All right. Well, thanks, everybody. Good morning, and welcome to day one, session one of our 2023 Telco Media Conference here at Bank of America. I'm David Barden. I head up, telecommunications and communications infrastructure research for the bank based here in New York for the U.S. and Canada. We're really pleased to have with us, today Verizon, and Sampath, the CEO of the consumer business, the largest business in Verizon, and Tony Skiadas, the full-time CFO of Verizon. Before we begin, I'd like to ask Tony if you have some safe harbor remarks you'd like to make?
Sure. Thanks, Dave. Good morning. So, I'll just draw your attention to Verizon's safe harbor statement. Things that we might say are future in nature are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our information is on our Verizon website, including our SEC filings as well.
Perfect. Thank you so much. I just realized that, Sampath, you're like the Beyoncé of telecom now. You're the one name, you know, that everyone knows.
Either Prince, Beyoncé, I shared, I don't know which one.
I think Beyoncé is probably bigger now. So before we kind of get into the core business, I'd like to kind of talk about a little bit of the headlines that have been coming up of late that I think people are interested in learning a little bit more about. I guess the first one would be the iPhone launch. Pretty big industry event, yesterday. I think that the press, you know, has a short memory, and when they report about what's happening, they kind of highlight the promotions that are going on. I think all of us kind of would love to kind of get a perspective on how you feel this launch has gone.
Are we seeing signs that the industry is more competitive, the same competitive, or less competitive than maybe a year ago?
This is a big, big time of the year for us. Everyone's excited about it. Upgrade rates have been slow. You saw that last quarter. They continue to be soft. But, you know, the next couple of weeks makes the quarter for us in terms of upgrade rates, depending on how customers pick it up. In terms of competitive intensity, kind of similar to last, you know, the last couple of years. Look, on acquisition, we're not gonna be second. We think we have the most compelling value prop with the best network that sets us up really well for the season on acquisition. We're not gonna cede share. We're gonna continue to push hard on that. On base, we don't feel the need to match our competitors dollar for dollar.
We have a slightly different value prop, and we have the ability to customize and kind of segment a base of one with a lot more personalization. So we'll always be a little different on base, but on acquisition, we are gonna win this quarter.
And so with respect to being more conservative on the promotions regarding your base, based on your belief that you've got this stronger value proposition, do you look across the landscape and feel comfortable that you won't have to make adjustments as we go through the period based on what you're seeing out there right now?
Yes. It's slightly different, our value prop, because we're able... You know, we have the app. People use the app to upgrade. We're able to target people exactly, you know, where they are on their cycle, their usage, their propensity to buy. So we're able to target that. Second, the value prop's different. You know, we have the ability to trade in any device in any condition. That's something our competitors have kind of always struggled to do. We have the operational muscle to get that through, and that's gonna be, I would say, a competitive edge that we'll have even for the base going in.
Got it. Okay. I think the second one that just, I think it was yesterday, that came out was T-Mobile and Comcast have struck a deal for T-Mobile to acquire a 600 MHz spectrum. It looks like 2028. Is this a piece of spectrum that you got to look at? Is this something you wish you had acquired?
I mean, we just saw the news last night as well, Dave, so, don't have a lot to say about it right now. But, you know, clearly, you know, T-Mobile felt like they needed more depth there, but you can ask them.
Mm-hmm.
Well, and T-Mobile has a 600 megahertz footprint.
That's right.
You guys do not, correct?
That's right.
So that would have been kind of novel headset.
It's the handset, you know, what percentage of handsets, seeding new spectrum bands and handset is a long movie. I don't know how much support there really is for 600 at this moment right now.
Okay. I guess, and the third, kind of, big one is the lead issue that came up from The Wall Street Journal in July. I think people have been, you know, hopeful that we would kind of see the telco industry kind of bring more information to light and kind of try to put as much as possible this issue to bed. You know, what can you share with us where we stand right now on this issue and the discovery?
Sure, Dave. So maybe I can pick up where we left off at earnings, which was we said we take this matter very seriously. We're doing a very fact-based and science-based approach, prioritizing the health and safety of our employees and the communities that we serve. We also shared some stats, and we said that about we had 540,000 route miles in the network, about half of which is aerial, and a small percentage is lead. We said we're still doing a review of the old MCI Western Union network. That work is still ongoing, but it hasn't changed those facts. In terms of some updates, what I would say is I think you might have seen last month that New York State did their own testing.
New York State Health Department did their own testing in Wappingers Falls, New York, which is one of our sites that was identified by the media, and they found no elevated evidence of elevated lead levels, and since reopened the park. More recently, last week, the EPA did their own testing in New Jersey at one of our sites and similarly found that there was no public health risk. And then on our side, we did our own testing at each of those three sites, and the average soil lead levels are below the remediation levels established by each of the applicable states. So therefore, the results are very consistent with what we saw and what the regulators have seen.
We're working very proactively with the EPA on it and other regulators, and as we said before, as we have more to share, we'll certainly do so.
... Okay, great. Okay, encouraging. So, let's kinda go back and zoom out a little bit. Maybe to start, so Sampath, you know, you've been about five months in the role as, as the CEO of the consumer unit. Talk to us a little bit about how you're trying to transform, you know, your slice of the business, and trying to maybe generate more momentum in, in that unit.
I've been very happy with the progress in the last couple of months. The transition has gotten very smoothly, partly because I've worked in different elements of the consumer business in my last little south of a decade in the business, you know, whether it's product, whether it's network, whether it's pricing and things like that. So it's been—it's a very familiar business for me. We've done an incredible amount of transformation in the first couple of months. The first is myPlan, which I think is probably one of the first in the world, which is completely customizable, it's transparent, flexible, gives the customer full control, and we changed how customers think and buy about it. So I think that's a big win for us. Second is the market structure.
You know, we got nationalized in the sense we had central structures running all of sales and marketing for us. We've gone to a much more local structure with six markets, a lot of autonomy in the field, as well as local marketing and activation, so that's been another big win for us. The third one is sales incentives. We have a large sales teams, and we had moved to a group compensation, partly because of COVID, and, you know, there were some consequences because of that. We moved back to an individual sales compensation, something Verizon is very, you know, very good at. And last is, we very well executed on our price ups. You know, the recent one has been on a fixed wireless access product, where we priced up $10 across the board, and very little churn from almost all our price ups.
We've done a lot of transformation work over the last, you know, 100 odd days. And going forward, what we see is more momentum in our business. Core operating metrics are looking better, and that's the foundation in which we want to build and get into 2024.
And then, Tony, you've been kind of in the seat since, I think, March. How about you? You know, have you tried to bring anything new to the game? I know that when we kind of came into the year, we started with a large amount of variable rate debt, for instance. Kind of what is your kind of philosophy that you're bringing to the table?
Yeah. So look, Dave, no change in philosophy. I've been with the company for 27 years, so I was the controller for 10 years prior to this. So I've been around for a while and worked closely with Matt previously, so a very smooth transition there. And then, you know, very focused on, I'm very aligned with Sampath, Kyle and Hans on driving service revenue growth, EBITDA, and free cash flow, and the team's very aligned on that, and we stay very close on that. And then within that framework, you know, focusing on mobility, broadband and private networks, and that's where the team is really focused.
Sampath touched on a little bit of the things he's doing on the mobility side and consumer in terms of, you know, improving the business, the market structure, which I'm a huge proponent of and strongly supported, and I couldn't wait to get that going, along with some of the other pricing changes that I know we'll get into with Sampath in driving the business forward. And then on the B2B side, Kyle's doing a great job in terms of continuing to grow the wireless part of the B2B space. Customers continue to prefer the Verizon network, and we've seen great growth, eight straight quarters of 125,000 phone net adds, so great momentum there. On the broadband side, we have a steady rhythm at 400,000 broadband net adds.
Both Fios and fixed wireless access. Fios is growing, fixed wireless access is growing. We have over 2.3 million FWA subs in our base right now, and we're on our way to the 4-5 million targets, so we're very pleased with the progress there. And that's both consumer and businesses growing, so both of those segments see great progress on FWA. And then on private networks, early wins with in private 5G with the Cleveland Clinic, and now that we're in football season with the NFL and the coach-to-coach communication. So we're very proud about that, too, and early leadership there. And then lastly, on capital allocation, no change in philosophy there. You saw we raised the dividend for the 17th straight year last week, so we're very proud of that as well.
Great. What I think I'd like to talk about a little bit is, you know, the industry in 2021, 2022, had its best ever, you know, postpaid phone net adds. For the last 18 months, prices in the industry have gone nowhere but up. You know, CapEx cycle is coming to an end, cash flow is expanding, everything seems to be going really well in the industry, and everybody hates it because everybody's convinced that something's gonna go really wrong. And I want to start with where all these things are supposed to be going wrong. And the first thing that's supposed to be going wrong is that 2023 is gonna see, you know, some of your peers have called it a normalization of the postpaid phone net add marketplace.
Now, year to date, year over year, we have seen a slowdown, but Verizon hasn't seemed to suffer any kind of year-over-year effect of that. Could you talk a little bit about why that might be and what you see the normalization of postpaid phone net adds in the industry looking like on a go-forward basis and how you're planning for it?
Yeah, look, because of COVID, we saw some pull forward of demand, which is typical, not of this category, of almost every other category that there was out there. The market moved to 9 million postpaid net add growth. Some of it was pre to postpaid migration because of government money and subsidy money that's coming into the system. I suspect we are gonna get into a 7 million year, and then normalization is gonna be between 5 and 6 million a year. 5 and 6 million year, plus all the broadband growth that we have in the business, as Tony said, 400,000, makes for a very healthy-
Per quarter.
Per quarter.
Quarter.
Quarter, exactly. Makes for a very healthy business, where we have growth opportunities in on the fixed wireless side in non-connected services, and think about it, our ARPA grew 6% last quarter, which is an incredibly strong number for us to be have. So look, we have a healthy customer base, but if you look at our FICO score, it's 723. That's our average FICO score of our customer base. So we have a very healthy customer base that likes the network, that likes the premium nature of the network, the value prop, and the customer experience that we give. So that makes for a very healthy business and a very strong franchise.
So if that's the case, we're going from 9 to a 5-6 in a normalized world. If Verizon's not adding postpaid phone net adds in a 7 million per year market, does that mean that Verizon net adds go negative in a 5-6 million net add world?
Look, we've historically, last couple of quarters, relied extensively on price to get to our service revenue number. We know, Tony and I talk a lot about it, we want to get to a more balanced 80/20 approach to price and quantity. So we are gonna grow our quantity number on phone net adds in a different way. Two ways of doing that. The first one is sales momentum. We've seen, we've put in all, you know, myPlan, some of the work we've done in the field gives us the momentum that we need. And second, is churn. You know, as we go through the finish, the back end of our price ups and more personalization, we get better at churn. So we know how to play in this market. We've historically taken our fair share of phone net adds. I don't see that any different.
We're just gonna have to go through a transition period when we get back to it.
You know, 5-6 million normalized postpaid phone net add world, what is Verizon's fair share?
Step one for us is to get to positive phone net adds in the consumer business. Once we do that, we'll get to our fair share. Look, our overall market share is between, you know, around 35% is our market share, but we're gonna have to work up through it. Step one is to get to positive phone net adds, which we are working hard on.
And I think that in that 5-6 million postpaid phone net add world, the definition of what a postpaid phone net has evolved, I think, and the pie seems to have grown. What of that 5-6 million in that world is addressable for Verizon, as opposed to kind of free stuff that's just being added to the pie?
Almost all of that is addressable, because if you look at our business, we have a postpaid business and we have a value business. So essentially, every segment of the market, Verizon has a killer value prop. We start with the premium segment. We have the best network, which we go and we sell in that. On the mid-end, we have Total by Verizon. We are scaling that to almost 750 stores on a path to 2,000 stores. So that's a good flanker brand that's growing incredibly well. Then we have Straight Talk at every Walmart. You can't miss it if you ever shop at Walmart. And then we have Visible, which is our digital-only brand, that is doing incredibly well. So at every single price point, we have... And then we have SafeLink for our ACP customers that we serve.
So we have a compelling value prop at every segment, every different price point. So essentially, the whole, whole market is addressable for us. The question is, which ones are profitable for us? Which ones make sense, and which ones Tony and I feel comfortable writing business on?
So another concern is that, okay, in this 5-6 million world, you know, it's not just the telcos' sandbox anymore. The cable companies have come in, they've been very aggressive, and the theory is that they're going to continue to cram the telcos into a smaller and smaller corner. How do you see that telco versus cable dynamic evolving?
We think our value prop of offering, you know, large, unlimited plans with the best network, and we, when we use the word offload, it's different for us, is a great value prop for us. Customers like it. Customers come to us every single day. The cable relationship is a strategic relationship for us. They're a strategic partner, but we only, we want to do deals that are creative to us. The current deal that we have is accretive to us for, you know, and we like the way it is, shaping up.
So if, if I'm a cable bull, I'm optimistic that my mobile strategy is profitable. It will remain profitable for the foreseeable future. It will always... It may be profitable forever because of my relationship with Verizon. I think everyone knows that I've, I've maybe been trying to coax some incremental color from Verizon. So number one is that your peers believe that the cable relationship with Verizon is, has a variable cost nature to it, and that as data grows, the profit margins in the cable wholesale wireless business will shrink smaller and smaller and possibly go negative. Is that a true statement or a false statement?
We're not gonna comment on commercial relationships with cable.
Yeah.
All I'll say is they're a strategic partner. We do deals that are financially disciplined. Tony and I will not write any business that's not financially-
Yeah, look, it's growing business. It's very profitable business for us, but we're not gonna get into the commercial terms, Dave. I'll ask one more because everyone expects me to. Which is, obviously under the original Spectrum deal that you did with the cable industry, which was a good deal for you guys, you committed to the DOJ that you would always have a wholesale relationship with the cable industry. It's clear that that relationship has at least involved at least one time over the years. And if I'm a cable bull, I want to believe that the way that this deal is structured will last forever.
The sense of it, however, is that while a deal has to exist, it doesn't necessarily have to be this particular deal, that you could come back to it and recut it if you felt it was in your financial best interest to do so. Is that a true statement or a false statement?
Look, we don't talk about commercial arrangements. All I would say is we've invested a lot in the network... you know, between Spectrum and my network, we invested a lot. Our retail customers are paying more for it, as you can see from our price ups and very low churn impact, and we want our partners to get access to the best network at the right price.
Well said, Sampath. Okay, so, another thing, it would be that another kind of element of, you know, the optimism on, on cable as opposed to telco would be that, in addition to my forever profitable, you know, disruptive mobile capabilities without a network, that fixed wireless access is kind of a flash in the pan. That while it's had a negative effect on, on the, ability of the cable industry to grow broadband, for now, we heard last week that, you know, Mike Sievert believes that, in fact, fixed wireless access won't really disrupt the broadband industry. AT&T's always been a little, skeptical of fixed wireless access, more of a niche product versus fiber. You know, where do you land on the long-term opportunity that fixed wireless access represents?
Yeah, we have a, as I said earlier, we have a steady pace of 400,000 net adds a quarter, which, you know, 383,000 were fixed wireless access, so there's clearly demand for the product. The network team is building way beyond, and engineers and network way beyond the 4-5 million target that we have, so we have a lot of ambition there. We got the additional spectrum recently, so we have total access to the complement of C-band, so we'll continue to build that out. But we see a lot of opportunity. Sampath sees demands, and he's going after it right now as we see demand in certain markets, and you may want to talk about some of the things you're seeing from a customer standpoint.
The customers value the product a lot, you know, to a point where we passed on a 10%–$10 price increase across the board, and you know, we continue to see continued momentum in the, in, in the product. Second is also a Fios franchise. I mean, we've put north of 50,000 net adds in a quarter, in a while. So we have strong, you know, growth on the fiber on one side and fixed wireless access on one side. Four hundred thousand is a good number, run rate number for us. You know, we are turning our attention towards taking churn down, better equipment. We launched some new equipment in the market, better accretion and selling more services on top. Look, it's a long-term, sustainable business for us, and we like the pace at which we are growing.
So along to that point about you're happy with the pace of growth, so you—the C-band was obviously divided into two parts. You got, you know, phase one, you guys built a fixed wireless access business on phase one that's delivering 383,000 quarterly net adds. Now you've got basically twice as much spectrum across the entire country. Is there a reason to believe that three eighty-three won't go to four eighty-three and then five eighty-three? Or will you throttle it by raising prices to kind of squeeze more dollars out of kind of a more deliberate cadence of net adds?
Yeah, Dave, look, we think we're at a good pace here, and the network team still has to build out the network. Just because we got the spectrum, you know, a few weeks ago, doesn't mean it's all built out yet. So the team-
Let's talk about 2022.
There's still a couple of years of work that Joe and the network team have to do to continue to build out the C-band network. But, you know, we're at a healthy pace. As Sampath mentioned, we made a pricing change a few weeks ago, and you know, we're also, as Sampath said, trying to build a sustainable business. We built this business from scratch that has over 2.3 million subs in the base and in a very, very short period of time. So we see a lot of runway ahead.
So if I go back to my original theory, you know, we've got a large number of postpaid phone net adds that's shrinking. We've got cable that's taking a healthy percentage of that. Presuming that that percentage stays relatively stable, in order for you to get your fair share, you've got to then, within the universe of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, you've got to take something from somebody else. Who is it, and how?
I don't think, you know, the current where cable is between 60% and 70% of industry net adds, I'm not sure that's going to continue forever. Because we have an incredibly strong value prop in terms of, you know, once the C-band network gets built out, a really good network with myPlan and a great customer experience to go with it. That's... Between that and the fact that we have an offering at every segment, we're going to be very competitive in this space. We've got work to do in terms of continuing to build growth, add momentum that I spoke about earlier, but I don't think the current share positions on net adds that we see are going to continue forever.
Who will you win from and how?
The answer still remains the same. We're going to have to get better on growth adds, and some of that has to do with execution in the field. We've put in what we need, which we think we need to do to win. We've had that model, that's the model Tony and I grew up with. We know what, how that model works.
Mm-hmm.
So we're going to continue to see more, you know, growth, add momentum. Second is our value prop. I think we have a very strong value prop with myPlan, where we can bring in customers at different price points. And the fact that we were the first to unbundle inclusions from the network has been a great thing for us because we can vary device promotion based on ARPU and price plan, which historically people have struggled to do, and we are able to do that. So careful segmentation of the market, good growth, add momentum, and continuing to bring exclusive things to the market, like Sunday Ticket. Hope you got your Sunday Ticket from us this quarter, you know? It's been a good start this Sunday.
Well, you know, now that Rodgers is out, like, what's the point? There's no point anymore. So I want to talk a little bit about that price. Because I think when it all boils down, you know, the negativity, the concern about the industry really boils down to that this shrinking pie of net adds will, and the rising prominence of cable will compress the telco industry into a smaller and smaller box, and that someone is going to have to react on price to address whatever it is, whatever perceived injustices is befalling them. So first of all, prices in this industry for the last 18 months have just gone up.
It started off with kind of saying, well, inflation and, you know, and that, but, you know, the broadband, the cable broadband, the broadband industry in general, you see this in Canada, you see this in the U.S. They just drive prices up all the time because they can. Is the wireless position—you know, is the wireless business misperceived? Are we misperceiving the fact that maybe the wireless industry is in a position where it has become so, such a basic utility to our daily life, that the wireless industry should be able to, and we should expect that this is just the new normal, prices are just gonna go up?
Our power is up 6%. You know, I think that says answers almost all your question. We think a better network with a better value prop and a better customer experience, people will pay more for it. You know, good enough is good enough for many things. We don't think you need to settle for a good enough network, which is why our value prop stands out, and we are committed to it, and customers see value in it. I mean, we've almost every customer in our base has been priced up in the last six quarters. We've seen very little churn impact from it. We've modeled things. It's always come below our model and our expectations. So that shows a very strong franchise, but more importantly, the value that we're able to bring to the table every day.
I want to keep exploring this a little bit, but one of the theories would be that, you know, we on Wall Street, the investor community, we've boiled the entire industry down to one number, which is postpaid phone net adds.
Yep.
If your postpaid phone net adds aren't growing, obviously you're failing, irrespective of your cash flow and all the rest of it.
Yeah.
I mean, because of this sense, it's... Because Verizon's not growing, at least at this moment in time, the volumes, that there's a sense that Verizon, from the top down, the board is telling Hans, Hans is telling you, "Grow those volumes. And if you don't grow, and I don't care what it takes, do what it takes." Can you tell me a little bit about how Verizon views that view of the Wall Street view of how the business might be working?
Sure. As Sampath touched on, it's, you know, we've said before, volumes are important to the business, but we're gonna be very disciplined and segmented. I mean, you know, Sampath went to a regional model. We can be very, very segmented now. We're not gonna do this peanut butter spread approach of offers and things like that. So we're not gonna do... You're not gonna see us chasing it. But we're very comfortable, we're very comfortable. Sampath and I talk about the, you know, the price and quantity mix and what the right, you know, what the right mix is there. We're very aligned on that.
Some of the price ups that we've done are gonna be some nice tailwind in service revenue for the back half of the year and sets us up nice for the first part of next year. We still have more work to do on improving volumes, but you know, we're gonna be very disciplined about it, and Sampath may want to add.
Yeah, look, a price up is, you know, we, of course, have passive price ups for existing services, we charge more. But there's also what I call active price ups, whether it's wireless access business, step ups, step ups to premium plan, selling more non-connected services, selling connected services to existing customers. So there are many flavors of price, if you will, and we are doing incredibly well across all of them. That's why I feel we have good runway that we've built on price, that gives us time to dig deep, get the right momentum we have on quantity, and we'll fix that over a very period of time.
So I think another element of where the industry is, is that, you know, just by the nature of its maturity, that a lot of the new adds that we're talking about, that 5-6 million, is, you know, probably the concentration of those is at the lower end of the market. I think that it's not in Verizon's best interest to kinda cut prices to go get those customers, but you guys have done a few things to try to go make the brand and make the product more appealing to that segment. Could you talk a little bit about that, and then maybe fold the TracFone merger into that as well?
Step one for us was, the reason we got excited about TracFone is, we have a product in every segment of the market. You know, at the low end, we have the ACP customers. We work with the government to subsidize. And at the premium end, it's folks who buy our ultimate plan, which we think is the best offering in the market. And almost everything in the middle, we have an offering that goes after it. Our peers don't have one for every single segment that we have, so I think that's one, important thing for us. Second is, we are not going to write business that doesn't make financial sense for us. We are incredibly disciplined. You will not see us chase business that does not make, financial sense. The third piece is the price ladder.
myPlan, the way it is constructed, lets people come in at different price points and then upgrade over a period of time. You could come in at a welcome price point without any perks, and then over a period of time, move to the plus and move to the ultimate, and then keep adding more perks and building your book of business. That's an incredibly strong price ladder framework that we've built. So that's how we think we're gonna be attractive to people on the low end, as well as people who want the ultimate, which is the best, as the name suggests, the ultimate offering.
Cecily Strong and Paul Giamatti have been telling me how affordable you are, too. So I see that a lot. So all right, so we talked a lot about top line, price, industry structure. Tony, you know, underneath that has been a big initiative to kind of streamline the cost structure and take costs out of the business. Can you kind of give us an update on kind of where you sit there and your comfort level that we can kind of take $2 billion-$3 billion of costs out of the business by 2025?
Sure. So we... You mentioned that the $2-$3 billion is by 2025. We're well on our way there. We said this year, $200-$300 million, and that's a combination of a few things. We're doing a lot of work on our Verizon Global Services around sourcing and IT platform consolidation. Sampath and his team are doing a lot of transformation work with customer care. That's already been launched. And then you may have seen recently that Kyle and the business team signed a deal with HCL to do managed services transformation as well. So there's a lot of projects well underway, and we feel very comfortable with the pace of cost cutting, and you know, that's something that we're gonna continue to focus on.
We affiliated, as long as you mentioned the Verizon Global Services, the business side of Verizon. Just out of curiosity, so, you know, the Sprint fiber business was recently bought by Cogent, a very famous, you know, kind of price discounter, it wants to get into the enterprise services market, lit services market, waves market, dark fiber market. Do you sense any potential for disruption to that business at the margin, or is it more of like a rounding error?
Look, we're being very disciplined in the wireline side of the business, and, you know, Kyle and the team, you know, will look at deals. If they're not accretive, we're not gonna do them. So, you know, we're employing a lot more discipline than we have in the past.
And so one of the things, I think that is also happening on the kind of cash flow side is that there's been a kind of a stepping down of the capital intensity, of the business in 2023. There's an intention to kinda, I think, take that down again in 2024. I think some people would be kind of questioning that just because the bubble of CapEx was intended to kinda go toward the C-band deployment. You mentioned that we've got a lot of new C-band. There's a multiyear incremental build that has to take place. So can you achieve the C-band deployment within an even smaller capital envelope than you've got in 2023?
Sure. So a couple things there, Dave. So we said that we came back—when we entered the year, we had the back end of the $10 billion accelerated C-band program. That finished in the Q1 . And then we said we would stairstep down to a BAU level of CapEx, which we said was somewhere around $17 billion-$17.5 billion. The Q2 , we did $4.1 billion, so that was right kind of where we expected, and we expect the balance of this year to be in that $17 billion-$17.5 billion range. And then when we look out for next year, Hans and I have said publicly that, you know, that's probably a good run rate to think about for next year. We haven't given guidance yet, but that's, you know, how we're thinking about it. </transcript
Our engineers have a long track record of finding efficiencies and building networks and they're the best in the business, so they know how to do this. So I would expect that the $17-$17.5 next year is an all-in number, and the team knows how to build networks in a very efficient way. So I'm very comfortable with the, with the pace of CapEx for next year.
Just to kind of tie that together with Sampath. So right now, the Verizon network is a little bit of a have and have not situation, where you've got C-band deployed in roughly half the country and not in the other half. So could you kind of talk a little bit about what is the experiential difference? What's the monetization opportunity as those incremental CapEx dollars go to the C-band deployment at the margin?
We are very happy with the deployment of C-band, but more importantly, the customer experience that comes with it. Important metrics that I track on a weekly basis is churn in C-band versus non-C-band markets. We tend to do much better, lower churn in C-band markets, so that's a good win for us. The second is premium mix. We get almost a 10% better premium mix in C-band markets. So more revenue, less churn, you know, makes for a very happy business case.
And so going back to you, Tony, on the... So with where we are on the CapEx level, so I think you've given some, you know, insight into where you think cash flow is gonna land in 2023, in the $17 billion zip code. So if I think about going from, you know, 19+ billion in CapEx this year to 17+ billion, $2 billion tailwind to that cash flow number, so that lands us in the 19+ billion free cash flow for 2024 versus a $10-$11 billion dividend, a much better coverage, a lot more cash flow. Kind of a couple questions on that. Number one is: What other moving parts might influence my David Barden $19 billion number for 2024? I'm giving guidance for 2024 for Verizon right now.
Yeah, thank you. So we're not gonna give guidance, but-
No, we can-
Let me start back with the 17, and we said, look, in the Q2 , we said we saw a good line of sight to 17 plus of free cash flow, $17 billion+. So, when you think about the piece parts, we don't have any unsecured maturities on the table this year. I think as you saw, you know, with a strong cash position in the Q2, we took down debt. We did a $2.6 billion debt tender right after earnings, so we continue to take to take, you know, the debt stack down. So that's extremely important to us.
And then, as we think about going out in terms of some of the piece parts, if you think about, you know, an improving EBITDA profile that the team is focused on day in and day out, that, that's the first place to start. CapEx, as you mentioned, back down to a BAU level of of spend. We said 17-17.5. We have to see where the interest rate environment is and where the tax situation is. We still have this year, the remaining C-band clearing payments that are due and payable in the Q4 , so that's about $4 billion, so we have to take care of that. But, you start to see a path where we can continue to make meaningful progress on on deleveraging, and that'll be a focus of ours.
So that was kind of a follow-up question on that. So with this round numbers, let's call it an $8-$9 billion delta between, you know, potential cash flow generation run rate and the dividend, is it all going to leverage? And for how long into the future do we devote all the excess free cash flow to the deleveraging plan?
So, look, we're not gonna give guidance there. Our capital allocation priorities haven't changed. You know, the four priorities that we have out there, we said we would invest in the business, and you see us doing that with C-band. The second priority is the dividend, as that I mentioned upfront, that the board approved the dividend for the seventeenth straight year. The third priority is deleveraging, and you see us doing that very actively right now. And we said once we get down to, you know, to our stated leverage target of 1.75-2 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA, you know, that's the target we've been focused on.
And then once we satisfy those three priorities, then we would consider share buybacks, and that's, that's how we're executing against that, and you see us making progress, and our dividend payout ratio continues to, to come down.
... Within that envelope, once you get to that point, another element on the table is always M&A, you know, acquisitions. Obviously, U.S. Cellular has kind of put itself up for grabs. Appetite at Verizon to look at those assets for one reason or another?
Yeah, we saw the same news you did on U.S. Cellular, and it wouldn't be appropriate for us to comment on it, you know, one way or the other.
Oh, you could go ahead. Just a little bit of comment.
We don't comment on any of that stuff, so thank you.
All right, so as we kinda wrap it up, so Sampath, you know, overall optimism, you know, among the new team that you're kind of on the right track to get where you wanna go, and that the industry is in a place where, you know, everyone can win enough that, you know, disruptive behavior and bad behavior is probably not the base case, convince us that, that we can feel okay about the wireless industry.
Everything is converging towards what you just said. Let me start with the first is our C-band build. We are, you know, towards the best part of our C-band build, very strong operating metrics from customer experience. We feel more comfortable about what all we spent than we did when we actually started the project, which is always helpful. So I think that's the C-band build, exactly per plan, the customer experience, a good thing. The second is all the transformation work we've done over the last, I would say, 100 odd days. With the new market structures, like, you know, new value proposition, new promotions that are differentiated, and continuing to see momentum in our business. The third is our strong ability to drive ARPA accretion.
You know, we saw 6% ARPA growth, different levers on price, a passive price increase, active price increase, earning the right to raise prices, and seeing very little impact on churn as well. The fourth piece is our fixed wireless momentum. At 400,000 run rate between me and Kyle, it makes for a very healthy, you know, growth business. So when you put all of this together, plus some of the things around cash and capital that Tony spoke about, it's a healthy business, it's a great neighborhood, and one in which I want to build my house on.
I think that's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you guys. I hope you guys have a great conference. Next up in this room will be Interpublic, and then, we will have T-Mobile in about an hour. So thank you, guys.
Thank you.