Great. Wonderful. Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the T-Mobile session at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. My name is Mike Ng. I cover T-Mobile and media cable telecom here at the firm, and I have the wonderful privilege of introducing Srini Gopalan, who is the CEO of T-Mobile. First and foremost, thank you so much for being here, Srini. It is an absolute pleasure.
It is great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Great. Srini, you are a couple of months away from completing your first full year as CEO. What has surprised you the most? How has it shaped how you think about the company's longer-term strategy? I was wondering if you could also just talk a bit about some of the recent news as it relates to your CFO and whether or not that changes anything in your mind.
Great. Just before I get started, I need to draw your attention to the safe harbor statement. We just pull that up or
It was just on.
It was just on. Just to make sure that I'm covered on that, because I will talk a bit about the future and use some non-GAAP measures. Let me start with your question of has anything surprised me almost a year in. Not really, because I've been associated with the company for nearly 10 years now. I must say, though, what has impressed me is the depth and width of our strategic moats, because I tend to think of most businesses and industries as what makes them sustainable is the quality of the moat that you have around you. I think about our moat in two ways. The first is the growth portfolio and what growth it enables, and the second is culture. Because in a company like ours, the two of them are inextricably linked. Let's talk growth first.
When I look at what we have, and I'll start with consumer wireless, our biggest business. Consumer wireless, we're unique because we're the only carrier who can genuinely say we offer the best network, best value, and best experience. Let me spend a minute on best network first. In many ways, when we talk about best network, where we are at this point in time uniquely feels a bit like being back in 2020, where you have some players talking about how network doesn't differentiate, which shocks me a bit because that's your core product. Others deploying capital into other businesses. We are ruthlessly single-minded focused on building the best network and enhancing it. We're already the best network, now we're really working hard at how we enhance it. Let's put some facts behind that. We rolled out our 5G standalone back in late 2020.
It's almost five years ahead of the rest of the industry. We're continuing to double down on our network, and we're seeing big payoffs on that. Quarter 2, our port-ins had a 20% higher ARPU than our port-outs. Our premium loading plan ratios is in the 60s, as against the base, which is in the mid-30s. We're seeing that consequent doubling down on best network really paying off in terms of the quality of customer we're attracting. The second leg of this, which is best value. That's something we've historically been really famous for. We define best value not just as best price, but the best value to break through customer pain points. We just launched our Nothing plan, which addresses a significant pain point.
And the way I think about value is, again, this is partly what you offer the customer, partly what your economic sets you up to do. Again, we are unique in that our front book is, or our new customers are actually higher priced than our base, which gives us enormous flexibility in terms of how we price, but also means we are probably the only player in this industry where when you see growth in net adds, it also means growth in revenue because the math of it is ridiculously simple. If you are losing customers of much higher value than what you are gaining, then you need more than positive net adds to dig yourself out of the revenue hole.
We are in the very fortunate place where, and we will zealously guard that, where our best value position is not just about what we offer the customer, but also a fundamental flywheel in terms of how it drives our economics. Best experience, great people, and I will talk a bit about that when I double down on culture. Now fueled by T-Life, more than 30 million monthly actives, and I know we will come back to talk about AI, but now fueled by AI and the huge strides we are making on that. All of that really covers off why I am super excited by growth in consumer wireless. The big thing is it is not just consumer wireless, because you look beyond consumer wireless. You look at our broadband business.
We have created the FWA category, and we just upped our guidance a little while ago from 12 million to 15 million customers by 2030. You add on 3 million to 4 million fiber customers, and we are talking about doubling a business in the next four years. That business came from a standing start in 2023. So, when you are thinking growth, huge upside there. Then you look at T-Mobile for Business. More and more businesses are going wireless. More and more businesses are recognizing that if your business depends on it, there is really only one wireless network you can count on. And we have 10%, 12% share when you look at the bigger businesses, lots of upside there. What is even more exciting than that is physical and edge AI.
You just had Jensen on stage, and he and I have spent a lot of time talking about when AI becomes kinetic or mobile, when objects with AI are more than places you write poetry, but things that move. Having a low latency 5G SA going on to 6G network is absolutely critical. Then the latest addition on our growth portfolio, financial services. We launched credit cards back in November, and Capital One is already calling it one of their most successful co-branded launches. So, I look at that portfolio and it is hugely exciting. I have seen the business from the board, but I think the thing that has surprised me to some extent, that has impressed me, is the depth and the width of the moat, because these are not individual pricing strategies or tactics. These are real, sustainable, defendable positions.
The number that captures a lot of it for me is an NPS of 46, which is the highest amongst the big three ever. The other big bit of the secret sauce that I think is totally unreplicable is culture. That is a big part of what T-Mobile has been. That culture plays very closely to customer experience. That is all about being completely obsessed about that. The way we articulate it is frontline first and the customer is why. We have doubled down on that. I have doubled down on that over the last three to four months. We have got three big programs going. One of them is the Magenta AI Institute, which is we are spending more than $100 million over the next few years.
Really, and this is a bold claim, to be the best in the world at preparing our people for the future, because we believe that that is critical to who we are. Second bit of it is pretty unique. It is called Frontline Connect. This will make you laugh because lots of companies have these things where you get senior management to go spend a day or two in the field, in stores, or on the network side, et cetera. Frontline Connect is unique. 750 managers, everyone director plus, will spend two days. Here is where the rubber hits the road. You do not get your annual stock bonus unless you make a commitment on how you will improve the life of the frontline, and the store manager or the frontline person signs off that that commitment will make a difference to their life. That includes me.
Last but not least, there is Value share, which is as we look at all this growth, we will create enormous value, and we are committed to sharing that with our employees. So, we have announced a $12,000 multi-year grant, based on performance, to all our employees, every one of them. So that is close to a billion-dollar investment in doubling down on our culture. So, I put those two things together and that is really what the moat looks like. A big part of culture is also leadership team, and we have been very thoughtful as a company in how we plan transitions. You saw the Mike-me transition. There was no kind of surprise. I have now got a management team and a leadership team that I feel balances the depth of experience at T-Mobile.
So, you have got people like John Saw, Jon Freier, Deeanne King, Mark Nelson, together more than 100 years of experience at T-Mobile. Then you have got Chris Sambar. Very excited about that, especially given our enterprise plans and our physical and edge AI plans. So, Chris will run all of our enterprise businesses. You have got André Almeida. André has worked in 14 different markets. He will drive a lot of our marketing brand, a lot of our thinking there and strategy. I will come to Peter, my good friend who is here. So Peter and I have known each other for a long time, and in fact, about the time that he became CFO.
When Mike and I started talking about the transition, it was already clear at that point in time as, I think September 24 was the first 8-K, that Peter wanted to put his feet up and go do a bunch of other interests he has, including philanthropy and the rest. The planned timing then was mid-2026. One of the first things I did when the transition plan between Mike and me was laid out was sat down with Peter and had a conversation with him, which is I really needed him to stay through the CEO transition. I'm delighted and grateful that he has, which is then what led to the September 25 8-K, which looked like a planned transition that he'll make coming summer 2027.
What we talked about at that point was we would do the transition at a point when we felt the business was in good shape and we found the right person. In Jessica, I'm delighted that we found the right person. A huge amount of experience, super bright, very consistent with our culture, humble, lets her deeds do the talking, and somebody who's got experience that's extremely relevant for us because she's managed a complex at Shell. It was the most diverse portfolio, a complex retail business, which is probably amongst the biggest retailers in the world, to allocating capital to things like oil exploration. That's a wide portfolio. Delighted to have her on board and really excited about getting her to meet all of you. That's how I think about those pieces.
I think the important thing is I see those three components as the same thing. The growth portfolio, the culture, and the leadership team, all of which contributes to a strategic moat.
Great. That's very clear and a fantastic overview. I'm sure we'll get into a lot of that. Maybe just to start out, I wanted to ask a couple questions around consumer wireless. We're a day away from the recently announced new iPhone. You've been very clear about wanting to pivot T-Mobile to have a more holistic value proposition relative to what's historically been for the industry, one that has emphasized on device subsidies. Could you just expand a little bit on that? How does the switch to more flexible 36-month equipment installment plans fit into the broader strategy? What has the customer's reception to some of the changes been to date?
Sure. I think there are two cornerstones of how we think about value rather than purely pricing. Cornerstone One is what are the big customer pain points? Cornerstone Two is CLV, which simplistically put is, will customers love it? Will we make money out of it? Which are the fundamentals of running this business. When I think about customer pain points, one of the things that we heard a lot from customers, including well-qualified prime customers, is, "Look, I'd love to get a new phone, but there's all these taxes and fees upfront. That means I have an out-of-pocket straight upfront." That causes friction in the switching process. As you know, we love switchers. So, taking that friction out is a big part of the product we offer now, which is zero down if you're well-qualified.
We roll the taxes and fees into the broader EIP. Moving to 36 months is simply a reflection of the device life cycle being larger. Those two are obviously very CLV accretive. When we think about subsidies, we use the same lens, which is what does the customer want? There's going to be promotions at periods in time because you get different waves of switchers. The first little while tends to be the most sensitive switchers, so there's lots of jump off, so you'll probably see more promotions there. From a medium-term perspective, we're very guided by CLVs. CLVs have been super strong. Q2 was up double digit in terms of CLVs, and we feel good about that.
We also are very clear, and I've said this before, that when you look at the business model, as device prices go up, you're going to have more of that cost being paid by the customer. That probably summarizes where we are.
Great. Very clear. On postpaid accounts, the company obviously has postpaid account net addition guidance for the third quarter, 250,000, and for the full year, 950,000 to 1,000,050. T-Mobile talked a little bit about some of the heightened churn going into the third quarter because of some of the changes on rate. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the company is pacing against those guidance numbers. How would you describe the current churn and gross add environment?
Firstly, I am not going to do an intra-quarter guidance on where we are.
I was hoping for one.
Yeah, I can send you the spreadsheet tomorrow. No. Look, where we are is we are feeling really good about both volume and value this year, right? We guided to 950,000 to 1,050,000. Halfway point, we were at 500,000. We are feeling very good about this quarter. So, there is nothing here that is different from what we were expecting. When you look at churn, just reflect on the fact that last quarter, we were 85 basis points down year-on-year. I know we love obsessing about tactics and the immediate, what is the competitive environment? There is a lot of focus on what was today's price versus yesterday's price. Honestly, you have got to pull back and look at this in terms of the direction which the water is flowing, right?
That is what the moats do for us, which is there is a fundamental pull of demand that comes as a result of being best value, best network, best experience. We are riding the coattails of that, and we are doubling down on that. So, I feel really good about not just the volume we are bringing in, but also the value. I talked about 20% higher ARPUs for port-ins than port-outs, talked about CLVs being up double digit. You have seen what has happened with churn. So, we are feeling really good about the mix we are bringing in.
Great. Turning to broadband, if we can, starting with fixed wireless. You mentioned some of the targets that you have through the end of the decade. Cable and fiber are out in the market launching very aggressive offers. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your outlook on T-Mobile's fixed wireless business and whether the customer satisfaction scores, the capabilities that you've been able to deliver in terms of speed is what's critical here.
Yeah. So, fixed wireless for me is just an incredible product. You talk about NPS. It is the highest NPS product we have. It's higher than fiber as a category, and it's higher than FWA as a category. There's a reason for it, which is this is not simply about price. It's great value, yes. Most importantly, it's a product that's incredibly easy to set up and gives you, and this is what I love about our newest routers, it gives you higher speeds than fiber when used over a Wi-Fi router, which is the way the vast majority of customers experience it. Certainly, it gives you comparable speeds to fiber depending on the router that you'll end up using.
Now, I'm not here to claim that technically it is exactly the same product as fiber, but you've got to look at it in terms of what it does for the experience. Higher NPS, comparable speeds to fiber. That's pretty awesome for a product which was written off as cell phone internet when it started. It is now a premium product, which is growing substantially, taking share. It's today very focused on urban and semi-urban areas, driven by our fallow capacity model.
Right
which ensures that we have a lot of runway to go. A fallow capacity model is something we obsess about, because we actually plan that at a hexbin level, which is 36 million of them, making sure that we have enough capacity for our wireless to then create the fallow capacity for fixed wireless. The remarkable thing, of course, is even as we've grown to close to 10 million customers, we're seeing speeds on wireless and on fixed wireless go only one way, and that's sharply up.
Great. Then pivoting to the other side of broadband, fiber. I think T-Mobile recently mentioned that it has been approaching 20% penetration within the first 12 months of deploying fiber in a market. What is the ultimate penetration that T-Mobile is targeting for fiber? Where do the fiber customers come from? Does it funnel in from the FWA base, or is it just taking share from competitors? Maybe you can just talk about your wireline strategy more broadly as well.
When you look at fiber, firstly, 20% year one for a greenfield build is phenomenal. That is a lot of the thesis on how we got into fiber, which is the thesis that the brand, the distribution, and our ability to execute would count in fiber as well. That is clearly coming true, as you can see from this. The way we think about FWA and fiber is the overlap is pretty minimal, and they are fundamentally complementary. Where there is overlap, what lands up happening is if an FWA customer moves to fiber, that just frees up more seats on the FWA bus. We look at it as fundamentally complementary categories.
Great. Shifting gears, this is a technology conference, I have to ask you something about AI, but I think there are two dimensions that I feel like a lot of people have been focusing on, which is what does AI mean from a customer demand perspective for you in terms of needing more network capacity? Secondly, how is T-Mobile using AI internally to drive operational efficiencies?
On the first, on the demand side piece, look, we have not yet seen any fundamental shift in demand in terms of either wireless growth or the piece that excites us most, though, is the possibility of physical and edge AI. As you get into a world, as you look at things like manufacturing returning onshore, as you look at humanoids and every form, drones, every form of connectivity actually having AI on it, I think you get into this choice of do I put AI on the device? At which point the device becomes too expensive and runs into battery problems. Do I let all my AI stay on the cloud? At which point do you have a latency problem. You have robots running into each other in factories because the signal just takes the round trip is just too long.
And I think what we're finding more and more is huge appetite for a low latency solution with edge inference. I am not claiming we are going to host huge LLMs at the edge, but edge inference is really exciting. That combination of being able to deliver low latency connectivity, having inference at the edge, now increasingly being able to supply voice that you can do only through a wireless network. You put all of that together and you have a compelling TAM opening up for edge and physical AI. As the only real game in town on being able to provide all of that and piloting that at scale with Figure AI, we feel incredibly bullish about the TAM that this will open up. I think this could be game changing in terms of the size of the opportunity ahead of us.
That is really, really exciting, and Chris and his team are working hard at that, and we have got some big things signed up already in terms of driving forward on that. When you look at the internal use of AI, we are passionate about two things. One, that we need to use AI to differentiate our experience, not to salami slice cost at the edge. Because I come from a huge conviction that cost comes out when you improve the experience. When you go at it purely from cost, all you will end up with is causing more problems. Whereas you start with how do I prevent a problem from happening? How do I equip my agents to deal with it better?
The second big belief we have is scale, which is we can demonstrate lots of cute pilots, but if they are not needle moving, that is more attempting to ride the coattails of an AI wave rather than really using it to fundamentally change our business. I think there are three or four places where we have seen huge value. Number one, care. Now, we committed to a 75% reduction in our calls in our 2024 Capital Markets Day , and we are well on track, and AI is a big part of that. We have a whole set of tools which help our agents, but importantly, also proactively address our customers. Again, this all goes together. With 30 million T-Life monthly active users and this, you are able to proactively reach customers and prevent the call before it even happens and then deal with it as it happens.
So care and service is scale, and we put out a number of $2.7 billion, which we feel really good about in total. The other big piece we are seeing is coding, which is as the context windows on these LLMs and AI as a whole has widened, our ability to replace legacy software with AI coding is game changing in terms of the impact it has had, and obviously from a customer experience perspective, it allows us to move faster, build digital assets quicker, et cetera.
Legacy systems become much less of a constraint in that world. The third piece is the network and our whole customer-driven coverage, which really focuses on not playing a vanity game of the number of pops covered, but focuses on what is the incremental CLV I create through a network investment? What is the incremental NPS I create through a network investment is completely AI driven and fueled.
And the last piece of it is something that we are now scaling, which is something we call IntentCX beyond the care center. If you want to simplify it, think of a world where you are able to actually have a CMO of one, where you are able to deal with each individual customer.
And with agents, you can actually do that. We have seen some really promising early results from that. So, we are all in from a using AI to transform our enterprise, but for the sake of the customer.
Great. That is fascinating. Shifting gears, maybe just talking about capital allocation. Last quarter, T-Mobile raised its free cash flow guidance. You also recently closed on the spectrum sale to Grain. How do you expect to deploy some of that incremental cash? Maybe talk about your capital allocation strategy more broadly as you balance shareholder returns and investments in the business.
Yeah. Mike, I will probably give you a boring answer, but that is a good thing when it comes to capital allocation because it means consistency, right? Our capital allocation framework has not changed. We start with determining what the right level of leverage is. We think 2.5 is the right answer for now. Then we go through all of the big significant investments that we are looking to make to run the business. Spectrum is one of them. We have walked away from spectrum auctions or spectrum deals that we thought were bad, EchoStar being a case in point. We just thought it was too expensive. And AWS-3, where we acquired quite a bit of spectrum, but at very affordable prices, right? Because we are really good at working through this piece of how do we do the trade-off on build versus buy, on densify versus buy more spectrum.
You should absolutely expect us to continue doing that even as we go through kind of 2.7 and C-band auctions, which, thanks to Chairman Carr, we are really excited about the spectrum portfolio. Both 2.7 and 2.0 are adjacent to holdings that we have.
So, we are excited by that, and we will be rigorous. We will go look at specifically what is the build versus buy, and out of that tumbles shareholder remuneration. That has been the way we have thought about it right through. Start with leverage, prioritize big strategic investments for the business. Then out of that tumbles shareholder remuneration, and that is what we have consistently done. You should not expect anything different. The way we will allocate the cash from Grain is exactly the same. We have got a way that works. We like that because we think that balances all interests, and that is what we will focus on continuing to do.
Great. Could you just spend a minute talking about the spectrum portfolio and whether or not you feel like there is sufficient capacity to support your growth plans from here on out?
We think there is definitely enough capacity. You look at our wireless growth and our FWA growth. Our FWA, and we talked about this I think when we shared the FWA numbers, where in our current 15 million, we are assuming no incremental spectrum. We are assuming also no spectral efficiency gains, which we are seeing already, right? So we feel good about the spectrum that is coming on board, and we will, as always, allocate capital the way we always have, which is look at the build versus densify argument and see what spectrum we need to buy.
Great. If I could ask about wholesale revenue. There has been some headwinds there from Dish and TracFone rolling off as expected. How do you think about the potential tailwinds from new MVNOs ramping to re-accelerate and potentially some of the benefits from advertising and cable B2B?
The way we see it is 2025 and 2026 as the trough years, because you will have Dish and TracFone probably rolling off a little quicker. You will have advertising compensating for that. You will have also new MVNOs like our Comcast and Charter, the cable MVNO focused on B2B. You will have that coming in. We would see 2025 and 2026 really as the trough years. There may be a hidden question there on new MVNOs. Just to put this beyond doubt, we do not see the value of doing an MVNO with a LEO operator because our MVNO strategy has remained consistent and coherent right through. We look at places where there is an incremental TAM to be got, either because of distribution or brand or access. We just do not see the case for that.
Great. I guess that justifies a natural follow-up just on Starlink more broadly, right? Obviously, a lot of attention being paid to Starlink's ambitions to create a direct consumer mobile service, whether that be from satellite to mobile or femtocells or an MVNO. I was just wondering if you could just expand on the risk of another competitor coming in like that.
Starting off with we know quite a bit about this category. With our partners, Starlink, we pretty much created this category from scratch. We understand this business way better than a lot of speculation. The physics of this means this is a really complementary category in places like national parks, in edge cases, right? Which is why it is 0.0003% of our usage at peak and 0.0002% at normal, right? Which is what you would expect of a category like this. The physics constraints of Direct to Cell from satellite are huge, because you use your phone indoors or outdoors. Indoors, right, you are getting a signal that is 350 kilometers away versus 1 km away from a cell tower. Signal strength goes down by the square of distance. You are getting a signal that is 100,000 times weaker, which means it is not going to get in indoor.
Outdoors, it is like flashing a torchlight from space. It is a beam size issue. Typical beam sizes right now are many times larger than Manhattan and can support about 10 concurrent users. Now, yes, beam sizes might shrink a bit. By the way, getting more spectrum does not change constraint A or B. We view this very much as a complementary edge use case, which does good things for customers in that edge use case, but is nowhere close to a substitute in the vast majority of America.
Great. As we wrap up in the last few minutes here, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about key priorities, milestones that you're looking to achieve over the next year or two.
From my perspective, look, I think we've got an incredibly clear strategy, which as I said, is characterized by driving forward on our growth vectors and feeding our culture. Those two give us an incredible moat. When you think about what drives our growth going forward, consumer wireless, 20 million families and businesses, accounts, in other words, are network seekers. These are people who chose Verizon or AT&T in the 4G era. These are 20 million not with us. They chose Verizon or AT&T in the 4G era because they thought it was the best network, and they were right then. It's not true any longer. You know we're adding about 1 million accounts a year. That's 20 years of runway on growth for us just in consumer wireless.
You look at something like small markets in rural areas, 40% of the population of America, we have 24% market share there. Now, yes, you can say we went from 13% to 24% in five years, but it's still 24%. There's a huge opportunity of growth there. You look at enterprise businesses; we're a 10% share. Massive growth opportunity there. FWA broadband, we're doubling. There's not many people who can say that. Just look at our last quarter results. There's not many companies of our size and scale who've seen 9% growth in service revenue and 12% growth in EBITDA. Then you add on to that all of the upside that comes from just having the opportunity in financial services, having the opportunity in physical and edge AI, and I could spend a lot of time on why I'm truly stoked by those.
But I think the central priority is feed the culture, widen the moat, because that moat lies at the heart of continuing to drive this growth. The moat's really important to us because we don't think of this business tactically as here's the new pricing plan, what's the net add that I've added? Those are important things, but ultimately what drives success in this business is the quality of your strategic moat, and that's what I will focus on feeding and driving because that'll create the growth.
Srini, thank you so much for participating in our conference.
My pleasure.
It has been a privilege to have you on stage here today.
Great. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir. That was fantastic.