Well, good morning and welcome to Citi's 2023 Communications, 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. Since this is our first keynote, let me also take the opportunity to wish you a happy new year, and thank you for joining us for our conference today. Before we get started, I would 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're also gonna work to incorporate your questions into today's session. If you're streaming this connection, there should be a question box on the page for you to ask questions, and we do have a microphone if we have time today to try to get it around the room.
Finally, continuing on the tradition of using our live surveys, they're completely anonymous. We're not tracking responses, we're just aggregating the results. You can access the live polling and Q&A, both with the codes that are up here and there's placards around. I just encourage you to log in now, so you can get ready to respond to some of our what I hope are gonna be some really good survey questions. It's also available on the streaming site as well. With that out of the way, I'd like to welcome back Hans Vestberg, Chairman and CEO of Verizon, and Kyle Malady, President of Global Networks & Technology. Hans, Kyle, thank you both for joining today.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Well, we've turned the calendar to the new year, it only seems like a couple of days ago. As you're now thinking about the year to come, can you just give us a high level perspective of the strategy, the priorities, and are there any notable changes in your objectives from the past year?
First of all, let me disarm the safe harbor statements. Anything that Kyle might say might be overlooking and goes for me as well. Just want to be aware of that. If you look into 23, I think a couple of things we are already changing. Kyle had talked a little bit about the technology roadmap that is actually changing, going into 23 compared to the previous five, six years. I'll let you talk about that. When it comes to the other businesses, I think that first of all the mobility, and especially on the consumer side, we have done quite a lot the last two quarters. As many of you may know, I was not really happy with the performance at the end of the first quarter, and of course then that trickled into the second quarter.
We start to take actions in the third quarter, being a little bit more agile, moving into the softer segments that we had. We continued that work in the fourth quarter. You're gonna see us being more agile. You're gonna see us being even more focused in certain segments. Remember now we are all the way from the lifeline with the TracFone brands all the way up to the premium brands. We're actually covering all the consumer segments. Our job is gonna be even do smarter, more surgical actions in the different segments to see that we retain our customers, but also acquire the customers that we want to have. Ultimately, with the goal of cash generation, that's number one for us.
I mean, we really think that is super important with wireless revenue growth or wireless service revenue growth and EBITDA expansion or cash flow expansion. That's really where it boils down. You're gonna see us being more on that side. I think a couple of other things that already has started emerging in 2022. I mean, the national broadband of course, both with Fios and fixed wireless access is really doing well for us. That's a strategy we outlined five years ago. It's starting to bearing fruit right now. The third quarter you might remember, we had way over 300,000 new net adds on broadband. We continue with a good journey in the fourth quarter. Of course, I'm gonna disclose the numbers when we meet in three weeks from now. Feel really good about that.
Finally, we start to get the traction. We talked about private 5G networks, mobile edge compute. Maybe the deals are small, but this year we're going to just get a lot of deals, and that's going to be a great base for our sort of platform for us to grow with enterprise customers over time. I think we have a strategy, but we're actually tweaking a little bit, being more surgical. I think, as I said when we kicked off last year, we have all the assets. We have now the spectrum, we have the network, we have built the network for five years. We have TracFones. We actually divested Verizon Media Group. We're much cleaner what we're doing. On top of that, you're going to see us doing more cost efforts this year. We announced it in third quarter.
Yeah, it's quite a lot of differences we're doing this year, but the core strategy is the same. It's more how we tweak it and go faster in certain areas and actually change a little bit focus in certain areas. Maybe you should say something about the technology roadmap in the year.
Yeah. Consistent with what Hans says here, we're tweaking our build a little bit. For the last bunch of years, we've been building a lot of fiber outside of our footprint as well as inside of our footprint. We've also been really bolstering our core network to handle massive amounts of data in the cores and been focused a lot on millimeter wave build. All three of those things are starting to come to the end of the build process, if you will, right? In our One Fiber markets, we are roughly 80% done with our core builds there. Now it's just a matter of hooking things up to it.
Our millimeter wave, we're over 40,000 nodes. Now that millimeter wave technology turns into a tool for RF engineers to use in hotspots that they have. C-band, we continue to build the C-band out. The three major programs coming down and C-band still continuing to roll allows us to take CapEx out of our program overall. We're gonna be less CapEx intensive going forward. The other thing that the tweak, the other major tweak that we're making, and Hans said, we're getting more local. When we were doing all this build, we consolidated a lot of things, so we could bring a lot of scale. Now it's really about optimizing, we're having a.
We have a close focus at the local level, along with our sales counterparts in the BU to make sure we're taking care of issues at a local level and servicing the customers in that way.
You can say also that on the consumer side, as I'm also running the consumer business, we are doing the same thing. We are in a moment right now where we go more local with our and executing more locally, both with branding, marketing, but towards the execution in hand-in-hand with our, with our team in technology. This is a pivot for the next step for us, being centralized for a while, and now we go local as the network has come so far with the coverage. We're now more in revenue optimization, capacity enhancements. We have built everything, as Kyle said, from the data center to the edge. We're built now with fiber redundancy, multi-edge routers.
Now at the edge, we can decide what type of business we're doing with different type of customers. I think this was a dream that I had when I started at Verizon in 2017. We too drew up this Verizon Intelligent Edge Network, now we're there, that's why we're also gonna see quite dramatic reduction on CapEx. It's not because we're not doing everything we want to do. It's just that we have now built this. We're still gonna have in 2023 a piece left of the $10 billion that were added when we bought the C-band in CapEx, ultimately, we're now coming it down to a BAU that is pre-2015, 2014 levels in absolute number. 2024 we should be done with that, we only have BAU.
Clearly this has been a strategy for a long time. We, we have the best network. It's just gonna get better with the work we're doing. Later this year we're gonna get all the spectrum we need, 160 MHz on C-band, covering the whole nation. In the first quarter, Kyle has not only promised, he has guaranteed we're gonna pass 200 million pops on the C-band as well. Isn't that right, Kyle?
That's correct, Hans.
Just, maybe finishing the topic on the BAU CapEx.
Yeah.
The goal, remind us, the goal for, was it 2024 BAU CapEx is?
Around $17 billion, somewhere there. That's where we're aiming for. It could be seventeen and a half or something, but around that number is a BAU that probably is gonna be the lowest capital intensity in the industry in the world when it comes to divided by the revenue. Again, we have built a network that is so smart. That was the whole intention from the beginning. That will of course unleash capital for us and cash flow. Again, remember what we are measured on ourselves is the service revenue and the cash flow. That's really. Especially going into this year, it's gonna be even more important for us.
Maybe, just rounding out one more part of the discussion on this while we're just talking about CapEx and investment, what are the things that could cause you to wanna spend more than BAU CapEx in the future? Is it to go more you know, fixed wireless, you know, bigger, broader? Is it more fiber? Are there things though that are on the whiteboard somewhere where, okay, here's BAU, but here are things that we should just be mindful of that you might do in the future?
It would be something like when we did when bought a C-band. It has to be something that's very clear to the market why we're increasing. I think we have discussed this every time, and I, and I will have Kyle helping me out here. We have talked about the four or five, 4 million - 5 million fixed wireless access broadband customers as a goalpost for us. The network will handle that. We build it once; we use it once. There might be many, many years out a conversation when, "Hey, do we split cells and do unique fixed wireless access solutions?" That's not in the plans for the next four or five years. After that, it might be that we come back and say, "Hey, it's a great opportunity.
We split 10 cells here because we can get more subscribers." I think that's gonna be a great, conversation, and it's gonna be sort of success-based.
Yeah.
Fixed wireless access as we do Fios today.
Right. I think it'd be opportunistic really, right?
Yeah.
I mean, like we did last year, if you remember, we spent some money, and we opened up 30 more markets for C-band past the 46 that we had. We were able to invest and clear those quickly, now we have those launched. Between now and when we get the full cadre of spectrum, if there's some opportunities like that that allow us to accelerate and grab revenue quicker, then that's something that we'd absolutely look at, just like we do with Fios.
We'll jump into the consumer business in just a moment, but let's queue up our first survey question. The first live survey question.
Okay. Out with your phone, Kyle.
Yes, you guys are.
We get to vote as well?
Yeah, yeah. Of course.
You get to vote. Yes.
Yeah, of course.
We can get a placard up here. It's right up here. You could log in. It should be visible now on our streaming site as well. I already see responses starting to come in. The question is: What do you expect for Verizon's postpaid phone net adds in 2023? The choices are less than equal to zero, over 0 - 500,000, over 500 - 1 million, and over 1 million. We're gonna get those responses coming in. We're gonna start talking about consumer. We'll get back to the results. Hans, you've taken over consumer recently. What can investors expect from your leadership of consumer, and what are the changes trying to solve for. Ultimately, what's the end goal of these changes?
I think a couple of things which you already have seen coming into the market. We will first of all from a offering point of view, we will be much more segmented to go for segments that we see that we are not performing well in. You have seen the Welcome 30, the Unlimited Welcome coming out with bring your own device, a special offering in a, in a segment of the postpaid segments. The other thing we're gonna see is also a harmonization more on the operations between the network and between the consumer business. You also will see us combining our consumer investment. When I say consumer investment, it's everything from media to above the line promotions, below the line retention.
We're gonna be much quicker on using that money instead of locking it up for longer times because the consumer sentiment has changed a little bit, so it's going much faster for them to change. We have been a little bit slow in some of those areas, so now we combine all that money in order to be quicker. As we saw in the fourth quarter, for example, we used a little bit more to media than we actually spent because it was smarter than using in promos. That is what you're gonna see from us. Much more agile decision-making using the regionalization right now, being closer to the markets and having actually decision-taking a little bit lower down in organization. That's what you're gonna see from us. You can bet that we will be disciplined.
We're gonna be focused on our cash flow and see that we get the right customers. We're not gonna throw ourself after the net adds that is not giving us the right quality and the right return on investments. That's not the main goal here. The main goal is service revenue. ARPA growth is very important for us. You saw in the third quarter how much we grew on that. That's important to us, and that is creating bottom line. At the same time, taking out costs so we get leverage on our scale. Don't forget when you answer the question which you already done, our business side is doing pretty well. We have five consecutive quarters over 150,000 subscribers, and they continue well. We're taking there.
It's more about where do I take my subscribers? Where are they giving my best return on investment? That's one process for us. Kyle is working a lot with me right now on the operation with stores and how we plan with incentives. You'd say commissions, but I think it's the same thing.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. In the stores and how we are tweaking that up, harmonizing it with the overall. That's what you're gonna see from me leading the consumer business, together with guys like Kyle and of course, the existing management team of consumer.
As you look at the fourth quarter promotional environment.
Yeah.
can you frame, you know, what you saw? Verizon had a goal of getting back to positive in consumer. How'd you do? Is there a significant amount of spillover? You raised the whole issue of iPhone inventory. Is there gonna be a spillover from 4Q - 1Q?
When it comes to the consumer net adds, I just wanna say one thing. We were positive. I'm not gonna go into the details because I have my earnings call, but we were positive in the fourth quarter, as we said we should be. Team did a good work. When it comes to the promotional environment, it's always a little bit elevated for the holiday season, so that's nothing. It was nothing unusually higher this time. We tried to, as usual, be as disciplined as we could and go into certain segments. There were some choppiness in supply from one OEM, which you probably know who it is, but they sorted it out. There's basically no spillover right now, at least for us. We had a good supply.
We had a good collaboration with the OEMs. There were days there were a little bit complicated lead times, but we sorted that out. It was a very short time. Yeah, it was good.
Let's go to the results of the survey. We've gotten some good response rates here. I'll read you the percentages and the answers, and for those online, you can see the graph there. 15% less than or equal to zero. This is for a postpaid phone net adds in 2023.
I know you're focused on that.
65%, 0 - 500,000. 21%, over 500 - 1 million. Zero was over 1 million. How do you think about these, you know, the response from our clients?
Yeah. What should I say? There's their vote. My focus again is gonna be generating service revenue growth. That's gonna be the number one. One measurement is, of course, getting new customers. You can step up; you can do ARPA. Remember, we have talked about this so many times. Our job. When we ended the third quarter, we had 41% of our customers on in postpaid on Unlimited Premium. I mean, every step up that we do every quarter with 2%, that's far more important from a ROIC point of view than actually taking a new net adds. You can just make the calculation, and you do them all the time. You know how much it costs the new net adds with the promos and compared to do a step-up.
Again, you need to be smart in a market where it's a subscription-based model. That's what we have in front of us. It's one of the best subscription models in the world. You need to be smart how you spend your money. Are you putting it on promos to get net adds? Are you doing the retention, or you're doing it for step-ups? You know, all the time, be more surgical. It's a financial game here. I know that some are very focused on the net adds as the main driver. It's not the main driver for the service. It's one driver. I think that's gonna you're gonna see from us. I think the responses are great, guys. We're gonna see where we end up. Kyle, do you have a comment on it?
Not on that. I'm not gambling on that one.
Let's go to our second survey, and then we're gonna come back and talk about the network while we get the responses. Second question, we're gonna ask our audience. Does Verizon need to reduce wireless postpaid service pricing at the risk of ARPU to improve volume growth? Your choices are, Yes, and maybe.
But.
Tiering and upselling can offset the base pricing changes. We're gonna let our audience respond to that. Kyle, coming back to you for a moment. In terms of network performance, can you talk about what you're seeing with the use of mid-band 5G? Is there a clear difference in usage and customer growth in the markets that have the C-band versus the markets that don't have the C-band?
We're getting great feedback on the performance of our C-band. I mean, for me, being in the industry for such a long time and just having the ability, the board giving us the wherewithal to obtain the spectrum that we actually call, you know, is generational spectrum. We've never been able to put this amount of spectrum in play for our customers. You know, the uptake's been great. Our usage growth in the markets that we have C-band is up quite a lot. To the point now where C-band usage overall is, you know, 15%-20% of our overall usage, and we only have it going in 46% of our markets. We see average users using it more when they have Ultra Wideband, and we're getting great feedback on it.
The other thing that's really unique about it is really the C-band that we're putting in play now, as opposed to LTE and low-band spectrum, which is just for mobility. This spectrum swath is really mixed use, right? We're doing both home and mobility in it, as well as millimeter wave. We're treating it the same way. All of our Ultra Wideband spectrum is being used for both. We're seeing just what we expected, frankly, in terms of, you know, fixed wireless access usage and having it. It is more than a traditional mobile customer, but also the time of day when people use it the most is offset. We feel from an engineering perspective, we're doing a good job fully utilizing the asset.
I'm just frankly, I'm really excited that also the board gave us the wherewithal to get the new 30 markets up and running quicker. We're gonna be really aggressive this year, bringing more and more online. I just can't wait till we can turn the switch on, I guess it'll be January first next year when we can bring the full complement of the C-band to bear. Right now we couldn't be any happier with how this is going.
Just adding to that, I mean, from a consumer point of view, we see a great pick-up on step-ups and things like that in the market where we have the C-band deployed. Remember, we only have 30 + 42, 72 markets, I think?
Yeah.
That has the C-band today. Of course, they're populated because they're gonna pass 200 million. There's 402 markets where we have this spectrum, so there's plenty of markets left to be done. That's also when you see the skew on our fixed wireless access is much more on urban and suburban, because that's where we deploy the C-band right now. Of course, over time, not too far away, we're gonna, we're gonna have also C-band in some places more than 200 MHz. We see actually the correlation there. Finally, I think, everything that Kyle has built right now, we are prepared just to hang the radios. Meaning we don't need to go out there again, adding 40 more megahertz or 60 MHz.
We have prepared them in places, even prepared it for 200 MHz where we need 200 MHz.
We'll come back to the step-up point in a moment on the ARPU side. Let's get to the survey results and share, you know, what we saw from our audience's perspective on does Verizon need to reduce wireless postpaid service pricing at the risk of ARPU to improve volume growth? 28% said no, 41% yes, and 31% maybe, but up-tiering and upselling can offset base pricing changes. Hans, you mentioned earlier the importance of wireless service revenue growth. Can you talk about how Verizon is charting the path forward, you know, with the volume, with the ARPU up-tiering that you're doing, and how price comes into play in terms of the competitive landscape?
I think that my answer would be no. Where we're gonna segment in certain areas, we might be a little bit softer, and we need to have more competitive offerings, and we're gonna have it, but we still gonna preserve our premium, and we're gonna preserve the growth over service revenue. Remember, sometimes we talk only about consumer, but we have over 45% market share on the business to business on wireless as well. We work the whole system constantly to have the right pricing. Very clearly, we're gonna continue to see that we have premium brands. Remember, we have different type of churns in different segments of the market where we don't need to do much. Others, we need to do much. Usually, we have high churn in the higher segments.
In the lower postpaid, we have been a little bit softer. That's where we need to do plans like we did right now with the Unlimited Welcome, for example, which is bring your own device, see that you get away from the promotion. Again, think about the consumer investment again. You take money from the promo and you can actually do it on something else, and your return on investment is better, and the lifetime cycle of the customer is even better, and then the churn is improving as well. You need, you just need to be surgical. Saying that we're gonna do a price reduction across the border, I mean, that I think is just irresponsible and not really thinking about the business you're running. We don't need to do it.
There are areas we need to be better, for sure. And we will be aggressive in those. We come in the market and go out in the market in certain places. We're gonna continue with doing that as well. I think that's gonna be our strategy, and that you're gonna see us be more agile. And more, sort of surgical in that.
In terms of the step-up opportunity on ARPU, can you frame where the base is today on the premium plans and what you're seeing in terms of the mix, so in terms of where that destination of mix of up-tier may be?
We are, as I said, on Unlimited Premium, 41% in the third quarter. On average, we have been adding 1 percentage points - 2 percentage points every quarter of more customers on that one. Still a big portion of our consumer base is there. On the unlimited, of course, that's now getting up to high 80s or high 70s, 80s. We still have more to be there, going there from the metered plans. Customers usually love to go to the from metered to unlimited. There's both those steps. All steps for every percentage we move is creating service revenue growth. That's how it works. That's what we will work with, but we're gonna need to have compelling offerings.
In some of the high premium plans, like the Unlimited Premium, we include Disney+ and things like that because customers really like it, and we have the ownership economics of that because ultimately we give the distribution channel to Disney. Oh my God, the guy is behind me. Our We're using our distribution channel as a scale, and then we can also make money on that one. That hangs together for us. We're continuing that. There are certain segments that don't care for an inclusion, and we shouldn't give them that. Our next step is, of course, +play, where we can have a much broader base, not doing inclusion, but our customer can use it. That's the next step we have of it.
I think we have a lot in the toolbox to really work with these segments.
Verizon touches so many aspects of the economy, the consumer side, the business side. Are you seeing any changes in behavior in terms of spending patterns, payment patterns, or even up-tiering, where you're seeing any signs of change in the economic climate?
Yeah. We cover a big portion of the consumer market. I cannot speak for my competition, so I speak about myself right now. We have seen increased store traffic from the second quarter to third quarter to third quarter to fourth quarter. Might have been that we had some challenge ourself in the second quarter, so that was more ourself creating less store traffic, but we clearly have seen that. The other thing we have seen is during the holiday season, and I was out speaking about Black Friday, et cetera, the intention of customers are higher. When they come into the store, they know what they want. They. The conversion rate is higher when people come into the store.
If that's because they are doing more digital browsing before so they know what they need to have, might be one, but it can also be that they think about the budget a little bit more, so that when they come in, "No, this is what I want." The intention is higher. You see less of the browsing. That's a little bit what we see. When it comes to payments, we have the best, highest quality consumer base in the industry. There's no debate about that. So far, we haven't seen any impact of late payments or anything like that. We are of course monitoring it, being close to it, every day looking for something change. As I'm sitting here today, that's what I know today, that we are. We have a great.
I cannot speak for the rest of the consumer world, I can only speak for I see in Verizon. You know, we have plenty of consumers in our base. That's what we see for so far.
We'll get to our third question, this is gonna take us into the fixed wireless realm. Before we officially enter the topic, we'll come back to prepaid. Just give our audience a little preview of what's happening. On the fixed wireless side, our question for the audience is, do you believe 5G fixed wireless will evolve into an effective competitor to fixed broadband services over the longer term? Our choices are yes, but only for value and entry-level services, and no. While you're submitting your responses, just a question on prepaid. Hans, where are we on the TracFone integration, the synergy opportunity, and is Verizon in 2023 gonna start tapping into that base and migrating prepaid to postpaid?
Yeah. You have seen us start doing things, and of course, a lot of work is ongoing with the integration of TracFone and the TracFone brands. It's not only one brand, it's several brands. That is ongoing and of course, we're expecting synergies coming more this year when we move some of the customer that is off-grid to on-grid, to our own network, which is of course one of the synergies, but it's also back offices and things like that. We're also gonna work with the different brands, how we're gonna put them in the market, because there are plenty of them. We have already, as you have seen, launched Total Wireless by Verizon as a new, if you say, high-end prepaid, competing there because we didn't have anything there.
Much of our prepaid was the TracFone brands going through the Walmarts. Now we have also a higher end prepaid. That is going on well. When it comes to the postpaid to prepaid migration, which actually is probably fairly big portion of what's happening in the market, today, we have no technical support for that because there's been different companies. We're gonna have that over time, so we can actually refer in between. Of course, with Total Wireless, it's much easier, but on some of the other brands, it's gonna be taking some time. We work with that IT the evolution. The good thing right now is, as we segment this up, we basically meet all the consumer segments of the United States.
Regardless of economic environment, we can play with anyone and meet the needs of any consumer in the market. Really good. We have that inside the consumer business. We're taking the right decisions, seeing that we're moving the money at the right time. Feel really good about that.
Great. Let's go to our results and get into fixed wireless a little bit more. Is 5G fixed wireless gonna be an effective competitor to fixed broadband over the long term? Kyle.
Absolutely.
Your vote?
Yes, absolutely. It already is.
So.
It already is.
26% of the audience.
Yeah.
That it's yes. 66% of the audience said yes, but only for value and entry-level services, and 8% said no. you know,
Do you remember when you asked this question five years ago, you had a question, will millimeter wave work?
Yeah.
80% in the audience said no. Things are changing here.
Yeah.
That's good. This is a good way to do it. I mean, I'd be interested to see, you know, dig down a little bit deeper on why people don't think it's gonna fly over a long period of time. My assumption is it's probably speeds, because the way you framed that question was really about entry level, right?
Mm-hmm.
Now, I understand a bundle.
Mm-hmm
And linear TV being added to it, but going forward, that model is broken and changing big time. I think what's gonna be incumbent upon us to make that true is take that 60% of people and convince them that having a two gig service to your home is really doesn't matter, right? Now, listen, I have you know, in Fios last year, we launched our Multi-Gig product for consumer on Fios. But there's very few people in our base who use full 2 Gb of max capacity at any given time. As a matter of fact, the average user uses far, far, far less than that. It's turned into really a marketing game, frankly, on what's an attribute that we can use to market.
I think it's gonna be incumbent upon us to show people the value and the ease of use of a fixed wireless access offering and, you know, the benefits that it can bring above just pure spee d. Right. That's what I see.
Yeah. The trends we see in the market is, of course, that linear TV is going down, and I don't think that if you ask that question, I think that 100% is gonna, yes, it will continue down. There are gonna be people who are linear, but it's going down. The second is, of course, also that the convenience of the product of fixed wireless access. I mean, if you install the LTE or the C-band fixed wireless access, we're probably down to minutes or 5 minutes to install it. Self-install.
Imagine that difference from another type of offering where you need to wait for a truck roll coming to your home, they need to dig in your garden, it might show up two weeks later. It's very different experience. Of course, ultimately, consumers and businesses buy experiences. Experience is how they experience a service, and as long as that is working great for them, they're gonna stay with it. They're gonna. I think if you've seen the last couple of quarters in the market, I mean, what is taking all the broadband subscribers? The satisfaction is very high on the product. We are pleased with it. We're gonna continue to pump it, and we're gonna get that demand that is out in the market on broadband way before anybody can build something.
I usually say that it took us 22 years.
Well done.
To pass 17 million households with fiber, 22 years. That's how hard it is. We basically have 30 million households covered with fixed wireless access in less than one year.
You mentioned earlier the 2025 goal. I think it was a $4 million-$5 million.
Yeah.
fixed wireless access. You're still pacing towards that?
Yeah. I haven't said anything different, so I guess it takes.
Financially-
Always higher ambitions internally.
Financially, maybe taking a step back to Verizon overall, can you share just some of the puts and takes that investors should be thinking about in terms of how inflation is playing into the cost structure, how promotions, stepping that up is playing into the cost structure relative to what you've been able to do with pricing and cost-cutting?
The inflation we talked about in the June timeframe, our CFO, Matt Ellis, talked about it. Roughly a half a billion impacted this last year of inflation, much driven by the energy cost and third-party cost and things like that that came up. We have seen some good movements on energy prices come down a little bit. At least the fuel has come down. There's something, but still elevated. That will continue for us. At the same time, the promotional cost has gone up, and many of you know how that works. You basically, depreciate that over three years. You're gonna have that in your base of the service revenue. That has gone up over the years, even though we try to keep it down, it does come up.
From a cash flow point of view, you have already cashed it out. From an accounting point of view, you distribute it over three years. That's gonna weigh on us a little bit, offshore, of course. On same time, we did a price increase that roughly gave us $1 billion dollar bottom line in last year. That is, of course, we also made a calculation. We lost a couple of 100,000 of customers, consumers, and that was a clear calculation, again, coming back to what are you measuring on service revenue and cash flow expansion. Those are the things.
We're gonna continue to work on that to see if pricing, we're gonna see if there's something to be done, but I think this will not be as large as we've done before because it was a large one we did in May last year, and we also had the churn then clinging off in October, and then we had the good churn going in the rest of the quarter. As we said as well. I think that's all the sort of the boxes we have to move, and then on top of that, we launch a new cost program. We always take out billions of dollar in the company because you need to do that in order just to stay competitive.
Now we have added the program with a new structure that we launched actually the first of January. We announced it publicly, it started first of January. This year, it probably gonna be more of sort of investments to do the co-cost efficiencies because there's a lot about onshoring, offshoring, outsourcing, insourcing. It might be that we need to take some cost for that this year and then get it into the base 2024/2025. We are in the long game to see that we have a economics of scale in the whole business and being able to continuously take down costs, not doing the shortcuts. We're long-term telecom company. We're gonna continue to be that.
If we have a microphone, we might have time for a question from our audience. We can get a microphone roaming, just, you know, raise your hand and we'll try to get to you. It's a little crisp out here.
I understand why you put a Swede the first slot on this conference.
If we take all of this discussion together and just financially, Verizon previously had out there, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, a goal to generate 3% + service revenue growth and EBITDA growth in 2023. How are you feeling about that, and are there any other puts and takes that investors should be mindful of?
It's a little bit early to guide for 2023. We will come back to that. Ultimately, our long-term goal is always expansion on cash flow and service revenue. Of course, there are different years, different things are happening. We will come back to the guidance when we when we meet in a couple of weeks from now. We need to see how the years comes out and all of that. We have a little bit work still to be done, but our long-term goals are clear. We want to continue to do this expansion. You know, the guide that we did for 2022 landed us between $47.5 billion-$48 billion in EBITDA or something like that. That's a healthy EBITDA.
We want to continue, and it's far more than double than some of our competitors in the market. For us, that's important to continue to nurture, because ultimately, we want to invest in the network because our customer really care about it, and we want to continue with our dividend. We are, I think, the only telecom company in the world that has kept and increased the dividend for 16 consecutive years. We think that's what Matt and I want to continue to do. We want to give our customer or our board an opportunity to continue to do that. That's important. That's why the $47 billion or $48 billion in EBITDA is important to us. Finally, we're gonna pay down debt, coming down to the levels that we talked about. Pre-C-band, it was before pre-Vodafone, now it's pre-C-band.
After that, we're gonna see what we're gonna do. I mean, we have the opportunity for buybacks or whatever is needed. Capital allocation is clear. It goes from the goals that I have on service revenue, growth, on expansion on cash flow. That goes through how we want to capital allocate. We take action on that every day in order to do the right for the company and for our shareholders.
We got some questions from our online audience around the CapEx figure. To clarify, the $17 billion BAU CapEx is as of what timeframe?
2024. 2023, we still have money left from the C-band. Remember, we took $10 billion extra for the C-band deployment over a three-year, and the last year is next year. Some of you have been following, so you know more or less how much can be left there. I want the books to be closed, then I will come back and say how much will fall into 2023 on that BAU. That we'll talk about when we meet later on this month.
Theoretically, should lower CapEx translate to better free cash flow for Verizon?
Yes. Yes, that's a pretty clear conclusion.
On the subject of MEC, you mentioned earlier, the opportunity to get more private 5G deals with customers. Is Verizon still on track for a goal of $2 billion of MEC and B2B wireless service revenue by 2025 from the 5G initiatives?
I think we're seeing a little bit slower pickup in the beginning, and partly our fault or our industry fault because the ecosystem wasn't there. Kyle work with ecosystem every day. We need certain radio base stations for private networks, different price ranges. We need modems for certain things, et cetera. You need more than the handset and the macro sites. That is now in there. We would now have offerings for cheaper private 5G networks with certain suppliers and more high level, high quality. We didn't have this optionality. That's why we're now sort of seeing that we are actually meeting the customer demands of building private 5G network. You start with usually one-use case, if that's visualization or AI or something like that, with cloud, then they find others.
For us, this year in 2023 is more about taking those deals, taking many of those deals and have them as a platform and then start building on them, learning from them. No one else in the industry is even close to what we're doing. We were very early out building, with, some of the large hyperscalers solutions, and now we also have the ecosystem for radio. We are fully committed. We strongly believe in private 5G networks, and that's a revenue stream we don't have today because we're not into Wi-Fi networks and, optimization of a manufacturing site. We're not into that today.
Well, I wanna thank you for joining us and kicking off our conference today. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you.