipate it to be a pause of a year or two, or are you already starting to see a little bit of densification, depending on the carrier?
So no crystal ball here. What I would say is, you know, we didn't really see a pause. We saw a slowdown, but we've got crews on our towers today installing equipment.
Mm-hmm.
Part of that's, you know, stuff they already leased but hadn't installed yet, et cetera. I don't know exactly when they're going to turn the spigot back on. It would surprise me for it to be elongated. If you kind of reference back to 4G and 3G, you know, those, those slowdowns for each carrier might have lasted in the nine month to 18 month range, depending on the carrier. I wouldn't expect to see anything more than that here. You know, for us, because of these comprehensive MLAs, we're a little bit more insulated on the property revenue side, so it's not as impactful to our rental business, you know, when they, they start back. Where you see it more for us is our services business.
Right.
That's inherently harder to predict. A couple of years ago, we had to take the guide up pretty steep. This year, we pulled it back some. That, that's really reflective of the tenant activity levels.
Right. And that network services business, should we just assume that until there is sort of like a leg up in terms of densification, it will stay at current levels?
Look, I don't really have the visibility to guide to 2024 yet. We'll talk about that in February. Look, again, I would expect to see a moderate level of activity in any given year, so I don't think the activity levels you're seeing in Q4 are indicative of kind of a trend that I would point to. But again, we'll give more specific guidance in February.
But I don't know if you would wanna talk a little bit more about the differences between the carriers and how they're approaching their network build-outs. If there are any differences between the main three incumbents that you would highlight?
Well, I don't wanna get in trouble with my customers, so I'm gonna stay away from any details on that. Look, I would say, is you had one carrier that had a head start.
Yeah.
And they had a little bit different spectrum band, and so they were pretty aggressive out of the gate. And I think that you've got the other two that are, you know, being more methodical than, you know, a little bit slower start, and they didn't get their spectrum as quickly. But I think overall, they're all approaching in a very similar fashion, which is, you know, you wanna cover that, you know, that dense urban, the 200 million pops or whatever you set your first target at, and then you start rolling out progressively from there.
Mm-hmm.
We're seeing that same pattern of behavior with all of the carriers.
In terms of Dish, it gets a lot of attention because what the company is talking about is that they've met the 23 build-out requirements. They're pausing a bit or maybe slowing down their activity, but then there's another sort of deadline approaching. In terms of your exposure, maybe if you could just remind us your exposure, and then in the worst-case scenario, if Dish defaults, what do you think could be the exposure?
So Dish represents about 1% of our global revenues today.
Right.
The only thing that we have baked into our guide is the minimum contractual commitments under their agreement, so we don't have any upside built in. That's, those contractual commitments are there regardless of the speed of their build-out. From that perspective, you know, the pace at which they deploy is not as relevant to us.
They have a longer-term deal or maybe a framework of a deal, and then within that, the comprehensive component is short?
That's right.
A shorter period of time. Got it. In terms of cable, I guess they haven't necessarily been a significant contributor to the overall activity, but we do hear them sort of talking to deploy more CBRS spectrum. You know, Comcast started in Philadelphia. Maybe they'll do it in other markets. From your perspective, is that an upside, or is it mostly in major metros, and it doesn't really go to the towers?
We hope so. Look, what we've baked into our current plan is we're not expecting a large new entrant. So if cable came through as a player in a big way, that would be upside from our current business case. They are our customer today, and we do have a level of new business that we expect out of them. It's just kind of the normal business that we have with them. But in terms of CBRS, you know, I'm excited about the prospects of it. I hope that they decide to build more of it, and I think we'll benefit. We do have a rooftop portfolio in the dense urban. We do have suburban towers. I think those would be great locations for them to install it, so I'm hopeful.
A little bit of both.
Yeah, a little bit of both.
And then maybe just touching on the competitive environment within the U.S. Over the years, we've seen multiple private tower companies sort of looking to take share from the incumbent tower companies, and we saw Verizon signing a deal with Vertical Bridge. Can you talk about sort of the current environment, and as you look at that incremental revenue or activity you could extract from the carriers, is there a bigger pool of towers that could go to?
You know, so when we look at that kind of the build-to-suit world and what the opportunities are to develop towers, you know, we haven't developed much in the U.S. over the past few years. The economics just haven't worked for us that are kind of driving that market today. So we don't look at it as anything that's really taking away from our current business plans. We don't have an expectation of building a lot of sites in the U.S. today. I think that you can actually read across to that a very positive read from the carriers, that they're continuing to develop. And as they push out into more rural areas, you know, we do have some portfolio there, that's an opportunity for them.
So if you see them continuing to build and expand to rural areas, you know, the build's gonna be a combination of co-locations and new builds. So we see some upside potential from that as they continue to develop in that area.
Okay. Maybe shifting to CoreSite, domestically, and it's been about two years since the acquisition of the asset. Maybe if you could provide, again, sort of like the strategic rationale for owning the asset now that you've been operating for two years, and has that changed since when you made the acquisition?
Sure. So when we bought CoreSite, we were looking at CoreSite as a strategic option to help us develop the edge, because we think that the edge is a big opportunity to add revenue to our existing tower sites. We were experimenting with the edge and looking at different ways to develop that with partners before we bought CoreSite. What we realized when we were looking at the edge is, you can drop a container on a tower site and you can connect it with fiber, but that doesn't give the tenants what they need to be able to operate a low-latency edge use case. That is what we ultimately think is gonna drive some good returns in that area.
They have to interconnect to a connected ecosystem so that that edge node is getting fed the data and feeding data back into kind of a cloud-rich environment that has all the right players there. So think about it, if you're trying to game with somebody and you're on one network and they're on a different network, that needs to connect somewhere where those networks can talk to each other. And so when we looked at the edge developing, we realized that unless you control that interconnection point, there's gonna be a value transfer from that edge facility back to that ecosystem. So that was the thesis behind it. But when we underwrote the deal, we didn't factor that into the underwriting. So we said that the investment has to stand on its own.
So what we found was an asset that had a lot of opportunity in it, but it does give us that option on the edge, and it gives us the ability to play in that space. It's performed phenomenally well. We've exceeded all of our underwriting for it. What we've said publicly is last year, we had a record sales for CoreSite last year, and we're on track to potentially have another year similar to last year. If you look at the supply and demand dynamics that have evolved in that space, they've been very favorable to us. We've been able to increase pricing, and we've been able to underwrite some additional investment.
When we originally closed, where our plan was to reinvest the cash flow that, of course, that was generating, this year's a touch higher than that. $360 million is what we're projecting for development CapEx, and that's really replenishing the capacity that we sold last year. And so we're very happy with the way the asset's performing. We think there's a lot of upside for it. You know, with respect to the edge, what I would say is we are seeing some progress in some of the partners that we're talking with about the edge, and we've got some POCs in place that we're doing with various players. And some of those use cases are things like, you have different software vendors that are trying to provide services that require low latency. And today, the option is to put it on-prem.
I'll make up a use case. This is not a real one that we're working on. But so say you have a drugstore, and someone is gonna offer you software that lets you use your security cameras to do supply replenishment. You know, they can check your inventory on your shelves. Well, that may be a low-latency use case that requires you today to have a set of servers in your drugstore to do that, and that may not be optimal for you. It's expensive, it's hard to maintain, whatever the reasons. And so we're experimenting with, well, can you do a near-prem installation, where you take a bunch of those on-prem installations, put it near, in an edge use case, and save them money on the installation, save them headaches on the install, and earn a great return for us? And we don't know.
This is a proof of concept, and we're still working on it. But those are the types of use cases that we're in discussions with different partners about, and we wouldn't have been able to have those POCs in place if we didn't have CoreSite-
Right.
as a kind of a strategic asset.
I guess when you bought the asset, you had mentioned maybe the edge opportunity will start to show up within the next three to five years?
Yeah.
What, what do you think the timeline is now?
I think that stretched out a bit.
Right.
You know, when you look at the macroeconomic conditions, like, no one that we were talking to has stopped any of their edge development, but it has slowed down a bit.
Mm-hmm.
So I, you know, I don't know exactly when it's gonna be there. There's nothing in our multiyear guide for edge, so if it does come within that time period, that's upside to the case that we've laid out. But I am convinced more than ever now that it's, it's when, not if-
Right.
that that's gonna develop.
Should we expect that you would just continue with the pilot programs in the near term?
Yeah.
How much capital would you put behind that?
These are small dollars.
Okay.
These are, you know, a few $100,000 apiece in some of these POCs that I'm talking about.
Right.
Look, we would not deploy significant capital at risk in this area. This is an area where we're gonna continue to iterate, work with partners, and for us to do anything of scale, it would come with an anchor tenant and a lot of visibility into it. Yeah, we have a lot of options to where to put our capital, including CoreSite itself. So anything that we did at the edge would have to earn returns higher than what we can put in other places, and we would look for ways to de-risk that.
Right.
And.
In terms of the core, CoreSite, how should we think about the capital needed to support the faster growth that you're seeing now?
Yeah. So again, what we're trying to do is replace the capacity we sell. And so as we have these record sales years, we'll tweak that capital up a little bit. We're not looking to meaningfully scale the platform into a lot of different markets, but we are doing some, say, putting a toe in the water. We bought a small data center in Miami that we've disclosed, and that's to test that market to see if we can develop another campus there. You might see us look at another, you know, kind of tier two market maybe, where we would experiment with a small data center there to seed the market on that. But we feel good about the overall reach of CoreSite, and we have the opportunities to continue to invest in those campuses at very low risk.
I think we said at the end of Q3 that 40% of the construction we had in place was pre-leased.
Mm-hmm.
De-risks it, it accelerates your return criteria, and so you'd expect it. You should expect us to continue to invest at a rate that replenishes that capacity.
The expectation to keep the, sort of, this initiative more domestically, or do you think that there could be opportunities outside of U.S.?
Right now, we're focused on domestic with it. You know, we're not looking to take it international, and we've got a core set of competencies here. There's plenty of opportunity here. You know, someday, if there's a right opportunity with the right anchor tenant and the right economics, yeah, I'd never say never.
Right.
But for now, we're really focused on the domestic opportunity.
Okay. Maybe moving on to some of the international operations, India first. It gets a lot of questions.
Okay.
I think you suggested a deal could be in the works before year-end. Can you provide an update on whatever you can say on it, and how should we think about sort of your expectations to be in the region and maybe just proceeds of the sale as well?
Sure. So there's really nothing new to report, so I'll just kind of repeat what we said on our last earnings call, and that is that we are engaged in a strategic review of the business. We are interested in selling a majority stake in the business. We're hoping to have something to announce by the end of the year. At this point, there's nothing to announce yet.
Okay. Maybe moving on to Europe. It's been a market that's actually growing faster than the U.S. right now. Maybe a little bit of sort of drivers for that and your expectations just generally, if that could continue.
Sure. When we did the Telxius acquisition, we said that we were expecting that market to grow at kinda mid-single digits organically. That's been a touch higher than that this year. We've seen a good level of activity on the portfolio as well as our legacy portfolio. It's also been supported by CPI escalators that have been a little bit higher, and we have very low churn because of the way we structured our agreement with Telxius. So if I break that down a little bit into some of the markets and what's going on there, I'll start with Germany, which is the largest. What we're seeing there predominantly is 5G overlays. So we have amendments there that we're able to monetize, paired with some build-to-suits with our anchor tenant.
And then there is some activity of new builds with 1&1, starting to build their network. That's been a very modest contributor to our business this year, but that is something on the horizon that we're looking forward to. If you go to Spain, it's predominantly 5G amendments as they're upgrading their network, again, with some build-to-suits with our anchor tenant. And then if you look at France, where we have a smaller portfolio, that's primarily co-location driven, and that is they're doing augmentations of existing networks.
I did wanna follow up on 1&1. They do have an MVNO agreement also in Germany. To the extent that they decide to go all the way MVNO, what would your exposure be?
Well, they're already an MVNO, and so we have very little exposure to that. I don't know the exact percentage, but it's-
Okay.
Pretty small. They were a small contributor to our results this year. But I also would point out, they've been an MVNO previously, and they ended the agreement with Telefónica. If you look at their public statements, they've said they still intend to build out their network along the same cadence that they had projected before. From our perspective, the change of MVNO from Telefónica to Vodafone doesn't really change our expectations about what they're gonna do in the market.
In Europe, there seems to be a lot of assets that are coming up into the market, either from some of the current independent tower operators that are looking to shed some assets or carrier-owned towers. What's your interest for adding more scale, and what are, maybe hypothetically, what would be some of the characteristics that you would look for if you wanted to increase your scale in Europe?
Sure. Well, it's a good market, so if we found the right opportunities, we'd be interested there. Let me kinda back up and tell you what we look for in general when we go into a, a new country, regardless of where it is. So the first thing we look for is the stability of the country itself. You know, is there a good rule of law, you know, preferably based on English or European common law, independent judiciary, respect for property rights, those types of things, you know, the, the macroeconomic. If those are met, then we look at the telecommunications industry in that country and say: Is it healthy? Are there multiple carriers? Is there a plan for issuing new spectrum? You know, is there a decent market share, sharing between the carriers versus one dominant carrier, et cetera.
And then we look at the portfolio itself, and that's really where some of the European distinctions come in, because a lot of those countries meet those criteria. But we were very disciplined in waiting to enter the European market at scale until we found the right terms and conditions. So part of it is, are they good assets? Part of it is, will they hold additional tenants? Is there a colocation environment? But the main thing for us is making sure that the underlying agreement with the anchor tenant provides us with the opportunity to lease up the assets.
Right.
To monetize amendments, to minimize churn, and to have a healthy escalator. And so if we can find opportunities that meet those criteria, then we might take advantage of it. But if not, then we will probably remain disciplined and look for other places to deploy the capital.
Right. Okay. Moving on to LATAM, I guess it's a market that has a lot of growth left, but maybe, sort of like a disruption with churn. How should we think about overall growth and activity in that region?
Yeah, so when you look at our Latin American market, this year, we're projecting our organic tenant billings growth to be about 5% this year. So if you look at the pipeline of activity that's happening across Latin America, it's moderate compared to what it's been in the past, and that's largely because of the carrier consolidation churn that we've seen. So if you look at the activity that's happening in the larger markets like Brazil and Mexico, we are seeing 5G overlays starting, but we are also dealing with the impact of churn there, so Telefónica, Telefónica in Mexico and Oi in Brazil. A lot of the Telefónica churn has already happened. We announced some settlements earlier this year that cared for a lot of that churn.
In Brazil, we've had a delay in churn, and so we expected to have a little bit lower results this year because we're gonna see more churn from Oi that's been extended. So that churn that we thought was gonna happen over multiple years is now gonna be concentrated in 2024 and 2025, and so that will temper our results in Latin America for a couple of years.
Okay. Africa actually has been growing very significantly. Some FX risk there, and you've recently extended your agreement with MTN. I was just curious to see what drove that and, maybe how should we think about that your interest in that region?
Sure. This year, we're projecting OTBG in Africa to be about 12%.
Mm-hmm.
That's a combination of CPI-linked escalators, but also some healthy amounts of new business there, and then we've also had some outsized churn, particularly in South Africa, which we think will be kind of cared for this year. In particular, what we announced was that we had entered an agreement with MTN in Nigeria for 2,500 tenancies, and we expect to satisfy those 2,500 sites with a combination of co-locations on our roughly 8,000 sites that we have in Nigeria and some selective new builds. And I wanna clarify a couple of things on that agreement. First is, we have not agreed to buy any towers from the competitor, and when we look at negotiating an agreement with a customer, we have not changed our financial discipline or our terms and conditions.
So, I'm not gonna get into the specifics of the agreement we have there, but rest assured that it's supportive of the types of agreements we already have there, and the underwriting for that agreement is similar to what we've done in the past, where we're hitting our risk-adjusted returns in the market for that. And so, anytime a customer comes to us and has a need for their network to build something, we're gonna take a look at it, and we're gonna bid that, or, you know, make a proposal on that, in line with our existing philosophy of how we support a market. And so, to the extent that we do an agreement with the customer, it's gonna be at the market terms and conditions that we think are supportive of our business there.
With incremental lease-up opportunities for those sites as well?
Absolutely.
Okay. Maybe just going to sort of capital allocation and to, how to think about cost for the-- and operating leverage for the business. I think one thing that has been lost is how much you've cut out of the overall, cost side this year.
Thank you for bringing that up, because we have been really disciplined about looking at our cost bases. In fact, our SG&A for 2023 is about $20 million less than it was 2022, and that's in an inflationary environment. So what we've been very focused on as a team is looking at our overall organization and trying to figure out how we expand our gross margins overall. And so, you know, we're looking at direct costs where we can, but also at SG&A. And if you think about how fast our company has grown over the past, you know, call it 10 years, you know, we've bought a lot of assets, we've built a lot of assets, and we just didn't have as much availability to focus on getting operationally really efficient, and that's what we're doing right now.
Right.
And so some of it is looking at, you know, can we centralize a few functions here and there and save some money? Some of it is saying, you know, we can get more efficient by looking at best practices and some automation. We've done quite a bit of automation in our kind of back office side, and so all those things are kind of coming together and helping us to really control our costs. And we're gonna continue to be focused on that going forward.
Expect that there are more opportunities for that.
We're gonna do our best.
Okay, great. And, leverage is almost in line with your longer-term guidance. I think you could, sort of, like, come inside the 5x early, sometime in 2024?
We're actually at about 5x at the end of the quarter in Q3-
Right.
but that's the number of one-time items, so we'd expect the end of the year a touch higher than that. I don't know exactly when we're gonna get to 5.0, but we're very focused on it. And again, if you look at the steps that we've taken, from margin expansion to reallocating some capital, holding the dividend flat, et cetera, we're gonna do our best to get it down there as quickly as we can.
Okay. And the decision to kind of, like, pause the dividend, can you just go over that maybe one more time? And then should we expect that to be more aligned with your free cash flow growth beyond that pause?
So, I don't want to give multiyear guidance here, but well, I'll talk about the decision for next year. So when we took a look at our priorities for next year, but we did have some headroom in terms of our... You know, as a REIT we're required to dividend out 90% of our taxable income, and we did have some headroom in meeting that requirement to be able to hold it flat. And we thought that it was gonna bring more value to our shareholders to use that to pay down debt and get to our leverage ratio. And so I would point out that that's disconnected from our expectation of AFFO growth next year.
Okay.
Okay. I think going forward, we'll make an assessment every year about where we are in terms of our distributions, but we would anticipate that at the right point, the dividend will need to grow in line with our AFFO, because that approximates our taxable income, and so I would expect to see growth of that in the future.
Okay. And maybe one last question: as we think about sort of, capital allocation, including discretionary CapEx, opportunity to do buybacks, taking the leverage to a level that you're comfortable with, and going back to dividend growth, how would you prioritize all those?
Yeah. So right now, we're prioritizing getting down to five.
Right.
Once we get to five, then we'll make a separate assessment at that point to say, what's gonna drive the highest total shareholder return? And so I can't really project now what we're gonna do with that, because it's gonna depend on what the available opportunities are to invest that CapEx, and it depends on where our stock price is and things like that. But, you know, we take a very kind of mathematical view of it, and we're gonna look and see, when we get down to five, what's the next best use of that capital? And if we, you know, if reinvesting it in the business drives a higher return, we'll do that. If not, we'll look at share buybacks, we'll look at further delevering, but we'll make that call when we get to that point.
Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much.
Thanks.
Okay.