Okay. Thanks everyone for joining us for our next session. Really pleased to introduce Peter Osvaldik, who's the Chief Financial Officer of T-Mobile. Peter, welcome.
Thank you so much for being here. Always a pleasure.
Why don't we just maybe start out, you know, 2022 was a very successful year for T-Mobile. Can you just reflect maybe on some of the company's major accomplishments and, looking ahead, discuss some of the goals and priorities for next year, for this year, I should say?
Yeah, absolutely. Let me start with the obligatory, you know, disclosure statement. I will make some forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties, and of course, please look at our SEC filings for those as well as any recons to non-GAAP metrics, which I'll use. Yeah, thank you so much, and again, always a pleasure being here. 2022 was just a fabulous year for T-Mobile. It was a record growth year on both from a customer perspective as well as most importantly, and we'll get into that in the context of 23 and the competitive environment, is on a profitable growth basis.
Not only did we have from a customer perspective, you know, achieve 3.1 million postpaid phone net additions, but also 1.4 million postpaid account net additions, which is really the true barometer for what's happening from a switching perspective in the industry. Record year for us there. You know, achieved just fabulous churn results. Of course, you know, broke the back of the network integration, as Neville would say, and just saw amazing work there on the part of the team, both simultaneously decommissioning all the Sprint cell sites, you know, faster than anticipated, but also being able to do it while reducing churn. That was always the big concern for everybody.
You know, we took the opportunity to increase CapEx and deliver on the aspiration that we always had and knew that this merger could bring, and that is to ultimately transition to becoming the best network in America, we'll come and talk about that a little bit more. When I shift to 2023, it's really a lot more of the same with kind of the turnover to the next chapter. Of course, from a merger integration perspective, we anticipate we'll conclude and finalize all the integration activity and achieve, you know, the recently updated synergy number of $8 billion in run rate in 2024 and be set up fully for that.
From a customer growth perspective, it continues to be the story of now that we have the best network, and we jealously guard our famous for value proposition, how do we take that and couple it with the under-penetrated segments that we've been talking about so long and actually continue to see very, very profitable growth? We'll continue to leverage and really build upon this network advantage. We've said over the course of a couple years that our 5G network advantage would turn into an overall network advantage that is now recognized by all the major third parties out there. Our job now is to continue to make sure consumers understand that, right? Businesses understand that. They buy a lot differently.
how do we in the consumer mindset where perception is stubborn, we've done a fabulous job over the last couple years, how do we continue that trajectory of making sure consumers understand this is the best network? How do we make sure that we continue to invest in it in the smartest way possible to continue that advantage growing? That's gonna be a core focus of this. Then, you know, profitable growth. That's what we're always talking about. We delivered a guide with earnings that actually increased Core Adjusted EBITDA over what we thought at Analyst Day and are now delivering from a free cash flow perspective, which is really the barometer of value creation and gives you all the opportunities, whether it's shareholder returns, whether it's, you know, investment in the business.
Our free cash flow growth in 2023 is now projected to be, you know, +75% year-over-year and further growth into 2024 and beyond. That's really the power that we knew that this merger could bring with the scale of profitable growth as well as the synergies. To finally see that coming to fruition is just a fabulous thing. That's where 2023, you know, it's gonna be another springboard year for T-Mobile.
Yeah. Great. Since T-Mobile completed the Sprint acquisition, you've outperformed the guidance pretty consistently. What are the major factors underlying that success? You know, as you look forward, do you see that same opportunity for outperformance, or is there, you know, maybe less room for that in the current environment?
Is this a, "Hey, it's been three weeks since you gave guidance. Can you please update it for me already?" question? Okay. Yeah. Fundamentally, what it is at the highest levels, this is a team that's hyper-focused on looking around corners, seeing what the opportunities are, and then rallying like nobody else to go capture those. When I look back the last couple of years in terms of overperformance against the guide, whether it's on a top-line growth perspective or whether it's the financial aspects of it really was taking category by category and applying that kind of principle. Synergies from the network shutdown. You know, we saw an opportunity to go faster on the network shutdown while jealously guarding the churn profile of those former Sprint customers, and we went faster on that as a company.
You know, we saw the ability to grow a little bit faster from the smaller markets and rural area perspective if we put some capital, enhanced capital pull forward into 2022 from a network piece. We went after that and delivered. At the same time, again, as I said, delivered what is now recognized as the best network out there. It's always, whether it's churn, whether it's synergies, whether it's growth, it's always this team rallying together unlike any other, looking around the corner and seeing what we can capitalize on from an opportunity perspective. That's much the same philosophy, of course, we'll apply to 2023 and beyond, you know? The opportunities look different than what we thought three years ago. You know, the world looks different. The competitive environment in the industry looks different, manifesting itself differently.
You have to see what the opportunity set is in front of you and get after it. That's what this team's just fabulous about.
Yeah. Are you seeing any effects on the business as a result of the softer macro environment, you know, whether it's consumer or business volumes, you know, tier mix collections, anything on the cost side related to inflation?
Yeah. Well, let's start with the consumer side. You know, probably a couple things we look at. One is, what are the take rates of our highest tiered rate plans, the Magenta MAX, as we call it. In Q4, that continued at a very strong pace. Over 60% of new customers coming in take our top-tier rate plan, and the base is now about 20% penetrated. We continue to see about the same rate in Q1 of that. No degradation there from that perspective. On the bad debt side, you know, much as we had forecast in Q2 of last year, we saw Q3 and Q4 go down from Q2 and stay at about those moderate levels, about pre-pandemic levels.
Now as we looked into Q1 and gave guidance, we anticipated that might have improved even a little bit from what we saw as a percentage of total revenue in Q3 and Q4, and that's playing out. We're seeing a little bit of the improved trend sequentially, which is what we expected. Looking good from that perspective. You know, on the cost side of the equation, I know we've talked many times about how early on in the merger story, when rates were at historic lows, inflation was very low, we had to, from a necessity perspective, and did strike long-term agreements with many of our large cost categories, whether that was the hardware OEMs on the network side as we were about to go through a massive network expansion, whether it was the power companies, you know, for the same reasons.
There, we also had the incremental leverage that the industry has never seen from the ability to say, "Hey, we're actually shrinking our portfolio of A plus B T-Mobile and Sprint." We're able to secure really, really strategic long-term arrangements there. The very large parts of our cost categories were locked down. Of course, we're seeing inflation pressures on the edges. Everybody's seeing that. From a labor perspective, we're seeing those. From some of those, you know, other cost categories, whether it's cabling or all those things, but we're well-insulated from the largest impacts. We saw that play out in 2022, and that's what we anticipated in 2023 as well. You know, so far, so good. You know, as we've many times said, we're certainly looking around the corner, side-eyeing the future, but we're not seeing it.
Probably a big part of that as well is this category is so much more important to consumers' lives than it was five years ago or 10 years ago, that it really has moved up in terms of priority of wallet as well at the same time. Yeah.
There's obviously, there's a lot of, you know, discussion around industry volumes. You know, I think your 2023 postpaid phone net add guidance is 2.5 million-2.75 million . That's about a 15% decrease versus last year. Industry net adds were about $9.3 million last year. Should we interpret the guidance as, you know, an indication you expect industry net adds to decrease about that same 15% to about $7.9 million, or are you assuming that maybe your share is gonna increase of net adds and, you know, industry net adds actually decline by more?
Well, again, when we project out what the industry's going to do, we saw some of this play out in the second half of 2022, we saw year-over-year declines in the industry. Those two quarters happened to be our best quarters, you know, from a post-merger T-Mobile perspective. Looking into 2023, we continue that trend. We are seeing that. We anticipated on a probability weighted average perspective, somewhere between 7 million - 8 million total net adds for the industry. That implies in and of itself, even in our initial guide, a little bit larger share taking of the total. You know, the one thing to remind you of is always, you know, we are the company that meets or exceeds our guidance.
What we put out as a postpaid net add guidance in 2023 actually happened to coincide with what we put out in 2022 as well. Despite anticipating the industry to go down, we do believe, you know, we're gonna continue to take a bigger share of the pie with the value proposition, the network, and again, really leveraging these under-penetrated markets.
What are you seeing in the consumer market today in terms of promotional intensity and competition?
You know, really continuing the way it was, I'd say, the last couple quarters. Of course, there's seasonal ebbs and flows, more promotionality in the holiday season. We continue to see about the same dynamics play out, whether it's cable, whether it's, you know, the competitive, MNOs. We're a little bit different. Again, when you have this significant value prop and this continually increasing network equities, we don't need to be as dependent on, say, device promotions as others. You see us be much more prudent, for example, from an upgrade retention strategy. Once customers come to T-Mobile, they really, really understand the value proposition. They really understand what this network is now versus what it was 5 years ago, and we can see the continually improving churn profiles.
We have a lot, I think, more tools to play with than just throwing massive device promotions out there for everybody, or in the case of cable, you know, giving away free lines.
How about on the business side? Can you talk about the competitive environment that you see in the business market?
Well, the beauty of the competitive environment there is we were finally able to bring it. You know, it was such a stale marketplace. You know, even two years ago, we started talking about this at Analyst Day. There were still data buckets and massive either outsourced customer elements or, you know, within these large enterprises, there were actually departments devoted to trying to manage the complexity of the wireless plans and data buckets and minute buckets. Now with this network, which again, as you mentioned, you know, consumers and businesses buy a lot differently. Businesses, large enterprises, governments take out phones, they go test the network, make sure it works where they need it, how they need it, you know, with the reliability that they need. That's where we've just begun to shine.
You see the T-Mobile for Business success continues to grow quarter after quarter. You know, phone net adds grew every quarter in 2022. You saw, you know, Verizon, the historically dominant player in this space, continue to see their churn and their postpaid phone go the other way. It's fun to finally be in this marketplace where we can bring the network quality that's so necessary for enterprise and government with the customer care and value props. We're, you know, again, with a small under-penetrated base that allows us to be really, really hyper-competitive there at great economics for us.
You mentioned that a lot of those large enterprise customers will do a lot of testing before switching providers. Can you talk more about how you're scoring these tests as compared to a few years ago and, you know, and also relative to the competition?
Well, it's everyone comes with their own set of criteria, right? The scoring is gonna be based upon that. I think the true measure of success is, are you winning the business? This is one where, you know, we continue to grow and win the business a lot more. In industries that you can just tell have very, very high standards and needs for the network. I think in the airline industry, we've got now, you know, nine out of the 10 majors in the U.S. Think about a torture test for networks. I'm going into all these cities, as the major airlines set, and I need the reliability to work for me. I don't mean just postpaid phones for, you know, the attendants to help.
I mean, under wing operations in the case of some of these airlines where we've displaced Wi-Fi and can give them a really great solution. We're scoring fabulously well, and that's allowing the growth in T-Mobile for Business to continue. There's a lot of runway ahead of us on this.
Yeah. Can you talk about the brand perception today among higher-end consumers? How much work do you think is left to do in convincing the high-end consumer that T-Mobile can deliver, you know, that experience that they're looking for?
It, it's really a great story and a great opportunity set ahead of us on this one as well. You know, we continue to see, you know, whether you're thinking about consumers and maybe, as you say, high quality or a consumer in two different ways. One could be just a measure of, you know, prime creditworthiness. We continue to see more and more prime customers flocking to T-Mobile, and our percentage of the prime mix as a percentage of our total is higher than it's ever been. The other metric that we look at is what are the subset of consumers that place value on network above all else? They will trade network quality above price every chance they can.
That subset of consumers, particularly in this top 100 market demographic that we talk about, are coming in at more and more of a share to T-Mobile. That said, there's a lot more opportunity. You know, if we look at network equities and value equities, you know, we clearly are the leader in customer value perception, and that's even grown. Our NPS has grown, you know. No surprise there when you take two different tax in a, in a inflationary environment where consumers are worried about how they're gonna protect their wallet, you know, and their savings. You have T-Mobile here with a Price Lock guarantee, and then you have AT&T and Verizon that unilaterally increase prices on you. That's how you maintain that fame for value. On the network side, as I said, in the consumer space, we've seen...
I mean, Verizon rode this tailwind from 3G- 4G, where they have the best 4G network as you shifted over from 3G- 4G, along with the iPhone relative to T-Mobile at that time. You know, they were able to convince consumers what was true at that time. They had the best network. Consumer sentiment is stubborn. Now we've arrived at the place, much like we forecast, that this 5G network advantage would turn into the overall network advantage. It's here, we've declared it, all the third parties really say the same, and we're starting to see the network brand equities. You know, Verizon's still above us, but we've cut that lead in half. Of course, our trend line is like this, their trend line is like that.
Therein lies that opportunity for us in the next few years as well to continue to attract network seekers, and especially in the top 100 markets. That's, you know, that's something we're looking forward to capitalizing on. Talking about that, you know, how does the team look around corners and capitalize on opportunities? This is one you'll hear us really work a lot more about.
You know, your guidance for ARPA, I think growth this year is about 1% and generally stable ARPU, but with potential for growth later in the year. Can you just talk about some of the moving pieces that are underlying that guidance?
Yeah. When you think about ARPU, it's very much, you know, a mix-driven metric versus an overall pricing dynamic metric. What I mean by that is, let's just say you have more success in one quarter in enterprise or first responders, which is another place we're seeing fantastic success for. When you have large enterprise or government customers, they pay lower than consumer rack rate, you know, ARPUs.
Yeah.
That's okay. They're very highly accretive customers from an ARPA perspective. It makes a lot of sense. That's one dynamic that's factoring in there. You have other things. You have, of course, again, Q4 tends to be a seasonally higher promotional environment. You have some of those impacts flowing through. You have the fabulous success we've seen with high-speed internet, paired with Magenta MAX and other plans. You see that discount get allocated between the two. We're seeing a lot of success in BYOD devices. Customers that recognize, again, what this network is and just they're astute customers, they'll bring their own device in. You tend to see a slightly lower percentage of value-add service attached to those, you know, insurance products, those kinds of things.
Another opportunity to make sure we develop a product that meets the needs of that specific consumer set. But those are some headwinds that you'll see and mix-driven things in ARPU, but there's a lot of opportunity for growth again, particularly with the continued customer self-selection into our highest tier rate plans. I mean, the market's telling us something when you have 60% of new customers select your highest tier rate plan, that's telling you something. You know, when I flip over to ARPA, which is exactly what we've been focused on, I mean, to us, it's how do you get true switchers to come to T-Mobile, you know, 1.4 million record high, industry high in 2022, and then how do you expand that relationship with high speed internet products, with other connected device products?
That's really what the focus for T-Mobile is on. There, you know, 1% year-over-year growth with, again, the opportunity to continue to see the opportunity, seize them, and potentially move on that a little bit later.
Prepaid is, I think, kind of an overlooked part of the industry, but a market segment where T-Mobile has been a leader and has grown as a business. What's the outlook for this part of your business from here? Do you see it as an important growth driver going forward?
Yeah, you know, we're very proud of the Metro brand and what we've been able to do. One of the largest brands from a total customer perspective. obviously, the overall industry dynamics are such that there's a lot of prepaid to postpaid movement, and a lot of that is cable. I have some interest in my, in my views on cable, so we'll have to get to that. you know, despite what's happening there, we grew our prepaid category in 2022, having one of the largest bases. we have industry-leading ARPUs in that space. We just delivered our lowest churn year in prepaid in company history. That's, you know...
Those are just great results and speak to, again, the network quality, the value proposition that despite this massive flight from prepaid to postpaid in the industry, we continue to be able to grow the base, and we're very proud of that, and we see this as a continued tailwind.
Yeah. Have you seen any change in the trend recently on prepaid to postpaid migration, or has it been fairly consistent?
I would say it's, it continues to be fairly consistent. You know, you see a lot of customers qualifying for postpaid plans, and a lot of customers being attracted to, you know, these very device-rich postpaid offers.
Good time to ask you about cable since you mentioned it. Net adds for cable increased, you know, pretty significantly in the Q4 and captured about 35% of industry nets.
Mm-hmm.
That was up from 23% in Q4 2022, or 2021, excuse me. Are you seeing any competitive impact from cable? You know, if not, where do you think your customers are actually being sourced from?
I mean, this has been really one of those fundamental questions I think that investors have had, is where is all this growth in cable coming from? We've said we definitely see a lot of it coming from prepaid to postpaid transference. We see a lot of it coming from Verizon itself and, you know, that can work for them given that they get the service revenues from the MVNO arrangement. What you fundamentally see, and this is kind of the disparity between T-Mobile and cable and the competitive play out as it stands today, you know, we project, I mean, year-over-year, we anticipate Q1 industry postpaid phone net adds will be down.
We anticipate in that context that cable will actually have more of a share of net adds in Q1 as a percentage of the total than they did in Q4. That's not coming at a profitable growth strategy. I mean, when, you know, you're dropping free lines into everybody's bags as they walk out the door on an exploding promotion, you know, that's not customer love. That's quite different than what the T-Mobile strategy is in and of itself. Yes, you can generate large customer headline growth numbers, but you're doing it at the expense of, one, a future churn event for the customer, and we've seen this play out in the industry before. Two, it's not profitable, so it's not sustainable in the long run. I mean, the Q4, I think Charter's ARPU was down 12% year-over-year.
I mean, can you imagine what this industry would be like if everybody decided to do 12% declines in ARPU on a year-over-year basis? In the same quarter that we'll continue to see them have a fabulous, you know, headline net add number. Again, you know you can do that when you drop free lines into every bag on the way out. We're meeting all of our profitable growth goals, which is what we go after. I know we've talked about this before. We're always setting this is the growth that we want to see in the prepaid segment and the postpaid segment total, including postpaid phone, and we can go chase more net adds every single quarter, but you do those at very degrading economics, and so that's not the strategy.
We set a, "Here's the target number we're going for so that we can grow customers, come on in at this high tier rate plan mix that we're seeing, and actually drop it down into core EBITDA and free cash flow." That's kind of the dynamic I see there. Very pleased with what we're seeing. Kind of fun to watch, you know, and we'll be very interested in these future customers coming to us when this exploding promo hits them and they realize they're riding on an inferior network and paying too much.
Talk about fixed wireless. T-Mobile added 2 million fixed wireless broadband customers last year, a little more than half of industry broadband net adds. How long is the runway for growth with this product? You know, why do you think it's resonating so well with consumers?
Yeah. You know, it was just a great success again in 2022. Two of those 2.6 million customers came in 2022. You know, a little bit of a difference, I think, to what perhaps other players in the industry are doing, we said that with the merger and as we roll out this massive capacity on the network, that you would have fallow capacity. When you have fallow capacity that you've already burdened the mobile build with all of the CapEx to get this rollout, this fabulous network, it makes a tremendous amount of sense to fill up some of this massive highway traffic that's unused with high-speed internet. For us, it became the first killer use case of 5G, where now we're riding with 2.6 million customers that have fabulous economics, again, because the network's already there. The...
It's fallow capacity. It's a very targeted approach to where the capacity exists on a bisector basis, that's where we sell. That's where we qualify houses. That's if you come in, that's where we'll qualify you. It's now available to over 50 million households in terms of available households. Again, the economics work very, very well when you have fallow capacity model. You also see it in the customer NPS scores. I mean, that's kind of the true measure we can all talk about what do we think? Customers will tell you exactly what they think. When you look at, for example, the latest TeraX scores from an NPS perspective, we're far above cable operators, over 30 points above cable operators. What's interesting is you're even above fiber operators.
I think what really resonates with customers is the same thing that Un-carrier's strategy brought to mobile, which is simplicity, right? Simplicity of pricing, great customer service, and a great product. You know, when you look at advertised cable speeds versus actual cable speeds as reported by third parties, it's very similar to what our 5G network is bringing. You can bring a really, really differentiated product from a customer value proposition simplicity, and that's what resonating with customers. In a lot of spaces, you know, in smaller markets and rural areas, remember, this is a very large country with very disaggregated availability of broadband, and you can bring this into an area, which is another potential tailwind for us as we continue to grow the Ultra Capacity network to cover 300 million PoPs by the end of this year.
You know, you're bringing this capacity and this network performance into areas that don't have fiber as a product, right? They might have DSL or other, you know, low quality products that we're competing against. That's why you continue to see the run rate into T-Mobile. You know, this 500,000, roughly ± net adds perspective is what we're anticipating for the balance of 2023. We think the runway is strong for our 7 million-8 million target, which again, you're going for a mid-single-digit penetration rate of this industry. This product is very competitive for a mid-single-digit penetration. It's gonna be durable.
If I can ask you maybe just one follow-up on that. you know, you mentioned that your speeds are basically matching, you know, what cable's delivering. You know, obviously, we see cable advertising that is, questioning maybe the consistency and the reliability that, not necessarily your fixed wireless, but the fixed wireless industry is providing.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know, is there any merit to that in your product, or how would you respond to that?
It's, well, one, it's so funny to have watched how that developed over time, right? Fixed Wireless doesn't exist. Fixed Wireless That's nothing. Damn it. They're getting that adds. Okay, Fixed Wireless We're not feeling it. Oh, now we're feeling it, but it's a transitory product. It's kind of funny to watch that arc. You know that when they're spending hard-earned dollars on advertising against this product, that it's really biting them. Again, where I go back to is customer NPS. Customers will tell you. We can all point to speed and all of that. Customers will tell you whether the product is working for them, and the NPS scores don't lie.
Yeah. I know you've talked about Excuse me the rural, suburban, urban mix of your base in that product. Can you just talk about the demographics a bit? You know, for example, number of people per households, MDUs versus single-family homes, household income. I mean, anything there, any other color you can?
Yeah. It's kind of in a base of $2.6 million, you'll see it kind of all across the board, you know. I will say. It continues to be about two-thirds from our top 100 markets and about a third from our smaller markets in rural areas, which makes sense because remember, the network build is progressing into the smaller markets and rural areas. That'll shift more into that space. Continues to be a majority from cable. I think what's really interesting is that the majority of the customers coming in are Prime customers.
Mm.
Again, the product is resonating with them. They're looking for value. They understand and need reliability and a great experience. Otherwise, you know, you kinda see it segmented all over the board with respect to family income, MDU versus households, predominantly single-family households. Yeah, a lot of Prime consumers as a great attractant to T-Mobile. Maybe those consumers that, again, we have the opportunity to convince from a sentiment perspective, the network is there. You can come in with a product like Fixed Wireless and really change perception dramatically.
Yeah. You lead the industry today with your mid-band 5G deployment. I think you're now at 265 million PoPs. How will you stay ahead of your competitors as they complete their large-scale C-band deployments and the other mid-band spectrum that they're rolling out?
You know, it's fundamentally, I think at the highest level, again, what we always said was, two years ago, we're gonna build a 5G network that gets us to an overall network leadership position, and we're gonna stay two years ahead. You can see that dynamic playing out, whether it's in the breadth of coverage, where we now cover 265 million PoPs with our mid-band Ultra Capacity layer, which is more than AT&T or Verizon plan to cover in two years from now, and we're on our way to 300. Whether it's the quality of the spectrum. I mean, ultimately, what we have are the best spectrum assets that we deploy for the benefit of consumers on the most dense macro network with the most technologically advanced core capabilities.
You know, Neville will share some more news on just more things coming with respect to technology advancements in a couple days. You have the densest network, the best spectrum assets put to work for consumers, very data informed driven on terms of where the next cell site and the next coverage is going so that it's there for the moment of truth for customers when they need it, and the best technology and the best team. That's just what's gonna continue. That's what allows us to get to a, you know, now the most CapEx efficient in the industry in 2023.
As we roll off this massive CapEx investment year, you know, Q1 of our total CapEx guide, I anticipate Q1 will be, you know, roughly 30% of the total as we're coming off that, off that peak. Now we've achieved network leadership and continued network leadership at the best capital intensity in the industry.
Let me ask you about just free cash flow and your free cash flow conversion rate of EBITDA is higher than your competitors, which means, you know, basically at the same free cash flow yield, you trade at a higher EBITDA. What are the factors that, you know, contribute to that difference, you know, in that capital efficiency?
Well, I would say it's a number of things. Again, we've said that we're gonna be able to create the most efficient network because it's very data informed. You have the best spectrum assets, you have the most advancements, so you can really, really, really get the efficiency on a bit transmission basis. It's also the ability to continue to profitably grow and scale the core operations of the company. I think when investors look ahead, what you have is a company that delivers service revenue into free cash flow conversion or EBITDA into free cash flow conversion.
We look at it as service revenue because really how can you convert what's coming in the most important aspect, service revenues, equipment revenues is kind of the, you know, the net neutral of the industry generally, and convert them into what is actually value creating. The free cash flow is what allows you to, if you wanna enhance investment in your company, if you wanna do inorganic things, if you wanna do shareholder returns, it's the true value creation of a company ultimately in the long run. We've arrived in 2023, where we're gonna be industry leading by multiple percentage points in that regard. If you remember from our Analyst Day guidance, that free cash flow figure just continues to grow. In 2026, we're at, you know, $18+ billion on an annual basis.
Once you get through this massive potential shareholder return of $60 billion, you still have a company that's throwing off $18+ billion of free cash flow on an annual basis. When you look at, more importantly, I think to us than EBITDA EV multiples are free cash flow EV multiples. Suddenly look, and investors and analysts know this. If you look at 2023, 2024, you don't look as expensive at all. You've got this company that's generating industry leading profitable growth and throwing off a tremendous amount of free cash flow with more free cash flow coming in the midst of a massive shareholder return already, and things don't look expensive. I think that's why you get excitement around what the target prices can look like and where T-Mobile can go.
You know, one thing we're very excited about as well.
You know, one thing that investors ask often is owning fiber backhaul an advantage or a differentiator for a mobile network operator, you know, or is fiber backhaul really just a commodity and you can just rent it and get all the same benefits or essentially all of them as ownership? I mean, what's, you know, as someone who doesn't own as much fiber as the other two MNOs, you know, what do you think about that issue?
Yeah. Well, you nailed it on the head. First off, all three of us have a lot of leased fiber, and that tells you something in and of itself. In the, at least in the current environment where it's been for years and where it's probably gonna be for a long time, it is such a competitive industry that we can get tremendous pricing on very high speed, very great SLA, high quality fiber backhaul. When you think about where am I gonna put capital deployment of this company when I understand the rates that we're able to pay and the quality that we're getting, it's not a place I would do it. The returns just aren't there. Of course, you have slightly better owners economics than leased economics. That makes sense. The delta between the two just doesn't make sense.
Not in an environment. We're very pleased with what we're been able to do with the backhaul fiber proposition, and in fact, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Yeah. I think, you know, the other thing a lot of people wonder about is, you know, you mentioned the decline in capital intensity, you know, as we get into next year in particular. What could cause an increase in CapEx to higher levels over the next few years? I mean, is there anything, you know, that, you know, could potentially cause it to go back up again or?
No, we don't see anything. I mean, on the run rate of what we laid out at Analyst Day, you know, where we're landing this year and that $9 billion-$10 billion annual run rate, that's what we anticipate. Of course, you know, there's always, as any prudent management team, we should look at are there opportunities to deploy more capital somewhere else and enhance value for shareholders? Maybe. We haven't landed on anything. If that comes, again, that would have to come with results that are accretive to what we gave you at Analyst Day in and of itself. Right now to deliver on everything that we've laid out there, we see this as exactly the right, you know, measure on an annual basis.
You know, you mentioned the share repurchase program. You started doing that in the latter part of last year. I think you've got another $11 billion left through September of this year. Do you expect that to sort of be a regular cadence of buybacks or are you gonna be more opportunistic with respect to the share price?
Well, you know, for obvious reasons, I'm not gonna get into how much are we gonna buy, when, and at what share price. The most important thing is that the theory and the cash flow production of this company is intact. Everything that we thought would be in place to be able to deliver on that potential up to $60 billion, only through 2025, right? Again, as we said, this free cash flow machine just keeps going into 2026 and beyond, which at our Analyst Day was a long way away, and now it's, you know, almost here. Everything's intact. In fact, the progression of where we were on integration and growth was such that it allowed us to begin early.
What we'll see, of course, everything beyond, this first tranche is subject to board approval, but, you know, everything fundamentally in the business is going fabulously well, and we see the potential for that full $60 billion.
Yeah. At that March 2021 Analyst Day, you provided 2026 targets for revenue, EBITDA, CapEx, and free cash flow. As you mentioned, since then, the integration and the financial performance has gone better than expected. Are these long-term targets still a good indicator of what to expect or, you know, or is there upside to those numbers as we think about that?
Yeah. Well, there's so much, as you said, that have changed since the Analyst Day guidance. You know, just if you think about inflation, of course, we're very immune to inflation, given our earlier discussion. If you think about the competitive dynamics and intensity, you know, AT&T brought back this massive amount of device subsidy. Now, for us, because of the differentiated value prop, we're actually seeing our equipment upgrade rate be quite lower than the industry because of everything else we have from a value prop, and we see that playing into 2023. I think, you know, equipment revenue could be even lower than it was in 2022, and that's, you know, again, that's a net neutral to net negative flow for the company, so that's fine. We continue to see upgrade rates be quite different.
We've also, you know, achieved higher synergies than what we thought at Analyst Day. We'll achieve those earlier. We're achieving the $7.5 billion this year that we thought ultimately was gonna be 2024. We've arrived at the station with the best network. Our job is, you know, to continue to educate consumers around that. I think there's a lot of growth opportunity. Of course, that was embedded in there, so we're very comfortable with what we gave and being able to achieve it despite how the world's changed. When you think about how the competitive environment has changed and what competitors have done with their original Analyst Day guidance, you know, for us to sit here and say everything's intact for that plan, and there's perhaps opportunity. Again, as we said, if everything goes right, there's opportunity to have upside.
You know, one of the things I always point to is others in the industry are surprised that Advanced Network Solutions haven't delivered $1 billion in 2023. We said at our Analyst Day, it's coming. If you have the best network with the most technologically advanced core and the most distributed network, it'll come to you. You'll get your fair share, if not more, of the opportunity. That wasn't in any of our Analyst Day guide because we said we don't know when it's coming. It's gonna be a little bit later. Our job is to build and capitalize on it. That's just one example of something that could really, you know, take the trend line in a different direction.
Right. Well, we're about out of time here, so why don't we wrap up? Thanks, Peter. Appreciate it.
Thank you so much.