Well, good afternoon. For those joining via the audio stream, welcome back to Citi's 2023 Communication, Media, and Entertainment Conference. For those of you I haven't met, I'm Mike Rollins, and I cover communications services and infrastructure for Citi. Before we get started, I'd like to mention that we do have disclosures available at the registration desk and on the Citi Velocity page from which you're streaming the audio. We'll work to incorporate your questions into today's discussion. For those of us around the room, you have microphones, and if you push the button, the light will go on and we'll get to your question. If you're streaming this connection, there's a question box on the page that you're on, and you can just submit your questions at any point.
We're gonna continue the tradition of using live surveys during our time together. They are completely anonymous. We're just, you know, collecting responses. It could be accessed with the QR codes and the information that are on the placards here on the table, as well as, they'll come up on the live streaming screen, and you can enter in your responses. With all of those details out of the way, I'd like to welcome back Dan Schlanger, CFO of Crown Castle. Dan, it's great to see you. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having us, Mike. It's great to be here.
We like to start the year in the same way, I think. Just thinking about your strategic and operating priorities as you look out to 2023 and as you look out to the coming year, are there any notable changes from, you know, what your priorities were over the past year?
The answer to the second question is not really. We have a pretty consistent set of priorities. We want to lease up the assets we already own, and we wanna build assets that we think we can lease up over time. We think that we've set ourselves up very well on both fronts, that the data demand growth in the U.S. drives the demand for our business. Whether that's our tower business or small cell business, as long as data demand is growing, we think we have a very good place in the world to continue to drive lease up on the existing assets that we have and have the ability to project out where we think additional assets will be valuable over time in the network to allow for that future demand to be serviced with additional infrastructure.
Because we have a very healthy demand growth, a healthy set of customers that are competing well on network quality and consumers that are upgrading phones and looking for a better wireless experience, we think that that creates a very good mix of dynamics that allows for us to see good growth in our business, both in 2023 and beyond.
We're gonna insert our first survey question into here, get this going. We'll talk about a few things before we get back to this. The first question for our audience is what do you expect Crown's organic tower growth to be in 2023, excluding T-Mobile churn? I'll help remind, per your prior guidance, actually, I think this came up this time a year ago, where you pushed out that T-Mobile churn to 2025. This is just an organic number without that. The choices are less than or equal to 4%, 4%-5%, 5%-6%, 6%-7%, or over 7%. We'll see as those responses come back in, encourage everyone-
Am I allowed to answer?
We'll get to your. Yes. Very much so. If you'd like to actually be a part of the survey.
No, that's okay. I'll answer verbally when you ask.
Okay. We're gonna come back to this in a moment, but, just, one question before we get there, which is, as you look at the portfolio of what you have, towers, small cells, fiber infrastructure, how do you view the synergies of these assets growing faster together versus if they were simply standalone portfolios or separate portfolios?
We think where the significant benefit for having everything under one place is that we can have a conversation with our customers that's beyond a specific asset and more geared towards where they have a network issue that they need to address, and we can help them address it. If they have a spot in their network that requires coverage, we don't just go to them and say, "Oh, yeah, we own the tower. You can use ours if you want." We can talk to them about how do you best want to address that spot. Not only today but five years from now or 10 years from now. We can have a conversation that extends beyond selling a product and more towards selling a solution.
I think if you think about that as your own personal way of going about the world, it's much better when somebody can help you solve a problem than it is somebody saying, "Hey, if you want this thing, you can own it." And we believe that develops both tighter relationships with our customers, that we can have better back and forth, better communication and a better relationship. But it also allows us to have a better insight into where we think infrastructure will be needed. And you saw some of that with our conversations with DISH and the agreement that we signed with DISH a few years ago around their tower business primarily, but it included a fiber aspect to it.
The reason that was important was because DISH is trying to build an all digital fiber-connected network of towers and other infrastructure assets. They are very much in a go as fast as you can type of mode. They started from almost zero because they didn't have a lot of network experience to begin with. They wanted the ability to go to one provider and get both towers and fiber at the same time so that they could have less to manage themselves. Just that in and of itself, that they thought it was important to go to one provider and wanted fiber to be included in a predominantly tower MLA, was an important validation of why we think having different capabilities together will help.
Because it allowed us to have the first-mover advantage with DISH, and we believe put us in a position of being able to generate more than our fair share of new leasing from DISH as they're building out the first phase of their network. Those are all really important because as goes around our company, that you can't get amendments on towers you don't have. So we wanted as many towers with DISH as we can get, so that as they grow their network and want to add more equipment, they're gonna go to the places they already have equipment, and that's gonna help our growth in the future. Not only does it help us in the near term that we get lots of growth, but we believe we set ourselves up for long-term growth.
Back to our priorities, lease up the assets you have and invest in assets that are gonna lease up over time. Having fiber was an important aspect of getting both those new leases and the future lease up that we will see over time. That's the type of relationship that we believe is spawned by having a conglomeration of assets as opposed to just one thing that we can go sell. Hey, if you want a pen, do you want it to be blue?
Thinking just a little bit more about DISH for a moment. When you announced that opportunity, I think there was a thought at the time on the opportunity for Crown Castle to maybe take more than its fair share. How is that playing out in terms of the DISH opportunity?
From what we can piece together from publicly available information, we believe we have taken more than our fair share. It seems like we have generated more growth out of DISH than what our competitors have been able to generate. We believe our agreement with DISH is a reason for that. Like I said, we're a first mover. We also believe, as they have said, that they wanted to anchor a lot of their locations around Crown Castle sites because we had that agreement in place, and it incentivized them to go on as many sites as they could on our system. We gave them access on up to 20,000 sites. There's an incentive for them to go on a lot of those. We want them on a lot of them as well, for all the reasons I just articulated.
We believe that structure and their desire to utilize our asset base as their anchor of their build really has allowed us to take advantage of more than our fair share. I also believe that the location of our assets has helped with that. We are skewed a little bit more to the urban areas than our peers are. I think the majority of what we've gotten over our fair share would be because we moved first with DISH, and we're able to make that agreement come to fruition.
After you had that announcement, just to stick on this for just a couple more minutes. After you had that announcement, I recall the next quarter you increased the amount of committed revenue that's in the backlog. Which, you know, I think established what you expected to be the minimum over the term of the agreement. Is a lot of that now in the revenue or is a lot of that still on the come in terms of the opportunities to, you know, monetize that relationship?
That number obviously is the total amount of the revenue that we see over the course of the life of the contract, and that contract's 15 years. A lot of that still is yet to come. We have recognized revenue with DISH as they've built out their network and gone on sites. We've seen them be very active. We've been very impressed by the speed at which they were able to build a next-gen organization to deploy a nationwide network. They have been a very fair and demanding customer. They have made us go as fast as we can and pushed us really hard, and we think that's good for everybody. We've both recognized activity, and there's a lot of activity yet to come.
I'll share the survey results, then we can talk a little bit more zooming out on just the broader organic growth opportunity for the domestic business. Twenty-five percent thought organic growth, domestic 2023, of course, all domestic, for towers, is less than or equal to 4%. Sixty-three percent between 4% and 5%, and 13% between 5% and 6%. It sound like you wanted to get in on the survey and share your answer.
We've given guidance, so I have an answer. What we've said that we think we're gonna grow in 2023 is around 5%. I'm interested in the split whether people chose 4%-5% or 5%-6% based on if they thought it was five, which way did they go. My guess is most people would be centered around that 5%, because generally, when we've given guidance, we're in the ballpark. We have a pretty good sense for what the growth is going to be. What we're excited about, though, is we have, over the course of the last few years, been a little higher than that. It's been 6% or so or a little bit more, and we've led our industry in the amount of growth in the U.S. tower market.
We're excited that we're able to stay in our what we think for the foreseeable future will grow about 5%-6% at revenue for towers. Being in that range, we think, is really indicative of what I started with, that there's a good set of dynamics underlying our growth in the US with lots of demand and growth in that demand, good competitive tension among our customers, lots of demand from the consumer in the US of wanting a better mobile experience. All of that is pointing to us being able to sustain a 5% revenue growth over time. Our business is such that adding year-over-year of good growth generates really strong returns for our shareholders over a long period of time. We're excited about where we are.
We think we're still in the middle of an upgrade cycle that will continue for years to come as our customers continue to roll out more spectrum on towers and continue to compete with each other on network quality. Those are all really positive dynamics for us.
When you think about that five to six longer-term annual opportunity, and you have agreements with a range of your large customers, you know, how much visibility is there? You know, is it very high right now already because of the established agreements? Is there a certain amount of flex that's involved? How should we think about that visibility?
We feel very good about that 5% to 6%, partly because we have the agreements in place with our customers. Those agreements, in essence, provide a level of growth that we know about, but it doesn't cap the amount of growth. There isn't like, "Okay, that's the most you could ever get." We actually feel really good about that 5% to 6% over a period of time in the foreseeable future. And the ability that if things go really well, we could do better. That's part of the way the tower business has been for a long time, is, and I think you've heard me say this before. I think our investors, in many cases, overestimate the amount of growth we have in any 1 year and significantly underestimate the amount of growth we have over a decade.
People look out and say, "Oh, you can't grow that much over a long period of time. We're gonna run out of voice minutes. Everybody's gonna have a phone, and they're all gonna call as many people as they can. You're never gonna need another tower again, and then you're gonna run out of data minutes, and then it's gonna be, well, now it's unlimited, so there's not gonna be a huge amount of incentive to invest and continue to build the network." There was always a reason to believe that the demand growth was gonna tail off, and we've never seen that in our business. We always see that we, as consumers, continue to consume more data. That leads to significantly more growth over a longer period of time than most investors would think.
I think if we had gone back 10 years ago and said, "Do you think we would be at the level of revenue and amendment activity that we are in 2023?" As we asked that question in 2013, everybody would've said, "No way," 'cause we hadn't even gone into really the 4G upgrade cycle that we've seen, and now we're in 5G. I just think that the ability for our business to add 5%-6% growth over and over and over again turns out to be a really good thing over 10 years and more.
The next survey question is gonna preview where we're going, but we won't get there just yet. The next question that we're gonna ask our audience to help with is, when will small cell bookings and installs accelerate? 2023, 2024, 2025 or difficult to estimate. We'll see what they come back with. While they're thinking about the answer, DISH is new colo for you. For the other major carriers you have in the U.S., as they're finishing the mid-band builds, are you starting to see the pipeline and interest in colocation and densification increase or change?
Yeah. To us, it's really unimportant whether it's colocation versus an amendment because what we get is incremental revenue on an asset that we already own. What we're seeing is a general consistent trend or a trend that is generally consistent with what has happened in the past in the tower business is our customers, when faced with the desire to deploy a lot of spectrum in a over large swaths of area, they start with amendments for the most part because they know what is on the tower, what the propagation characteristics are, what the traffic patterns are, and they already have the network set up to see where one tower overlaps with another. It goes faster and easier for them to go with amendments first.
Then they move into colocations, which are putting assets on, or putting the antennas on assets we already own, but they are not on yet. That takes more network engineering 'cause it adds another point of presence, and they have to shift their network around a little bit, and it takes a little bit longer to figure those out, and it's a little more expensive. They go first amendments into colocations, and that's kinda how they generally move through an upgrade cycle. We're seeing much of the same thing now. I think that we've heard some of our customers publicly say things of that nature too. We kind of, we've gotten a lot of C-band out, now we need to infill.
That infill, in many cases, means adding in some places they don't already have covered with a new band, in this case, C-band. Yes, we're seeing that. That's a natural transition that we are seeing.
In terms of churn recently has been running, from what I recall, at the lower end of the annual 1%-2% X kind of major consolidation churn. Given all the agreements in place and the visibility you have, again, keeping T-Mobile out of this equation, should it stay at the lower end now going forward at this 1%-ish type level?
I think we'll be within 1%-2%, but on the lower end of the 1%-2%, yes. I think there will always be certain years that something happens and it pops up. I don't want to say, yeah, we'll always be at the 1-ish%, but 1-2 is a good range, and the lower end is generally what we've seen when there hasn't been consolidation churn within the tower business. Like we've said, you kind of excluded the T-Mobile churn.
Yes.
I'm gonna just hit it for a second.
Please.
What we've done is we've signed an agreement with T-Mobile where the deconsolidation churn for the most part hits in 2025. We consolidated what was churn across a long period of time and pushed it into 2025, and that's around $200 million of run rate revenue that will churn in 2025. What we've said is past that, there will be some churn, but it will be within that 1%-2% normal course for us. Like I said, I think that normally we'll be around the low end of 1%, but there might be some times when it might pop up a little bit depending on a specific year.
Okay, got it. You know, as you're just closing out the discussion on the domestic business, there are certain things that are in these agreements already, and there's probably things that are gonna emerge in the future that may not be covered by the agreements and could be an opportunity for further monetization. You know, are there certain things that we should all just be thinking about and looking for, whether it's. I'm gonna just throw out a few things randomly, like, you know, Massive MIMO, you know, taking, you know, antennas from, you know, three sectors to maybe six sectors in certain markets, which could accommodate, you know, certain types of capacity for things including like fixed wireless. Things that
Are there those things or other things that you would imagine that we should just be aware of that could really be an interesting source of incremental monetization that's not covered by these base agreements?
I wouldn't say that there's anything on a. Kinda we're talking about a structural basis. What I would say is. The compounding effect of data demand growing at 30% a year is hard to imagine when you sit today. What that means is over the next 2-3 years, the incremental amount of data will be equal to the total amount of data that is moving over the network right now. 30% growth means every 2-3 years you double. The ability to keep up with that is going to require an amount of investment in additional antennas, additional tower sites, additional small cells.
I think it's hard to think through how much that will be because the increments have been small over time, and now we're getting to the point where the network's actually really big and we're still gonna have to double. How that gets done, the true architecture of that, I believe is less important to us than the fact that we as an industry need to figure out how to accommodate all of the consumer demand that is coming. We believe as Crown Castle, that we are best positioned to benefit from that demand, because whether it is going from 3 sectors to 6 because we have fixed wireless or whether there's Massive MIMO or whether it ultimately, I know you didn't do this on purpose, but whether it ultimately moves to small cells, we're somewhat agnostic 'cause we benefit from it all.
Our, like I said, our MLAs don't have like a cap to them that say, well, forever and ever, this is the most you'll ever make. It actually allows us to have, if certain things are done, that we can make more money. I think that just the compounding effect of 30% demand growth year-over-year, it gets back to the same thing I said earlier, really results in over a 10-year period, a lot more activity than what most people can think of when you start that 10-year period.
It's a good pivot into the small cell discussion. We have the results of the survey back and, 13% 2023, when small cell bookings and installs can accelerate. 2024 is about a quarter of the audience, and 2025 is about 38%. Difficult to estimate was almost a quarter of our audience as well. As a dispersion, what are you seeing? Can you review for us with what you're seeing in the small cell business? You had some activity in 2022 and how the conversations may be evolving with these carriers, similar to what we were just talking about earlier, now that they're getting through this mid-band cycle and this amendment cycle, talk about the small cell opportunity.
I would've bifurcated your question into bookings versus installs.
Okay.
I think the difficulty is that bookings to installs can take 18-36 months. We've already seen the bookings acceleration. Over the course of the last 18 months, we have signed 50,000 additional small cell nodes, 15,000 with Verizon and 35,000 with T-Mobile. That was equal to about 70% of the total bookings we'd had in the history of the company added together. That is an acceleration. We believe that the bookings acceleration has occurred, now we're starting to get into the position where the installation acceleration is occurring starting in 2023, where we're doubling the number of nodes we believe we'll put on air from 5,000 in 2022 to 10,000 in 2023. We don't believe that we were capped there.
We think that there's ability to grow past 2023 at 10,000 or more. We believe we've already seen that acceleration in bookings and that 2023 is the start of the acceleration of installation, but we believe that we can accelerate even more beyond. What that leaves us is a question I think that is underlying what your survey was, which is when is the next acceleration gonna happen?
Mm-hmm.
What I think that kind of ignores is that the acceleration we're seeing today happened during the period that our customers, particularly Verizon and T-Mobile, were very busy deploying mid-band spectrum on towers. Even though they were very busy on towers, they knew that over the course of the next 3, 2-5 years, they needed small cells as the next leg of the network deployment. Needed to get started on those small cells over the last 18 months to give us time to start siting them, building them and delivering them. What's good about that is, like I said, even in the midst of being so focused on getting as many towers hit with as possible with that mid-band spectrum, they knew small cells were coming.
There's no way that they gave us all of the small cell business that they're gonna have over the next 3-5 years. That's not the way companies act, nor do we think that they gave us all of what they'll outsource. It's just the first tranche of what we think is a growth engine for us and the industry. Because like I said, as we look out and think through how much data demand is growing and how much network capacity has to grow to withstand that demand, that dynamic can't be serviced only with towers, it has to go to small cells. That growth in small cells will drive significant growth in both additional bookings and installations and additional new builds and colocations for Crown Castle.
When we go back to our operational priorities of lease up the assets you have and build assets that will be leased up, that's exactly what we're seeing in the small cell business right now. The question of when we see that next round, we've already seen the first round of 50,000. When we see the next round, I think is difficult to predict because we have a hard time predicting when our customers will prioritize specifically by building out small cells over all the other things that they might have in terms of capital allocation priorities. We're ready, able and willing to provide the small cells as they come up. We have no internal capacity constraints that we have come across. We think we can ramp up more than 10,000 per year. And we think we can deliver more than 10,000 per year.
We will push as hard as we can to get as much on air as possible, as quickly as we can, and then get more bookings as quickly as we can as well, which will likely come from our customers looking out again 3 years out and saying, "Okay, what do we need in terms of network quality, in terms of coverage, in terms of capacity, and are small cells going to be a solution?" We believe the answer will be yes.
Just a couple clarifications. First is the 10,000 for 2023, remind us, is that exclusive of some of that episodic churn that is coming through the system?
Yes. It's exclusive of about 5,000 nodes of churn that as a result of the consolidation of T-Mobile and Sprint networks. We think about on a net basis, we'll add 5,000 nodes in 2023, but that'll be 10,000 additional nodes and 5,000 churn. The reason that we keep quoting the 10,000 as a doubling is the churn, as you said, is episodic. It's because they combined and they were on similar sites, and they wanted to get rid of those. Going forward, they even realizing synergies, T-Mobile made the decision that they needed 35,000 additional small cells.
We want to talk about the overall growth level of activity as a way of showing that the growth in the business is still continuing, even though we see this episodic churn event from the consolidation in the industry.
Another just clarification question. You mentioned, Verizon as a customer, T-Mobile as a customer. Is AT&T a significant small cell customer today?
Yeah, we're building small cells for everybody. Our total backlog is a little more than 60,000. obviously, those two orders we got for 15,000 from Verizon and 35,000 from T-Mobile are the majority of our backlog.
Remind me how many are on air today.
A little more than 55,000.
That gets you to 115 minus 5 for T-Mobile. A hundred and ten is kind of the addressable opportunity at the moment.
Yes.
I'm gonna throw out the third and final survey question. We'll come to this in a couple of minutes. Do you expect annual dividend per share growth for Crown Castle to return to the annual target rate of 7% to 8% after 2025? It's just a choice of yes or no. We'll come back to that in a moment. Fiber solutions. You have a small cell business, you have fiber solutions. Is there significant macro sensitivities to that business? If the U.S. goes into a recession, is that something that investors should be mindful of in terms of the possible slowdown or churn in that business? Is it fairly durable relative to you know, changes in the economic backdrop?
What we've seen in the context of our business has been that the macro environment hasn't had a tremendous impact on our level of growth. We've generally been able to grow around 3% on the revenue line for fiber solutions through some varying macroeconomic cycles. I think that's because we've targeted what customer base we go after, which is more of a large-scale enterprise, government entity, financial service provider that have longer time frames that they plan to. The short-term implications of a recession, and hopefully what would ultimately be a mild one if it were to happen, I don't think impact the decision of those companies to invest in the movement of data and across their business. We have not seen tremendous impacts from macroeconomic situations on our fiber solutions business historically, nor have we assumed there would be significant ones going forward.
However, I would say, of course, we're subject to macroeconomic events. Like any other business, if companies pull back and wanna save money, then they're gonna pull back and wanna save money. I think the difference is that we really are selling. The core value we're selling is the network itself. It's hard to pull back on the network when your business is still operating because people are still generating more demand and more data, and they wanna move it around, they want it to go faster. We are helping supply the underlying infrastructure to make that happen. We don't. Again, we don't see a huge impact from a slowdown, although we might see some if there is a recession in 2023 or beyond.
One other question on small cells, just to pivot back to that for a moment. The CapEx for that business is sensitive to the level of co-location on the fiber relative to new nodes. How does that look in 2023 relative to, you know, what the experience has been over the last couple of years?
Yeah. To give a little explanation to that, when we build a small cell system, the initial build, we generate a 6%-7% yield on invested capital. The majority of the capital that we spend is to build the fiber of the small cell. It's not the cost of the fiber itself, it's the cost of digging up a street, burying the fiber, and putting the street back together. When we add a second customer to an already existing system where we don't have to dig up the street and bury the fiber, there's significantly less capital in those colocation type of builds than there are in the anchor builds that we do. Therefore, the returns are much higher in colocation.
When we add a second tenant, the entire system goes from 6%-7% to low double-digit yields, which means the incremental yields are 20+%. That's because the amount of capital we spend on a colocation is much lower. As we look out into 2023, the 10,000 nodes we are going to build are a majority colocation, so we are going to double the number of installations we perform from 2022 to 2023, while adding only about 10% more CAPEX. That shows the power of colocation. Double the activity and only add 10% of the cost. That will result in higher yields, obviously on that capital, because we'll get the same revenue generally for doubling the revenue and only getting 10% more cost. That's the business model we're in.
That's how build good assets, lease them up over time. It results in good returns.
Are you ready to hear what our audience thinks about your dividend?
I'm ready.
Okay. Over 80%, 83% said yes, it would return back to the annual target rate of 7%-8% after 2025 and 17% said no. Your answer on this question?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes. What we've said, again, our target is to grow our dividend 7% to 8% a year. The reason that we focus on the dividend is because that is the return we're giving to investors for all of the investments they've made prior to that date. We want everybody to understand that we are focused on giving them their money back and a return on their money and growing it at 7% to 8%. Over the next two years, 2024 and 2025, we don't think we're gonna get to that 7% to 8% because of episodic reasons. Either, in essence, a significant rise in interest expense and then the Sprint churn in 2025. We believe we'll be under our 7% to 8% growth over the next two years.
As we exited in 2026 and beyond, there is nothing we've seen that is systemic in our business that would lead us to believe that the growth rate would be any lower than 7%-8%. We're very excited about the long term growth in this business because not only is towers a great business model that continues to grow for all the reasons we've discussed, but we have all of these new investments in small cells that we think will lease up and drive significant growth in our business. That's a great place to be because as good as the tower business is, nothing grows forever for all the time. You always need to be thinking about what's next for your business.
We think we found something that's really attractive, that has the same customer base, the same underlying business drivers, the same contract structures, and the same basic value creation while delivering the same value to our customers, which is lower their cost of implementation and operation by sharing the cost of that implementation across multiple customers. That seems like a great business model for us, is to have every way of attacking the growth in infrastructure in the US, and we think we're primed to do so.
Is there a risk that it could be below 0, that the dividend could actually get trimmed over the next couple of years between now and getting back to your, you know, the aspirations and, you know, after 2025?
Yeah. It's actually not my decision on what the dividend does. That's a board decision, so I can't promise what they'll do. We don't see anything that would lead us to believe that cutting the dividend is in the cards either.
You know, maybe finally, just in terms of capital allocation, net debt leverage, is there any room over time to bring that up? You know, you've been around that 5x level for a while. Any, any opportunity to move it? Conversely, do you feel like it's more prudent to actually bring it down?
We believe our business can withstand more than 5 times debt to EBITDA leverage and still operate very well. What limits us is, in essence, Moody's has a rating on us that says if we get above 5 times in the way we talk about it, they would say that that would potentially lead to a downgrade. That's recently shifted a little bit because they have recently put us on an outlook of positive. We're not sure how that's going to end up. We'll see. If they were to move their targets, I think we would move where our leverage is.
If they went up, we would probably move our leverage, because we believe that maintaining investment grade rating is really important. We believe that having more debt is totally sustainable and lowers our overall cost of capital, which is really important in a business that spends money like ours does. The cost of capital matters a lot. We want the lowest cost of capital, which we think is the debt market. We think we can withstand more leverage. Our business model is sustainable, predictable, and growth. We think that leads to a better leverage profile.
If you get that flexibility to take that leverage up, what would be the priorities in terms of how to use that extra financial flexibility for Crown Castle?
Whatever drives the most long-term dividend per share growth. We believe that is investment in new assets that generate the types of returns that we talk about with things like towers and small cells that we're investing in currently, which are generating, like I said, you know, up to 15% returns. Those are sizable over and above our cost of capital returns. We will continue to want to invest in our business. If that changes and those returns either come down or the repurchase of our stock would be more beneficial to the long-term dividend per share growth, we would shift our priorities. That's not what we've seen to date.
I was going to ask you about the buybacks because there was a time where Crown was more focused on buybacks. Is that something that is more of a discussion or at this point it's just too premature?
Yeah, it's never premature. When we've modeled out our business, we see that continuing to invest in the assets drives the best outcome over the long term, and that's what we'll continue to focus on.
Dan, thank you for your time.
Thanks, Mike.
Thanks.