Citi clients only. Welcome back to Citi's 2025 Global TMT Conference. For those of you I haven't met yet, I'm Mike Rollins. I cover communication services and infrastructure for Citi. Disclosures are available at the back of the room, and if you don't have access to those or would like another copy, please email me at michael.rollins@citi.com. We're pleased to welcome Paul Bullington, Chief Financial Officer of Uniti. Paul, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you, Mike. It's always great to be here. This is definitely one of our favorite conferences of the year. It's nice to be with you.
It's great to have you, and it's been a very busy time for Uniti. Maybe you can just catch us up with the recent close of the Windstream deal. What are Uniti's key strategic and operating priorities as you look out now over the next couple of years?
Yeah. So yes, definitely a lot going on. It's been a busy time, but a good time. We're glad to have the merger closed and have that process behind us and be able to really kind of focus on what's next, the future, and hit the ground running. From a priority standpoint, the Kinetic build and go-to-market focus is a huge thing for us. We spent a lot of time even pre-merger, really very fine level of detail, completely going through the full Kinetic territory, rethinking the build plan, reprioritizing the build plan. And we've got now in place a full build plan out to the 3.5 million homes by 2029. So certainly a lot of focus on that and now ramping the build engine to be able to meet those targets is a key focus of ours right now.
Also, I think the go-to-market approach at Kinetic is also something that we want to refine. We see a lot of good things that have happened. The penetration curves, particularly more recently at Kinetic, have been really strong, but we think there's a lot of work to do and a lot we can build on from that. So, that more investments that we can make in terms of our go-to-market approach, distribution, marketing, all those sorts of things to really continue to drive penetration. Getting that all in place is a big focus of our leadership team.
At the Fiber Infrastructure business, really capitalizing on the enhanced opportunity that we see by bringing those two parts of the businesses together, the Windstream Wholesale business along with the Uniti Fiber and Uniti Leasing businesses to create a bigger network, a broader network, deeper customer reach, really capitalizing on that enhanced opportunity, which includes AI and the hyperscaler opportunity, but it's broader than that. It is a big part of our focus. Integrating the leadership team, integrating the business, achieving the synergies, that's going to be a focus of ours, and then particularly on my plate, I think we have a really good opportunity to drive some interest expense out of the capital structure, helped by the market backdrop, but our capital structure from a debt standpoint has rallied really strongly over the last year.
So I think we're going to have some opportunity to drive some interest expense out of the business as well.
Great. Now, with the merger, you've organized the company now into three key segments: Kinetic, Fiber Infrastructure, and is it enterprise solutions?
Uniti Solutions.
Uniti Solutions.
Uniti Solutions, yes.
Which is the old managed services business.
Correct. Yep.
Do you view those as three distinct and separate businesses that eventually be separated through strategic action, or are they more complementary?
We definitely view them as separate businesses. We view them as separate businesses with good synergies across those businesses. We think the fiber business is a business of scale, and so having the Kinetic business and the reach of that network attached to the Fiber Infrastructure business and the reach of that network are complementary to each other. But we do think those are strategic business, separate businesses. Uniti Solutions, we've kind of labeled that as non-core because it doesn't exactly fit our fiber thesis where that's not a business that runs on its own fiber. It's basically over the top, typically running on other networks. It's a good business, throwing off nice cash flow for the business, but we view that as non-core.
But those two fiber segments, we think are complementary, but we want to maintain the optionality to separate those if at some point in time that's a path to maximizing shareholder value. So separate, but complementary.
The strategic review of the new asset portfolio was referenced in one of your slides in your 2Q earnings presentation, and it mentioned that you're at the beginning of this process. Can you provide the scope, timing, and the opportunities that you'll be reviewing?
Yep. Yeah. So we definitely wanted to highlight the fact that now that the merger is behind us, it's not that we haven't been thinking about the assets from a strategic standpoint. Obviously, we think about that every day as an executive management team, but we have been focused on getting the deal closed and working through the Kinetic build plan and all those sorts of things. And now that we've closed the deal, the merger, we wanted to highlight the fact that we can really now turn more attention as an executive team and a board to thinking about the strategic roadmap for the businesses and the optionality for these businesses.
It's not saying that we have a formal process with a formal timeline that's going to deliver a formal answer, but just the effort to be intentional and very strategic about how we want to think about these assets going forward. So it's really looking at everything, looking at strategic opportunities from an M&A standpoint, both on the sell side and the buy side. But I wouldn't necessarily expect a product or a communication necessarily that we've finished the review, but it would just be folded into our process going forward. I mean, we do think there's a lot of activity in the market today, particularly from large strategics that have been pretty vocal about raising the bar for the number of homes passed that they want to reach. And so I do think that's a part of it as well.
We think given the scale of the Kinetic business and the Uniti business as a whole, there may be conversations to be had there as well, and it seems like that activity is picking up.
And so with the footprint that you have, we've seen all different size footprints be a part of this convergence strategy for these national carriers. So for the portfolio you have, getting to 3.5 million homes by 2029, is that something that's kind of in that sweet spot of focus for these big strategics? Or do you think there's a round of consolidation where you might try to expand your fiber presence first and then having more of a larger converged footprint for you guys could be more appealing to these big strategics?
Not to say that we wouldn't entertain opportunities to get more scale through acquisition, but if you think about players of scale in fiber to the home, we're already one of the, I would say, the top three, four largest fiber to the home players that are not one of those big strategics. So I don't think more scale is required to get attention on that front.
Very helpful. And so another priority that you've been, I think, focusing on is getting the business to growth. Where are you in the process of returning consolidated revenue and EBITDA as a combined company back to positive growth?
Yeah. So we're close. The investment that we're making in Kinetic, accelerating that investment, is going to help us to get to that inflection point quickly. I would say, but we do have some. There's some legacy services that we're still working through, particularly at Uniti Solutions and some of the Kinetic wholesale business. My thought around that inflection point is that we're probably flatish 2025-2026 as we're working through some of that, but I think you see an inflection at that point, particularly 2026-2027 from both the top and the bottom line standpoint.
And when you think about just the ways that Uniti is going to drive value for shareholders over the next few years, how much do you think is going to come from the organic side of the business versus capital allocation or M&A?
I think organic is where we've got definitely the most wood to chop there and where we're focused. I mean, we've got seasoned people, particularly Kenny Gunderman, our CEO, very seasoned on an M&A standpoint. So I think we've proven to be smart buyers and sellers of assets in the past. So certainly never say never with regard to other acquisitions that might help us there. But I think the organic opportunity in front of us is really what we're focused on. We've got a lot of fiber to build. We think the best way to deliver value to our shareholders operationally is to build fiber, sell fiber, right? That's what we want to do. So we've got a roadmap to get to 3.5 million homes by 2029. That's 1.25 million subscribers, 75% of Kinetic's revenue coming from fiber.
At that point in time, you'd have 90% of the entire company revenue from fiber. We think that's the best way from an operational standpoint to drive value for shareholders because with the fiberization of that territory gives us the right to win. Fiber is the winning technology, we think, for the long term. So that drives penetration, that drives profitability, that drives cash flow. All of those things, I think, come from achieving our objectives there.
Maybe diving deeper into the Kinetic opportunity, when you look at making that migration to more fiber passings, how do you look at the margin for EBITDA and unleveraged free cash flow that that business can eventually get to from where it is today?
We haven't put out anything with regard to that. I want to kind of probably keep my comments less specific with regard to specific margin targets there. I think that will come. I think we're going to lay out more of the vision for what those benchmarks look like for the business 2028, 2029 as we're kind of coming out of that build. But I think generally speaking, we're going to go through an investment period over the next three to four years. There will be some cash flow burn during that period to fiberize the network. But then on the other side of that cash flow burn, you really see an inflection point, right, in terms of free cash flow, delivering significant free cash flow to the business, allowing us to delever the business as well beyond that point.
So no real specific guidance there, but just the general path forward would have that inflection point as we wind down the build 2028, 2029, turning to substantial free cash flow generation.
So, you have new leadership at Kinetic. You mentioned there's room to optimize performance. Can you share some of the progress you've had early to date and maybe how that will reflect on performance over the next couple of years?
Yeah. So there is new leadership at Kinetic. John Harrobin is in the room, so I'll have to be nice in my comments, be kind. No, I think, look, and I think John would tell you this if he was up here, but there's a lot to build on that is really good at Kinetic. I think the foundation is there. And I think we've got the systems in place. We've got people in place. We've got a progress and a trajectory. And we've made good strides from a penetration standpoint. And so a lot to build off of. So what are we changing? What are we doing different? I think the build, for one, we're pivoting, right? The build previously was focused around subsidized builds and internal crews. We are pivoting. We're going to be much more focused on what we call strategic builds.
So, the non-subsidized builds and a much heavier mix toward external crews, which gives us the ability to scale and flex and really get the build engine humming. So, that's one, I think, big difference that we're going to build on. Two, and a long-range plan. So, prior, it was more cherry-picking, scattershot in the fiberization approach, which makes sense in terms of you go where you have the lowest hanging fruit. Going forward, we're going to have a long-range build plan. We know where we're going to build for the next three to four years. And so, I think that's a different approach. From a go-to-market approach, I think there's a lot more that we can do from an investment in marketing and distribution channels.
There have been some improvements made there over the last year with the effort that Kinetic has been undergoing with their Fiber Forward program, which is basically rolling their go-to-market marketing learnings back into older vintage cohorts. But I think one opportunity we see is the ability to invest much more heavily and intentionally in some of those efforts and to scale those efforts. So I would say that as a big sea change that it's probably different now than it was maybe six months ago.
And then one other thing with, well, one topic, two questions. So I remember the Windstream footprint from years ago, and I think the messaging back then is it was just a less competitive footprint in the ILEC. Is that still the case relative to ILEC regions that are out there?
Yes. I would definitely characterize the Kinetic footprint as being less competitive on the whole. It's more that tier two, tier three rural markets where Uniti is always focused. So we think it fits really nicely with our strategy. I mean, if you look at the competitive landscape for Kinetic, 60% of the footprint is large cable. I think that compares pretty favorably to a lot of peers in terms of that. There's another 20% that's kind of cats and dogs. And then there's another 20% where there's really no cable competitor. I think the stat is maybe 12% of the network has no other wired competitor. And about it's 15%-20%, depending on how you count it, 20% if you kind of look, I think, at co-ops and those sorts of competitors, but 20% with a competitive, call it overbuilder or second non-cable option.
From a competitive standpoint, we really like the characteristics of the Kinetic footprint.
And your ARPUs, and you talked about this on the last earnings call. I think that your ARPUs are a bit higher than your peers for broadband and for Kinetic fiber. And what I'm curious about is, does that introduce just a longer-term risk for the business in terms of FWA competition or LEO satellite competition, just because you have that higher bar on ARPUs where it might let a little bit more of that value segment attract to these other alternative competitors?
Yeah. We definitely don't think that ARPU is a vulnerability of the business. I think, and ARPU is a little, I mean, you got to kind of make sure you're comparing apples to apples across businesses, which sometimes is hard to do. If you look at our pure broadband ARPU, it's right in the $70 range, which is a little higher, but pretty close to competitors and peers from a broadband standpoint, and then we have another $10 or so generally of value-added services, but we only really have two value-added services today, which gives us an opportunity for the future as well, so a security service and then voice, and then there's another $10 maybe for modem, CPE rental, that sort of thing, so that kind of gets you that $90, which is a pretty high number.
But when you look at the components of it, I don't think we're particularly vulnerable. I think part of the ARPU equation there is the lower competition that we just talked about being a piece of it. But only about a third of the Kinetic footprint is at a gig speed or higher. So we think there are lots of opportunities from an ARPU standpoint going forward. Moving customers up the speed ladder is going to be really important for Kinetic. So we get a higher penetration at those higher speeds and higher ARPUs. That's a piece of it. Adding more value-added services, which we think we have an opportunity to do, can help with ARPU. Better managing our retention credit strategy, those sorts of things can help with ARPU as well. So we see plenty of levers that we can pull from an ARPU standpoint and continue to have.
I don't think we're expecting the kind of ARPU growth we've seen in kind of the most recent years at Kinetic. I would call it more of a kind of a 2% type ARPU growth on a go-forward basis, maybe 3% at the high end of the range, but probably closer to 2% from an ARPU growth standpoint through pulling some of those levers. But one thing we are, and I talked about kind of the change in philosophy from a go-to-market strategy. I think pricing is one of the pieces of that puzzle. And the Kinetic approach historically has been more of a rack rate approach where kind of everybody works off the same rate card. I think we think there's an opportunity to be more strategic there for markets where there may be more competition or more susceptible to FWA or other things.
Maybe there's an opportunity from a price standpoint there, but not necessarily painting the entire Kinetic footprint with that same brush.
Going more local with the marketing and with the pricing.
Absolutely, yes.
Maybe shifting gears to Fiber Infrastructure. So maybe just set the stage for us. As you look at the pro forma business, how much of this is considered strategic relative to what might be like a heritage or legacy revenue that is at risk of a trading away?
Yeah. So I think the vast majority of that Fiber Infrastructure business is what I would call strategic. So really all of the heritage, I mean, Uniti Fiber Infrastructure business, so the Uniti Fiber business and the Uniti Leasing business, that is all fiber-based. There's no legacy in that. It's all very strategic in terms of revenue. On the Windstream side, and that's about half of the combined business. On the Windstream Wholesale side that we're merging into that F iber Infrastructure business, two-thirds of that business I would call strategic with another third that's probably more legacy. It's not TDM and the copper twisted pair sense of TDM. It's more fiber-based SONET TDM. So it's a technology that's going away, but it's a very profitable technology. It's a technology that doesn't have a substantial cost base.
So we're not as eager to just drive that legacy revenue out of the revenue stream, but it is declining. So that final sort of 20% of that Fiber Infrastructure revenue base is what I would kind of call legacy. Yeah.
And you mentioned on the last earnings call some strength that you're seeing in the sales pipeline and the opportunities to just leverage these assets and push sales. Can you give us an update on how that's progressing?
Yeah. So the sales funnel is bigger than it's ever been today. I mean, and that's kind of on an apples-to-apples standpoint. And then when you combine the Windstream Wholesale business with the Uniti businesses there, obviously there's a much deeper funnel. And we think there's a lot of cross-sell opportunity between those. So new customer relationships, broader reach of the network, broader scale, we think only drives more opportunity, more revenue to that business. So that's kind of what I talked about in terms of our priorities is really making sure we are capturing that well. A big piece of the story is the hyperscaler piece. That part of our funnel has grown 5x from what it was second quarter of 2025 over second quarter of 2024. So we're seeing just a ton of activity there. It's super exciting for our business.
We think that that is primarily upside to the business. We talked about a $1.5 million, or sorry, billion dollar, $1.5 billion total contract value from the hyperscalers in the funnel. And so we expect to win our fair share of that. And we expect deals to continue to come into the picture, new deals to come into the picture as the consumers of AI fiber, hyperscaler fiber continue to invest in their compute infrastructure and their networks.
So the Uniti team has talked about the success you're having not just with selling fiber, but leasing up assets that are already in place or largely in place. And this has been a question, I think, for Fiber Infrastructure companies for a while: is the marginal returns on capital. Can you help frame this? When you're spending whatever it is in CapEx in this segment, just the simple math of how that drives EBITDA growth for Uniti and the ability to have this accretion to return on capital over time.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of really, and sometimes I feel it's even a little bit of a hidden success story for the Uniti, particularly that Uniti Fiber business, that Fiber Infrastructure business. Historically, it's been a little overshadowed by some of the Windstream lease and all of those things that are now in the rearview mirror. But that's always been a question, I think, and a challenge for Fiber Infrastructure businesses. Can you take that anchor wireless build or hyperscaler build or whatever that anchor build is, and then can you successfully layer lease up over the top of that? And I think we have proven over the years that we can not only do that, but do that really well. Our enterprise business at Uniti Fiber is growing double digits year over year. The wholesale business at Uniti Fiber is growing double digits year over year.
That's exactly when we talk about lease up, that's exactly the bread and butter of our lease up, taking those networks that we've built for a wireless company or for a hyperscaler and then layering over that enterprise business at as many buildings as we can that fiber passes or marketing those on-net buildings or those near-net buildings to wholesalers, and so the types of returns that we're getting on that are really strong. We're averaging yields, so first of all, it's very margin accretive, so our typical benchmark is we think about it as it differs from project to project, but you can think about it as kind of an 80% margin for those kind of lease up businesses or opportunities typically, and we're talking about yields on that margin of over 50%, so extremely accretive to the business.
So we really like the economics of the F iber Infrastructure business and particularly the lease up part of it.
Maybe just pivoting to Uniti Solutions for a moment. One of the things that struck me, and you can tell me if this is fair or unfair from what I recall, there was an original set of pro formas and segment profit contributions, and it seemed like from the time of the initial guidance being put out to the latest guidance, it feels like the margins went up in Uniti Solutions and the corporate overhead to offset that went up. Is that something that you learned over time in terms of how that profitability of the business is working, or were you able to variabilize maybe certain components of that differently than when you first started the merger process?
Yeah. So I think that was just a fallout of the work that we did to segmentize the business and really refine the accounting from the perspective of the way we wanted to run the business going forward. The real difference there is that previously at Windstream, they had a shared cost center across all of the networks, what they call their CNO organization. There was a lot of shared network costs across that entire business. Initially, in our evaluation of that, we had an allocation methodology for those costs. But then in preparing to be a combined company, we really went through from an accounting standpoint and really went through all of the detailed work to allocate those costs. And so we have a much more refined view of the allocation of those costs that were shared in the old Windstream model.
And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. The majority of the network costs went to where there's network, right? And at Uniti Solutions, where they're using third-party networks, there wasn't as much overhead with regard to that business. So it was just really more of a refinement of the accounting in terms of go-forward segment EBITDA.
You mentioned that that business eventually could get back to growth. What does it take to turn that business around?
Yeah. That's honestly something we're working to figure out. I don't know that we have all of the answers yet, but what we do know is that there is a core book of business at Uniti Solutions that's mission-critical for those customers. Those customers are typically Fortune 100 type customers. So big customers with big needs across the country. Our viewpoint is that that is a business that's critical for those customers. That's a business that we understand and can work to optimize. While there's a piece of that business, I think we might change our terminology on it, but there's a piece of that business that's sort of, I would call kind of high calories, sort of, or trying to think of the best way to describe it. It's more access-based. So not a big value add to these businesses.
It's more of a pass-through business, and so that's the business that we think is going to continue to run off, and our job is to really focus on that core product set, that value-added product set and those core customers and stabilize around that, and we think we can definitely do that over time.
As you're managing the investment into Kinetic, into the homes passed with fiber, and then managing these other two businesses, Fiber Infrastructure and Uniti Solutions, what's the right leverage for the total portfolio versus where you are today?
Yeah. And we've definitely made comments around leverage. We think that leverage today is on the higher side. The merger itself was deleveraging for Uniti from where we were. But given the nature of the combined business, we think the leverage today, closing around five and a half times, is higher than what you would optimally run the business for the long term. But we also see that we have a strategic imperative to invest in this business. We've got to fiberize this business in order to have the right to win and to have the kind of growth and profitability and defensible territory that we need to have for the business in the long term. So our plan is to make that investment. That's going to drive leverage up in the shorter term.
We've kind of put a bracket around a six to six and a half times kind of high end on the leverage as we go through that investment period. But then on the backside of that, like we talked earlier, call it 2029 as we're winding down the build, that capital intensity goes way down, free cash flow starts to accrue, and then we see the opportunity to delever the business. Long term, we've put a target leverage range of four to four and a half times. But given the investment period through sort of 2029, it's going to take us a while to get there.
And then just maybe real quick, you talked about flattish overall revenue, $25-$26. But when you look into these individual segments, these big three segments that you have, what does the growth or revenue change roughly look like in each of these pieces?
Yeah. So Kinetic, I like to think about it in terms of the consumer piece of the business and then the enterprise and wholesale segments for Kinetic. The consumer business at Kinetic from 2024 to 2025 is right at an inflection point. It's flattish, but we're inflecting very quickly to growth from a top-line standpoint at Kinetic consumer. The wholesale business has got a lot of TDM, and that's a game of we're buying from the big guy, the other ILECs or RBOC, and they're buying from us, and everybody is trying to look at the balance of power there and raise prices and drive those costs out of their business. So that's a declining piece of the pie. But then where I think there's a real opportunity is the Kinetic enterprise, the Kinetic business piece. That's only about 20% fiber-based today, and it's declining on low single digits.
It's declining, but it's declining. We've got an opportunity to turn that into a growth business really quickly. Fiber. Get through the rest really quickly since we're running out of time. But Fiber Infrastructure, we see that as a mid-single-digit grower, a little TDM to work out there. So maybe not quite at that growth rate year over year unless we have some huge hyperscaler AI wins, which I think is very possible. And then Uniti Solutions is going to be continuing to decline at sort of a mid-teens kind of rate on both the top and the bottom line for the next couple of years. Yeah.
Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you.
Yep. All right. Thank you.