Okay, if everybody could take their seats, we'll get started with Charter. We're thrilled to have Jessica Fischer back, CFO of Charter. So let's start with maybe a high-level question, then dig into the operating questions. Could you just talk about, like, what you and the business in general are the most focused on at the moment?
Yeah, so we're making progress across all of our initiatives, right? Evolution, expansion, and execution. On the evolution side, that's network evolution, so the upgrade of our network so that we can provide multi-gigabit speeds in the downstream and up to a gig in the upstream. It's expanding mobile convergence. We launched Anytime Upgrade, as well as a phone balance buyout plan, which is enabling us to continue to expand mobile. It enhances value for the business through mobile, as well as through adding value to our broadband connections.
And then on the video side, you know, continuing to pull and bring value into video packages, as well as to be more flexible in the way that we can package our services, so that we're providing customers with a service that provides what it is that they want or that they can afford, at an appropriate price for the value that's in the package. On the expansion front, that's expanding our footprint both in rural and then generally across the footprint. Our expansion has been going extraordinarily well. Construction is in progress. We expect to build 450,000 subsidized rural passings this year, and that construction is progressing quite well. And we're getting the returns on the passings, I think, that we had expected to get.
And then on the execution side, you know, I would have said in other spaces of time that this is maybe the one that had gotten less focus in what we talk about, but there's a lot going on in execution. We have made investments in extending the tenure of our employees, and that now is starting to come to fruition in terms of driving down transaction volume across the business. We have worked on digitization efforts and continue to work through digitization efforts that are allowing our employees to be more efficient in the way that they serve customers when they do serve them. And the combination of those things, along with some of the work that we've done around our expense initiatives, is allowing the business generally to be more financially efficient as we move forward across the year.
And then we've really sort of refocused in expansion as well, making sure that we're taking into account, from the customer side, like, how does the customer view what it takes to sort of produce high-quality service? And we've been focusing our execution initiatives around improving those things that really matter to customers, to make us a better service delivery organization. And when you bring all of those together, you know, everything we do across our initiatives is focusing on bettering the business for the long term of performing well in the market. And I think that that's what we're doing, so it's an exciting time to be at Charter, kind of investing in all of those things that I think will make the business better for the long term.
Great. So let's move on to the big subject of broadband and ACP. As of your Q2 earnings call in late July, Charter had... Well, I'll call it this. You said you retained the vast majority of your ACP customers. Can you give us an update on your retention efforts around ACP subscribers since then, and if you're seeing any pressure on customers' ability to pay?
Yeah, so we continue to do everything that we can to keep customers connected to reliable broadband. I think in terms of what we saw in voluntary churn coming out of ACP, that actually has gone quite well. And on the non-pay side, it's still too early to fully call it, but I think what we're seeing in terms of payment activity has been consistent with what we overall kind of expected. And so if I break those two, you know, voluntary, we expected to take a lot of calls related to the end of ACP credits, which really happened for us in May and June, with them stepping down and then fully going away. That call volume now has largely made its way through the system, so I think we've seen what we're going to see in voluntary.
We think we performed extraordinarily well there, because we had the mobile product to offer, because we have a high-quality sales workforce, and so overall, I think that has gone quite well. On the non-pay side, as I said, so those just from a timing perspective, most of the highest risk non-pay sort of makes its way through over the next two months from right now, so some of that'll fall in Q3, some of it'll fall in Q4, and that group, I think, is paying consistent with what we expected, maybe the lightest shade better than what we expected, but overall, I think the message should be that it's consistent with where we thought we would be, and we should be in okay shape coming through it.
And then I know that this is the second question on your list because it's what people are excited about, but I would be remiss not to remind folks, it's a one-time issue, right, in terms of the impact of ACP going away. I think that ultimately we'll weather sort of the one-time issue quite well. But we have always done a great job of serving customers who were more challenged to pay across the market. We have products in place to sell to them. We have a sales infrastructure that's successful at selling to them. And I think we'll continue to serve that customer group quite well, even in a post-ACP market.
Right. So, if I just interpret what you said about the bad debt, like the involuntary churn, the bad—like, is there anything you'd say about bad debt, like, right, over the next.
Yeah. I don't expect a huge spike in bad debt in the second half of the year, and I know that's not fully consistent with what people are anticipating, and there's sort of two reasons for it. One is something we explained in the Q2 call, but we have a set of customers who we knew were in this very high-risk group. And because our expectations for them ever paying were quite low, we're accounting for them on a cash basis instead of on a accrual basis. And so because of that, what you might think of as being bad debt expense, there's a portion of it that's gonna fall into contra revenue. And that's, I think, where you'll see that piece of the impact.
The other piece is that inside of bad debt expense across the non-ACP portion of the business, we've actually had some really good payment trends, particularly in mobile. And so I think there's some favorability across that piece of the business that sort of offsets the impact for what you might see from ACP flowing through bad debt.
Okay. And have you seen increased churn across your competitors and higher levels of selling opportunities as a result to their own ACP churn?
There's not a sea change in activity levels.
Okay.
There's maybe a little additional activity that you would see, particularly in mobile, and in that space, I think we are able to be really competitive because we have the best-priced mobile product in the market for those customers, but ultimately, even in mobile, I think, you know, we've got a lot of stuff out there right now in terms of having the new Anytime Upgrade, as well as the phone balance buyout, and so the way that you'll succeed in those in the long term isn't sort of snagging up a few ACP customers. It's by having the best product in the market.
Right.
And pushing it at a value to customers.
Right. Okay, so last thing on ACP: so then by... You said some of this will flow, you know, flow into Q4, and at that point, do you think that, like.
Is it over?
Yes.
When it's over.
Yeah.
There's an immediate impact to ACP, right? Which is the voluntary and the non-pay that we talked about. There is a longer-term impact. What we always said about ACP is that it didn't necessarily gain you sort of more customers in an individual quarter, but it kept customers in that more challenge-to-pay segment more consistently connected over time, and so what we think we'll see in the post-ACP environment is some of what we've talked about, in that churn had been at sort of all-time rock bottom lows. We'll have a little bit of that that'll come back in the form of non-pay for those customers who would've had ACP who had had ACP, but don't anymore. They'll fall out of the system, but then they come back.
Right, in another form. So it doesn't change sort of your overall customer level that much, but it does create additional activity in the form of churn out of the business, and then customers coming back into the business. And I think the level of what impact that is, it'll be hard to see what it looks like until you've sort of settled out of the more immediate impacts. So inside of next year. I think activity levels will be a bit higher, both churn and connect.
Okay. Back-to-school season has been underway for a few weeks now, and typically, this does drive strong broadband additions. Is seasonality becoming more or less pronounced for broadband?
You know, since COVID, really, we've seen seasonality be less pronounced, and it's hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that causes it to be that way, but I think over the last several years, it's just less pronounced than it's been before.
Looking past the noise of ACP, fixed wireless operators have been the largest broadband share gainers in recent quarters. What will it take for Charter to regain its position as the most significant share gainer in your footprint?
You know, there's been a moment, and there always is when you have a new competitor in a market. There's a splash effect of having that new option that wasn't there before. I think ultimately, you know, we call it cell phone internet. It'll be challenged by reliability and by the total speeds that they can actually get, as well as potentially by the capacity of their networks. But what we do on our side is sort of what we've always done. It's about selling high-quality products at attractive prices. It's about adding as many of those products to the customer as you can, which, you know, people like to talk to me about margins, but I like to talk about how much cash flow you can generate per customer and per passing.
And our strategy has always been about doing that in a way that you're actually adding value for the customer, right? You're adding a mobile product, or you're adding a video product that has great sort of built-in direct-to-consumer content to create that value, that then carries the additional revenue that they pay to you, in a sort of win-win for you and the customer around generating, that value. And then we back it up with high-quality customer service, and as I said, that focus around seeing ourselves in the customer's space and delivering high quality of customer service by investing in network upgrades and investing in digitization and serving the customer the way that they want to be served.
Ultimately, if we pull those things together, like, that's the way that you compete, not just against cell phone internet, it's the way you compete against fiber. It's the way you compete against any competitor in the market, and that's how I think we win in the long term.
But you were alluding kind of to the thing that I guess everybody sort of expects, which is, you know, what happens to the quality of their connections? Like, as in fixed wireless, as their subs grow, have you seen any, like, diminution in the quality? Like, what are you seeing in your markets?
You know, anecdotally, if I go talk to the people in who work in our stores and our sales agents, they would say that they see more customers coming back because they have issues with the quality of fixed wireless and coming back in. I think to some extent, it's backed up. There was an interesting Opensignal report a week or two ago where they talked about the quality of broadband connections and the reliability of those broadband connections. And the MNOs who have fixed wireless options were sort of at the bottom of that pool, right?
And it all sort of goes back to what we've said, which is that ultimately, in an environment where you have customers using increasing amounts of data, where they're using that to power new types of applications like AI and virtual reality, those higher quality connections are going to be important to consumers, and I think that it's a struggle for the fixed wireless product to deliver the kind of reliability that customers want, need, and expect from their broadband connection.
So let's go to the other end of the spectrum. Fiber competition has also been increasing. What are you seeing in terms of the pace of fiber builds in your footprint?
From a pacing perspective, you know, they haven't slowed down. There's always variability quarter to quarter as to how it looks, but the overall pacing across our footprint, I think, looks similar to where it's been before.
Can you talk about how you differentiate your offering from that of fiber?
Yeah. So I think the big differentiators on our side is how you can pull together products to make it more valuable to consumers, right? So we are able to offer a converged mobile product all across our footprint. And we do that and have the mobile product now that is the fastest mobile product in the market when it's combined with our broadband service. And so you pull those together, you have a customer who can get an attractively priced and high-quality mobile product with your broadband. You loop into that. We have a video product where we're adding a lot of value and trying to package in ways that are consistent with what consumers are asking for. That also is a differentiator.
And then you come back to service, and you say, "Can you differentiate on service? And have you invested in a way that allows you to do that?" And you bring those together, and I think that's how you differentiate against fiber.
Mm-hmm. I mean, you are increasingly. We'll get to video, but you are increasingly offering a very differentiated video product.
We are, and we're excited about it. I think we're one deal at a time transforming what we can offer in video. And I think it's becoming really exciting for customers. I mentioned to you before we came in, we announced this morning that we had just completed an early renewal with AMC, which puts AMC+ sort of in that list of direct-to-consumer offerings that we have. And so now, today, if you're sort of a traditional video package subscriber, it's a $30+ retail value of DTC products that can be included in that package. So it's a long way from the first deal that we talked about a year ago when I was here, that wasn't quite done yet at the time.
But it is an exciting and, I think, transformational change in terms of being able to provide real value to consumers in a way that can generate then that affiliation with video and broadband that sort of drives the business going forward.
Have you seen a noticeable impact on churn in a good way?
So it's early. And I'm always a little skeptical about sort of customers who engage more with our products tend to churn less, and so those customers who engage early, I think, are always going to show lower churn profiles. So I'm not willing to call it yet. And I think we're, you know, we're early on. We added Disney+ in January. You had ESPN+ in March, ViX in July, Paramount+ in August, now AMC+ on its way. But that's really early tenure of sort of trying to get customers connected to those platforms and to get people to recognize that it's part of the bundle. So I think we'll get there. I think it will drive lower churn but statistically, today, I wouldn't feel right.
No, it's absolutely increased value. Just going back to fiber for a second. In the markets where there's, you know, where you compete against fiber, what do you expect in terms of market shares? Like, you know, an even split and, you know, just the lower end goes to fixed wireless? Like, how do you see the market evolving?
Okay, well, first, I want to start on the fixed wireless side because I think people assume that, because of what they've done with headline pricing.
Right? You can get a lower headline price, but to get that price, you got to have two expensive mobile lines. And when you combine the cost of getting or you have to have one expensive mobile line. You have to have an expensive mobile line. When you combine the cost of that expensive mobile line and the cell phone internet together, and you compare them to our pricing scales, we actually compete quite well with the cell phone internet product on price. I think from a marketing perspective, we haven't quite gotten there with consumers, but I think that we will, and that you'll see us sort of finding ways to connect with consumers on that competitiveness. And I think we can be fully competitive, even for those more price-sensitive customers.
On the other side of that, you know, I talked about the differentiators, like, how is it that you differentiate against fiber? You have a mobile product, you have a convergent mobile product, you have a video product, you do well and have scaled customer service infrastructure that allows you to serve customers better, and all of those things come together to lower your churn. And I think when you pull all of that together, that we're more than just a split-the-difference competitor in the market, right? Like, we have real differentiating factors, that should drive us to be more than just sort of one-for-one in the market versus a fiber competitor.
Great. Moving on. Can you talk about the rural opportunity as a whole and maybe a little bit more on your rural plans?
Yeah. You know, rural has been, and continues to be kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in broadband. There are a lot of passings out there that were not economical to build without subsidies, and the subsidy programs are game-changing in your ability to go create those passings and generate a return from them. We were early on, big participants in RDOF. And there, I think we've been quite successful. You know, we're the largest rural broadband builder today, and we will build 450,000 additional passings this year.
I think we're pacing well ahead of the RDOF, sort of timeline, required timelines for the project, and we're doing all of that while still sitting at the same expected cost per passing that we were when we bid on it back in 2020, which is actually quite remarkable. Penetrations there are going quite well. The early penetrations are higher than we had expected them to be, and because of that, combination of things, I think we're generating the returns that we'd anticipated that we would generate.
We've added on to that with state subsidies, and those, I would say, fit very well into the footprint that we have, whether it's sort of filling in around our RDOF or filling in around existing footprint in ways that will do well for the long-term sort of management of the business, and will generate returns as well. And then there's BEAD. And with all of the rural that we have done, I think we're extremely well situated to be a good competitor for BEAD subsidies and to be able to go do projects where people have created programs that are conducive to private investment, and at a cost per passing that will generate good returns for the business.
Just maybe within, you know, RDOF and BEAD, what are the plans there for extension, for BEAD extension?
Oh. So in addition, we talk a lot about what we're doing on the rural side from an expansion perspective, and I think that's all going quite well. We've been doing some additional plant expansion as well, just inside of our footprint. So in addition to what you see us building in rural, we've been building additional passings inside of the plant, where we've identified passings that we can generate a really high return by building. And we've done good targeted building across segments like enterprise, where having additional connections is really valuable to growing that business. So across all of those, I think that's going well. BEAD, you mentioned. I think BEAD's slower than we expected it to be.
We've seen the states that we think where we have the potential to have sort of our largest BEAD investments still haven't had their plans approved by NTIA, and so because of that I think BEAD is having a slower start than what we would have anticipated. I'm hopeful that we'll still get there, like, those plans will make it through, and we'll get there, but it's been a little bit slow.
Right. Turning to the network evolution, you recently reduced your CapEx guidance for the year, but that was due to lower CPE spends, with network evolution still seemingly, you know, still full steam ahead. Can you talk about the next steps and investments to enhance the plans and the network?
Yeah. So our expectation this year is that we will complete our Step One markets, and be in progress in our Step Two markets inside of the year. As I said before, after we go through network evolution, you know, we have today gigabit speeds across our footprint, and we'll be able to offer multi-gigabit in the downstream and gig in the upstream, which I think enables that sort of next generation of products that will drive additional data usage across the networks. But overall, you know, we're making progress on the network evolution front, and we're excited about where we're going to end up.
So I guess putting it together, what do you think will be the greatest source of Charter's net additions as you look forward? Is it the footprint expansion of rural markets, housing growth, market share gains, that you kind of alluded to in competition, you know, in a competitive view?
Yeah. It's a hard question to answer because there are pieces of that that aren't under our control, right? But I think that we can grow in all of those spaces. So you have footprint expansion, where clearly we're doing all of the things that we need to do to grow footprint and grow our subscriber base in a financially responsible way, generating returns from those. You have the competitive side, where I think we have the differentiators to be able to continue to grow in the competitive space. And then you have sort of growth in the overall broadband market, which I think comes from housing growth, as and household formation, which maybe is the one that I think more about as we.
Mm.
As, hopefully, we get some recovery in the housing market and see more household formation. But then also there's demographic there, too, where, I think that there's still a bit left in terms of broadband penetration, of overall households, just as you have sort of that last generation of folks who were not connected, move out.
That's so hard to believe, but, like, just maybe the last broadband question. I mean, hard to believe that somebody could live without it, but, what do you think broadband growth will look like for the industry as a whole over the next, like, three to five years?
You know, I think that there can be good growth. I think it comes from the things that we talked about. You know, footprint expansion and expanding in the U.S. to cover rural America with broadband will provide growth to the broadband market. I think you continue to have sort of household formation and with it, just a little more penetration and overall broadband. And in all of those, you know, I think that we're really well positioned to sort of take a good share of the growth that you see in the overall broadband market over time.
Okay, moving on to mobile, which has been a big driver for you. Can you talk about your overall strategy in mobile? And as part of that, why did you launch Anytime Upgrade in April and your new phone balance buyout program in May?
So the overall strategy in mobile is about providing a valuable product to our customers in a way that only we can, right? So as a cable provider, we have gigabit service everywhere, essentially everywhere we operate, and in addition to that, can offer mobile service across all of those passings. And so we have that converged connectivity opportunity everywhere. We have millions of radios connected to our network that can serve as backhaul for what most of the activity on a mobile phone is, which is data usage. And so if you think about that, whether it's a second SSID inside of households or in our public Wi-Fi hotspots, we have the ability to backhaul a lot of traffic from mobile on our own network.
And to do it in a way that's valuable to consumers. You think about it as a consumer. You would, at least in my case, I would always rather be connected to Wi-Fi than to be on the cellular network, right? And so we have that converged opportunity. We have the opportunity to add value to consumers and to do it in a way that also generates financial growth for the business. And so that's an exciting opportunity. And so what we've done with it then is to say, okay, how do we grow it as fast as we can, right? And we've grown over time by having a really well-priced product. We're growing in terms of brand affinity to mobile, people believing that our mobile product is a mobile product.
And in addition, we keep adding features. So Anytime Upgrade was super exciting, because it's a $10 add-on, right, to get into our Unlimited Plus, which is what consumers have to do to get access to Anytime Upgrade. We make a margin on sort of every customer who takes that upgrade. And the Anytime Upgrade process is one that resonates with consumers, that you can upgrade your phone sort of at any time, and just sort of restart on a new EIP note. So it's been a good program for consumers. It's increased our uptake in Unlimited Plus, and I think it's attractive to customers. It's attracting customers in as well. Phone balance buyout is the other side of the story.
You know, customers are often sort of stuck when you have a multi-line household in one or a few overall EIP notes with your existing plan. We would have customers who say: "I want to come to you, but I feel stuck because of these EIP notes." And so we targeted phone balance buyout very specifically to address those multi-line households that had a difficult time with switching because of their existing EIP balances. It's been successful, so in bringing those subscribers and in particular, in bringing the multi-line households that we wanted it to bring. And it's doing it at an appropriate customer acquisition cost, so that once again, with those things combined, I think we're continuing to add financial value on Charter's side to the mobile business as well.
You might have noticed on our last quarter call, we talked about it. We are EBITDA positive inside of the mobile business, even with sort of this high rate of customer growth, and without having to utilize sort of GAAP allocations to reallocate or to allocate internet revenue over to mobile with the Spectrum One offers. And so we're in a good place. Mobile is well-positioned to be able to be a good source of financial growth for the business, and we're expanding it really rapidly with the new products that we're offering.
What's the working capital impact from these programs?
So there is some working capital impact, in particular, if you think about Anytime Upgrade, in that the balance of EIP notes increases. We also did our first EIP securitization transaction, back inside of Q2. And so we're mitigating that working capital impact, by accessing an appropriate piece of the market where we can get low-cost capital, to fund it. And so although there is a negative working capital impact from ... I think overall, that it's still adding great value, to the business.
Okay. Roughly 8% of your total passings subscribe to both your broadband and mobile offerings. Chris has said that you remain underpenetrated, and you've been, you know, even though you've been gaining mobile share fairly rapidly, what level do you believe, you know, at what level would your penetration rate be commensurate, do you think, with your peers?
We take a much larger share of gross adds today than that sort of 8% penetration of our customer base. I think that share of gross adds has been increasing with the programs we've added, like Anytime Upgrade and phone balance buyout, as well as with just greater brand recognition across the market, and I think if we can continue, which we think we can, to take an increasing piece of gross adds, you know, there's a lot of natural growth, and for a long time, sort of built into the mobile business today, which I think can make it very successful.
I guess moving on, watching the clock. Can you talk about current trends in your small and medium business operations?
Yeah, you know, SMB, I would say, has some of the same issues as residential, in that there is an impact there from cell phone internet products, particularly going after businesses that use relatively small amounts of data. We've always been underpenetrated in SMB, relative to where we are in the residential space, and we have high-quality products at attractive prices. So I think you have sort of those two offsetting impacts kind of pushing at each other right now. In the long run, I think that we continue to be underpenetrated in the space, and we should be able to attract more SMB customers.
Interestingly, it's also one of those spaces where we probably underinvested in connecting, I would say, you know, your average local strip mall over time because of the way that we were looking at them. As part of our expansion initiatives, we've adjusted that so that we're building the right projects to be able to connect appropriate groups of SMB customers across our footprint. All of those come together, so in the short term, SMB is a bit challenged by fixed wireless, but in the long term, I think it can be more successful.
Same exact question, but for enterprise.
Yeah. So Enterprise has actually been doing extraordinarily well, and you can see it more than you could before, because we've always sort of been fighting against cell tower backhaul and the diminishments in that business, which is finally starting to sort of come in a bit lower than it was before. But overall, what's happening in Enterprise, as I said, we're building appropriate targets. We've expanded our product set in a way that matches what we see the consumer needs in the market. And we've focused on service infrastructure and how we really deliver that set of products to clients better. And I think that's really sort of wrapped around sort of creating a good value proposition for customers in the market.
We're growing there with customers, sort of large and small, public and private, and really doing well in expanding that portion of the business, and I think it can grow well for some time to come.
Okay, moving on to video. Can you talk about what your video strategy is on just your programming negotiations? You've, which may be a little more public than it used to be. But are you looking at every new deal as a transformational deal? What are you trying to maximize for in the negotiations?
Yeah, so every deal we do today, our goal is to put value back into the product that customers are paying for, so we're not letting content leak out into the direct-to-consumer universe. We're pulling it back into the package, or if we can't, sort of offering to sell a direct-to-consumer product instead. And we're, in addition to that, pushing for the flexibility to be able to offer customers, you know, the packages that they want or can afford to buy. So pushing for the flexibility to be able to package in a way that better suits the individual customers who we see in the market. And we've been, as I said earlier, sort of rolling in those deals.
I think we see that there is a way for us to sort of get there in rolling more value into packages, making it a clearer value proposition for customers, and that's what we're looking for as we go into each of these deals.
Right. Because it is still relatively new, these DTC offerings. What at what point... You're not, as we said earlier before we even came on, you're not marketing it, like, really aggressively marketing. It's almost like if you, you know, It's hard to know. At what point did you reach the scale where you actually would kind of make a bigger marketing splash?
You know, I don't want to call ahead of time exactly when we think we've gotten there, but I think, you know, we're early on in introducing, as I mentioned, across the set of DTCs that we've introduced. I think we want to make sure that we fully understand sort of how we get those roped in. And I think we want to have, you know, a fulsome package, and to believe it's the fulsome package to market to customers. So we do some marketing, and I think we've actually had some good marketing arrangements with some of our programming partners, to try to get people to understand what's available to them as part of their package.
I think we'll get there in terms of having a product that really has a lot of value to consumers. If you think about it as a buyer, I know the number of streaming services in the market, just managing across them, I sort of chuckle every time. There's the commercial for how you track how many services you're paying for. Like, there's a solution to that, right? We've been here before. Like, bundled products actually are good for consumers, and they're good for the businesses that are being bundled because they make the revenue stream more consistent over time. And so I think the desire for it in the market is there.
I think as we sort of attract this bundle of products, including the linear product, which is still valuable for a large number of consumers, I think that there's great potential to provide value to consumers there.
Let's just focus a little bit on advertising. What are your expectations for advertising in general, and is there any comment you can make on political, would you say?
Yeah. So our advertising business has been performing extraordinarily well, particularly when you think about the shrinking sort of linear viewing base over time. And they've done that because we've really built the infrastructure behind the products. So to be able to do attribution, whether it's in linear or in streaming, and to have the infrastructure necessary to be able to sell not only advertising that's available across a product like the Spectrum TV App, where we get a lot of great digital impressions, but across other sort of services as well, so that we can be fully scaled in both linear and digital availability across all of the markets that we sell in. And so I think that those sort of strategic investments that we've made and being able to .
B e a great delivery service, as well as to have a great sales service for, for advertising, has enabled the business to compete really well, in spite of what has been a shrinking linear environment. On the political side, that one, until you're all the way at sort of the end of the races, you hate to call it early, but it looks promising, right? There's a lot of new money that's flowed in over the last several weeks. Geography matters to us, right? So if you think about, there are some markets in our footprint that have become, I think, competitive in the presidential race, that weren't viewed as competitive before.
There's a lot of issue spend flowing into some states where we have a pretty good footprint, and so I think we're seeing some good activity there, but ultimately, sort of whether those spaces stay competitive or continue to be viewed as competitive through the end of the election, as well as whether the presidential sort of top ballot money travels down into the down ballots, it's those couple of things that are most impactful to kind of how much political revenue we end up generating as we go through the race.
All right. Two more questions. Can you discuss your cost management efforts across the business?
Yeah, so cost management's been going quite well. We have, you know, projects large and small, short, medium, long term. We saw some good results, actually pulled forward sooner than we expected into Q2 this year, but I think those will continue to build through the end of the year and into next year, and all of those we've done with a focus on making sure that we don't harm our sales or our service capabilities across the company, and so I think we're happy with how it's going, and I think as we sort of make through some of the organizational adjustments that we've made, as well as some of the medium- and longer-term projects, we'll see the results continue to build.
Okay, last question. You slightly revised your leverage targets, as you're now moving towards the middle of your 4.0x to 4.5x target range. ACP seems a little bit better than expected. EBITDA growth is, you know, seems very stable as a result. Could you just talk about how you prioritize capital allocation, including debt paydown, reinvesting in the business, share repurchase, and any M&A?
Yeah, so our capital allocation priorities haven't changed, right? We invest first in organic growth in the business, next, in accretive M&A opportunities to the extent that they're available, and then we sort of manage the balance sheet, including doing share buybacks, to target, where we want to be in our target leverage range. And the things that you mentioned that are going better, I think that we always had sort of strong expectations for EBITDA for the year. But we recognize the importance of maintaining the investment grade rating, on our CCO debt, and the importance of that to all sort of holders of capital across the company.
And with that, though we continue to be very confident in the trajectory of the business going forward and where we'll take it in the long term, while we're in this sort of height of the capital cycle with a couple of years of higher CapEx, I think we'll target between now and the end of the year, coming closer to the middle of our 4.0x to 4.5x range.
Agree with that. Thank you so much.
Very good. Thank you.