Great. We're going to get started now. Thanks, everyone, for joining our conference. I'm Batya Levy with the communications team at UBS, and our next speaker is Steve Vondran, President and CEO of American Tower. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for the invite, Batya.
Thanks. So I thought that we would just start with maybe looking into the next year, and if you could just give us an overview of what your top priorities will be.
Absolutely. We have a great business model that has long-term durable growth, and that's underpinned by strong secular trends and long-term contracts. And then we combine that with high operating leverage so that revenue converts down at a very high margin, and we supplement that with some select investments and an investment-grade balance sheet that really gives us an advantage in the market. And so our overall goal is to drive industry-leading AFFO per share growth. And so we've organized our key priorities around those pillars. And so 2026 is no different. The first priority is to maximize organic growth on the portfolio. When you look at, in particular, the U.S. market, mobile data growth has grown at about 35% a year for the last three years, and it's projected to continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several years.
In fact, some experts are predicting that the mobile carriers will need to double network capacity over the next five years, and that gives us a long runway of growth for new colocations from densification and amendments. Those are secular tailwinds, and so we'll continue to monetize the rest of 5G and the deployment of 5G and focus on getting ready for 6G, and so that's on the revenue side. On the expense side, we have a disciplined cost management structure in place where we're always trying to maximize the growth and the margin on that, and we've been very successful over the last several years at reducing SG&A as a percentage of sales and actually net reductions in SG&A.
And we've got programs in place to look at the rest of our direct costs over the next several years to try to make sure that those costs are growing slower than the revenue, which will give us margin expansion over time. We've also generated enough cash that we have the ability to invest in our business, and we have a disciplined investment strategy on that. We've pivoted over the last couple of years where we're focusing most of that discretionary CapEx in our developed markets, so the U.S., Europe, and CoreSite. And we're investing less in our emerging markets. Not zero. There's still a little bit of investment there as we work through some contracts, pre-existing contracts in those markets, but we are investing more in the developed markets.
And then we also have the options to buy back stock or further deliver some of the other uses of cash there as well. And then kind of the fourth pillar is really maintaining and enhancing our investment-grade balance sheet as we focus on the quality of earnings and making sure that we have quality on the revenue side, but also being disciplined about refinancing our debt and keeping that investment-grade balance sheet that gives us the lowest cost of capital in the industry and gives us just that much more leverage in terms of our operating results. And when we put all those together, we believe that that will give us industry-leading AFFO per share growth over time.
That's great. I'd like to dig in on all of them, but before we do that, maybe just get this topic out of the way. Can you just maybe talk about maybe framing the potential risk as you go through the litigation with DISH, and how should we think about the process?
Sure. DISH comprises about 2% of our global revenues, and that's roughly $200 million a year. I've seen some analyst reports out where they net present value that and kind of size it. I'll just refer to how they size it, which is $1.5 billion-$2 billion. That's kind of the way to size the risk with DISH on that. There's really nothing new to report in terms of the litigation. It's still pretty new. We just filed it a couple, I guess, a few weeks ago on that, and it takes time for these things to play out in the courts. Just to refresh everyone's memory on what happened with DISH, we signed an MLA in 2021, and it goes through 2036.
After the spectrum sale was announced, we received a letter from DISH saying that they believe they were excused from performance under the agreement. We strongly disagree with that, and so we filed suit to enforce our rights under that agreement. For those of you who don't know, I'm a recovering lawyer, so I am not anti-litigation when it's required. And so we'll continue to play that out. And we'll continue to talk with DISH. We're open to the idea of trying to resolve this business person to business person, but if not, we'll just continue through the process. Courts aren't fast, so it's not going to get resolved tomorrow, but we'll update you guys of the progress along the way as developments happen there.
Okay. Maybe just generally in the U.S., you mentioned healthy levels of carrier activity. Can we dig in a little bit more based on where we are in terms of the first phase of 5G deployment completed? What does that mean in terms of carrier activity going forward? Is there a pause in the market? Are you already starting to see some densification? What are they spending on?
Yeah. So we think of every G as about a decade-long deployment, and so we're roughly five years into it. And that first phase is a coverage phase where everyone's racing to get a certain number of POPs covered. And we're largely through that phase of it, and we're getting into the phase now where our customers are focused on kind of what we call quality and then capacity. And so when you do that initial build-out, every technology and every spectrum band propagates a little bit differently. So when you do the first overlay, you have some quality of service issues. I'm sure no matter who your carrier is, you may have areas where you're still on 4G, things like that. So they'll attack that and improve the consistency and quality of coverage. And we're definitely seeing that activity today. And that comes in the form of two things.
It can be additional amendments as they enhance sites that are already getting capacity issues, but also as they fill in gaps in the coverage. So we're definitely in the phase where we're seeing that activity. And we're also seeing the early phases of densification to meet capacity needs. Now, a lot of times they do both. When you're doing a quality of service, it also relieves capacity. So you can't tag a specific site all the time and just say it's definitely for capacity. But as we look at the regions where we're seeing new colocations coming in, they mirror areas where we saw capacity adds in 4G and 3G and 2G. So it's a pretty good bet. So we are encouraged by what we're seeing there. We're seeing that beginning of densification. And again, we expect another five-year run on 5G as they prepare for 6G.
One of the things that we look at in terms of the densification for 5G is we think that's actually getting the networks ready for 6G as well. So we think it's some smart network planning to densify now. If you look at the spectrum bands that are being identified globally for 6G, they're in that 7 GHz -8 GHz band, which is definitely going to propagate much differently than the 3 or sub-3 bands. So we think that more dense networks are going to be required out of the gate for 6G. So this densification we're going to see in 5G is also getting ready for that first phase of 6G as well, we believe.
For the 5G deployment, which is still ongoing, the carriers now have access to more spectrum. It's sort of depth and breadth of spectrum is available for them. Does that delay more activity for towers?
We don't think so. We think it's both, and when you think about how rapidly mobile data requirements are growing, they need every solution at their fingertips. They need to be able to deploy more equipment, more spectrum, and more sites to meet that demand over time, so I know there's speculation out there about, does it delay things a quarter or a month? We think in terms of long-term, medium and long-term, we don't see any delays in medium and long-term. We think that they need all those different solutions to meet that skyrocketing demand.
Okay. We had AT&T CEO John Stankey in the prior session, and he said that the wireless CapEx has peaked. What does that imply for you?
There's not always a direct correlation there because when they talk about spending on their network, there's a lot of different elements in that. There's the backhaul element. There's the core network element. The radio access network on the towers is only one part of that overall spend. So I don't read a direct read-through in terms of him saying that that means less activity on towers. For me, the way I think about activity on towers is really mobile data growth over time and what equipment's available, what's the throughput available on that, how much capacity can the radios handle, what spectrum's available, and then what do demand trends look like. That's a much better proxy than what they're spending year to year on that whole chunk.
Okay. I remember a time that we used to say every time the carriers touch the tower, the tower companies benefit from that. But maybe with the holistic MLAs, the carriers also got some flexibility and were able to light up more spectrum with just a software upgrade. So thinking about the upcoming spectrum that's becoming available, we saw it with 3, 4, 5 for AT&T. It's just spectrum upgrade. Maybe they will build out 600 MHz later on. Can you just help us understand when is it good for towers and when is it not?
It's always good for towers. Okay? It may not be that every single touch results in an amendment revenue piece of it because as they reform spectrum, as they reform equipment, there's a little bit of a substitution effect on that. But as mobile data growth increases, there's a limit to what the new equipment can handle in terms of throughput. So even if you can do a software push to a radio, there's still a limit to how much that radio can. So as mobile data growth climbs, they'll need to add more radios over time. So as they're deploying this spectrum, it's good for us. Anytime carriers get spectrum, they deploy it. It's good for us because that requires them to continue to invest in the network, and that telegraphs are going to continue that they will invest in the network to do that.
Mobile data usage still up 35%. Can you talk a little bit about what use cases you think that the carriers will continue to support with incremental mobile equipment?
Yeah. We'll certainly fixed wireless as a component of that growth, but we are also seeing that 5G smartphone users are using a lot more data than 4G smartphone users. And so when you start thinking about the use cases that are in place today, a lot of it's still video streaming on social media, and the uploading has more of an effect on the network than the downloading does. So don't discourage your kids from doing their TikTok videos. That's good for our business. Fixed wireless continues to be a growth driver for the carriers. And so if you look at the net subscriber adds for the past couple of years, fixed wireless makes up the biggest part of that. And we see them continuing to drive good margins in that business and setting new targets for subscribers.
We think that's a good driver of activity on the networks overall and a good source of revenue for our customers. When you get a little bit further out, all these use cases that are related to AI are not baked into the estimates that we're seeing out there. There's always an asterisk in every report that comes out about mobile data usage that assumes light levels of AI. I'm starting to get really excited about some of the more bandwidth-intensive use cases on AI. Working with a group of folks, we were using one of the new video editing softwares, Canva, the other day. It is such a bandwidth hog. I mean, it was causing problems on the Wi-Fi that we were on. When you start thinking about those types of applications in the mobile network, those are going to be huge data drivers.
The other use cases that we're starting to get excited about are some of the AR glasses and even the ones that aren't AR yet, the Meta glasses with the camera in it. Ed Knapp, who retired but is still doing some work for us, he's obsessed with those things, and he's streaming video up all the time on those, so those types of use cases are going to continue to drive more and more bandwidth increases on the network, and when I look out over that kind of medium to long term, I just don't see a limit to mobile data growth. I think it's going to accelerate, not decelerate.
I think you've mentioned before that the current network planning has been more to support the downlink capacity and not so much the uplink. Are you seeing a change in the carrier activity to sort of support the future use cases that could be coming?
We're not seeing it yet, but we wouldn't necessarily see it. A lot of that's behind the scenes for them. So when we talk to industry experts, what we hear is they're still architecting 90% downlink, 10% uplink. And again, I defer to my customers to talk about their specific use cases on that. But I do think over time they're going to need more downlink. And so whether that's re-architecting the networks or just adding more raw capacity, I think that that's going to be required to meet the demand that's coming down the pipe from all these use cases.
And maybe other potential tenants. Cable is a small portion of your portfolio. They are talking a lot about continuing to build the CBRS. Is that an opportunity?
They're a very small customer of ours today, so we see a little bit of activity around the edges on that, and when you look at what they've been very successful in this space is MVNOs, but their scope relative to the MNOs is still pretty modest, so we're not anticipating anything in our current guidance for that, but we hope so. We hope that they continue to find a business case to do that. And when you think about other tenants on sites, we've had what we call our vertical market segment, and we've had that in place for two decades. And so that's things like government, wireless internet service providers, all the way down to ham radio operators. There's a big ecosystem out there that we support on the towers, and so we'll continue to work on that.
We're now talking with some of the satellite providers about teleports on the sites. We've even got a little proof of concept for drone nesting on sites. So we're actively chasing all those additional tenants, but nothing I can brag about today in terms of materiality, but every dollar helps. So we're out there chasing every dollar.
Any thoughts about Starlink and their potential for building a maybe hybrid MNO with satellites and terrestrial networks?
That'd be great. I don't see anything, any announcements today that make me think that that's imminent. But if they did, we'd certainly be there to support them and help them build out that network. We've got a great portfolio.
Okay. Maybe wrapping all of that up in terms of how to think about domestic organic growth. You had given a five-year outlook of about 5% growth through 2027. We had some discrete events that could change it. Maybe help us understand what could be the outlook into 2026, 2027, given those items, and then how do we think about future growth from there?
Sure. So we gave that guidance, I think it was in 2021 when we gave that multi-year guidance, and we said that the way we saw the industry shaping up, that we would expect to see 5% growth from 2023 to 2027. And if you look at where we are a few years into that, we were pretty right on where we were. What we didn't have in our view at that time was DISH selling its spectrum or UScellular being acquired. So those are some things that may have a short-term impact in terms of what our leasing looks like on that. And we'll wait to give guidance for 2026 when we give our Q4 results in February.
But when you think about kind of the long-term growth algorithm that we've laid out for everyone, we believe our developed markets, including the U.S., will provide mid-single-digit organic growth over time. And it almost doesn't matter who's building it. As long as mobile data growth grows, the customers need to build to meet that demand. And so we actually view some of these changes as long-term positive for the industry because even though you'll have fewer customers, they're better capitalized and they can better utilize the spectrum. And we've seen that play out over time. I've been with the company 25 years, and we used to have a couple of dozen customers because you had all these regional customers. As they've consolidated, we saw investment climb up because it was more profitable.
Even when you think about Sprint and what happened when T-Mobile bought them, T-Mobile then kind of doubled down on their investments in their network, and we saw a lot of healthy growth from that combination. Even though it was painful to lose a customer, over the long term, we're going to benefit from that. So we think these structural changes in the market are probably healthy for the market long term, even though it may be a short-term headwind over the next couple of years, given we didn't have that in our viewshed.
How do you think about churn going forward with the industry consolidation churn almost over? You used to say that it's 1%-2%, but is that the right level when you think about the incumbent tenants on their network now?
Look, it's hard to predict right now. 1%-2% has been our historical churn number, and what we've said is we believe it'll trend down to the lower end of that, and we'll wait to see how that plays out quarter by quarter, but it's certainly a lot of the catalysts in that churn were regional players merging out of business, etc., and we'll just have to wait and see how it plays out over time.
Okay. The network services business has been tremendous, and we always think of that as potentially a proxy for future growth to come. Can you maybe help us understand, is that wrong? Is that like a one-time benefit that you had that's not going to continue? And how do we think about that business going forward?
So the service business is a great business, and we do it. The cash flow is nice, but it's also complementary to our leasing environment. By being the easy button for our customers, we think we get more long-term revenue out of it because we get a higher share of new business. Having said that, that services business is cyclical. And a couple of years ago, we had to take guidance down pretty materially, and last year, we had to take it up pretty materially. So it's a little bit harder to predict. It's a good proxy for activity levels on the sites, but our comprehensive agreements smooth out some of that from a leasing perspective sometimes. So it's not a one-for-one proxy necessarily. What you can read from it is that the ecosystem is healthy. The customers are investing.
They're building their networks, and they're building them on our sites. The other nuance on services is we've grown our construction management piece, and that's not broad-based. So we do most of our services everywhere, and that's like acquisition, zoning, and permitting, engineering, those types of services. We do that for everyone across the board all over the country. Construction management is more of a niche business for us where we do it for certain customers in certain areas. And so when that's a larger piece of it, it's not as predictive because it's more of a niche business.
Got it, and maybe talking about competition in the U.S., we're hearing more and more private tower companies trying to get some business from the incumbents, and Verizon has a deal with Vertical Bridge. They talk about wanting to diversify their tower portfolio. How do you think about their presence, and as the carriers move on to the densification phase, could that opportunity be shared with some of the private ones?
This is nothing new. The customers wanting to diversify their vendor base has been going on for at least 15 years that I can think of, maybe even longer. You have to remember it's real estate. There are barriers to entry around a lot of these sites. I don't worry too much about those types of things. We're not building a lot of new sites in the U.S. today because there is competition from some of these private companies that are willing to underwrite returns different than I'm willing to underwrite than that. It has limited our ability to develop new sites kind of on a build-to-suit basis in the U.S., but it hasn't at all impacted our ability to drive organic growth on our existing portfolios.
And so the way I think about that is there's so much demand, there's so much growth in the networks that they can support multiple vendors on that. And who knows, some of those vendors may become acquisition targets in the future like they have in the past. And so I think it's just a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
Okay. Maybe let's move on to Europe, another developed region that has been growing around mid-single digits. How do you think about your positioning there, both in terms of potential consolidation that could happen among the carriers, your exposure to that, but also it looks like there are some portfolios that are being available. What would be your approach?
So when we entered Europe, we were very patient to get the right portfolio, right terms and conditions because we anticipated that there could be some counterparty risk with some of the smaller carriers there. And while I'm not sure we expected as much consolidation as we're seeing, we knew that that was a risk out there. And so when we bought the Telxius portfolio, we had very little exposure to the weaker tenants on it. So that has given us a lot of insulation from the impacts of the carrier consolidations that we are seeing. In Spain, you have MásMóvil and Orange coming together. There are some rumors about things that may or may not happen in France. We have small exposure compared to the peer group in that.
And so we actually look at it very much the way we look at the U.S., that it may be an opportunity for us because fewer customers with healthier balance sheets may spur a little bit more investment and a little bit more competition in Europe. And so we feel very comfortable that we'll continue to drive those kind of mid-single digit growth opportunities in Europe. Now, when you think about scaling in the region, we have really good scale in Spain and Germany. France we're a little bit subscale in, and we'll continue to evaluate opportunities there. But we don't feel compelled to do anything. There's no strategic reason to stretch for that. So if we do buy something there, it's going to be because it's a good deal, right terms and conditions, and right price.
And how would you balance in terms of growth versus yield? And I guess you've mentioned that you want to put incremental capital into developed markets, so that would hit it. But in terms of growth opportunity?
The good news is we have a lot of opportunity to invest right now, and so whether it's we're doing a lot of build-to-suits with good day-one yields, and we also think have good growth characteristics in Europe, and we're putting more capital toward that. And we have CoreSite as an option in the U.S. to put more capital in. So we haven't had to make a growth versus yield decision because we can do both. And that's what we want to continue to do, is source the opportunity to do both.
Okay, Madam, and that one has seen some industry consolidation. Can you just remind us how long that will take us? And then anything else that you're seeing in terms of new activity picking up?
Yeah. That market's in the middle of a reset, and it's resetting kind of all across the market from the larger countries like Brazil to the smaller ones in Latin America. And it's been a low-growth market first for the past couple of years, and it will be for the next couple of years. So probably 2026 and 2027, I continue to expect low growth in Latin America as we continue to see the remaining churn in Brazil from Oi, so the gift that keeps on giving. And then also there's some carrier consolidation in some of the smaller countries. And also there have been a couple of carrier bankruptcies that we're working through. And so I'd expect to continue to see low growth in that market. The good news is, though, we are seeing a little bit of signs that the market reset's happening.
If you look at Brazil in particular, the three major carriers in Brazil are starting to tick up their investments in their networks, and it's not dramatic yet, but we think it will continue to rise over time, and so we are seeing some positive leasing trends happening in Brazil, not enough to offset the churn that we're seeing, so I don't want to change the expectation on that, but it is the sign that that market is changing, which we think will give us a return to accretive growth rates in Latin America 2028 and beyond.
Okay. Any updates on Mexico? How should we think about trends there?
Look, Mexico. I guess we have the two issues. We have the dispute with AT&T Mexico that we disclosed before that we're kind of in stasis on pending that arbitration. But from a market perspective in general, that market is still behind in terms of 5G deployment. The spectrum's not in the hands of the carriers yet. And so we're not seeing robust investment in the networks there by anyone because they haven't figured out, from a policy perspective, how to get spectrum in the hands of the carriers. So I think that's something that's got to get worked out over time. And they're going to need the investment just like everybody else needs the investment.
So I'm hoping to see the government and the carriers work something out there to get that 5G spectrum in their hands, to see some investment happening there, but it just hasn't happened to date. So that's a future opportunity in a current kind of stasis model.
Maybe Africa, it remains one of the sort of half of your emerging footprint, roughly. It's been growing very nicely, double digits. Do you expect that to grow? Also maybe provide some guidance for us in terms of your appetite to remain in the region?
Sure. So Africa has got an amazing growth story in terms of new business. Our new colocations and amendment business there continues to grow. They keep having quarter after quarter of really good results on that front. And so when you think about the challenges we've had in Africa, it's largely been carrier consolidation, which is pretty much done now. The vast majority of our revenues there are with the top two players in each market, which we think are stable and durable. And then we also had FX issues that have been weighing on it. They've had a great year this year, and they've had really good growth this year because FX has been relatively stable, better than what we expected when we put guidance out. And we're seeing those new leasing trends continue to accelerate. Looking forward, the leasing environment is going to continue to be good there.
FX, you guys probably have a better handle than I do on what that's going to be. And it's going to be unpredictable, which is why we've said we're going to pivot investment. When we think about our emerging market portfolios, when you go back to why we went there to begin with, it was to give us higher growth for longer because we thought they would grow faster. And from a new business perspective, they are. Now, you've got some discrete issues with carrier consolidation, but when you get through that, they are growing faster. For us, it's just the volatility that puts in the portfolio. So we think having some exposure there can make sense for us long-term. It just needs to be smaller so it's not having as much of an effect on the overall results.
So we'll continue to work through investing more money in developed markets and then continue to ratchet down the investments in those markets so it becomes a smaller piece of the pie. In terms of divestitures, we get asked that. We might nip around the edges. And look, everything's for sale in the whole portfolio. If you want to buy something, make me an offer. But we want to get the right value for something. So we're not going to do fire sales. We're not going to run for the exits on that. We're going to harvest cash flows, repatriate them, invest them in the good markets. And that's what we see kind of the near-term best option for those. But we're always evaluating. And so if we ever decide that we can create more value by doing something different, we will.
But as we sit here today, we think that continuing to operate those markets as efficiently as we can, growing them, harvesting that cash flow and reinvesting it is the best long-term growth driver for those markets today.
And then maybe CoreSite, the other part of the business which has been doing tremendously well, maybe not for the reasons that you bought the asset for. First, maybe operationally, it was a double-digit grower. Can 2026 be a repeat of that? And then same question strategically, do you see yourself as the owner of that asset for a longer term?
We see the ability to drive upper single-digit or double-digit growth in CoreSite for a good period of time. The demand drivers that are in that space are durable, and it's not just the AI boom that's fueling it. Now, that's helping with market pricing having gotten better. It's helping with not having excess supply out there, but CoreSite's benefiting from its core business, which are enterprises that need to be interconnected to major cloud providers and more and more inferencing platforms in that environment, and there's a very long tail of business on that, so for us, the key to driving growth in CoreSite is replenishing capacity. We've got more megawatts under construction today than we ever have in our history, and we'll continue to invest in doing that, and that'll continue to fuel the growth there, so that's a great story for us. It's a great growth driver.
We're able to continue to write mid-teens or better development yields as we build the assets, and we have a lot of opportunity to keep growing that portfolio, so that's a great business, and we continue to focus on that. I believe more and more the edge is coming. We were wrong on the timing. We thought it was going to happen sooner, but we're really starting to see the ecosystem starting to develop there, and so I am convinced that you will see the synergies between tower and data centers, and so I think, yes, we're the right owner for that asset. Number one, it's a great growth driver. We're maximizing the value of it today, but number two, it is going to give us a leg up and a right to win as the edge evolves over time, so I'm feeling very good about the investment.
I'm feeling very good about the business. I'm feeling very good about how the edge is going to play out over the next several years.
So far, it's contained to domestically. Would you consider also owning data center assets outside of the U.S.?
Our customers would like for us to, and so I think with that, we haven't found the right opportunity to do that yet. If we did, it would likely be developed markets, and it would likely be in conjunction with customer commitments with that so there's no current plans. There's nothing to announce, and there's nothing in the works on that but I wouldn't shut the door on it. Again, the dynamics that we're seeing in the U.S., the rest of the world's behind so there's an opportunity to get some of that growth in those developed markets. We consider that in the right opportunity.
Okay. Maybe tying it all together in terms of how to think about capital allocation, and especially considering what your stock valuation is right now, and as you think about opportunities to invest in developed markets, both on the tower side, maybe CoreSite development, CapEx seems to be going up. How should we think about that discretionary CapEx versus buyback and your leverage?
Yeah. It's really a math exercise that Rod and I engage in kind of on a real-time basis, and every opportunity that we look at to invest capital has to compete with the stock buyback, so we just run the math and say, "What do we think is going to create the best long-term opportunity based on where current interest rates are, where the stock price is, and what that investment opportunity will yield?" so it's really a dynamic way to allocate capital. Our first priority is funding the dividend, and then beyond that, we do have some optionality in terms of whether we're going to fund that internal CapEx, M&A, stock buybacks, or further delevering.
And you saw us announce last quarterly earnings that we had started doing some buybacks because at the time, that was going to create more value than what we saw in the other alternatives for that cash. And we'll continue to make those dynamic allocation decisions based on what the math shows us.
Can we expect that to continue in the near term?
We'll make the decisions the same way for the medium and long term. We'll wait to tell you what we're doing this quarter when we do earnings. But nice try.
That's fair. I think we'll end it there. Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.