AT&T Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

AlphaStreet
Provided by AlphaStreet
April 21, 2022
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Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, welcome to AT&T's First Quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions]. A reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to our host, Amir Rozwadowski, Senior Vice President, Finance and Investor Relations.

Please go ahead.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thank you and good morning everyone. Welcome to our first quarter call. I'm Amir Rozwadowski, Head of Investor Relations for AT&T. Joining me on the call today are John Stankey, our CEO and Pascal Desroches our CFO. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our Safe Harbor statement. It says that some of our comments today may be forward-looking. As such, they are subject to risks and uncertainties described in AT&T's SEC filings. Results may differ materially. Additional information is available on the Investor Relations website. And as always, our earnings materials are on our website.

With that, I'll turn the call over to John Stankey.

John?

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Thanks Amit, and good morning to all of you. Appreciate you joining us this morning. Two weeks ago, we reached a major milestone in the repositioning of our business with the completion of the WarnerMedia Discovery transaction, less than 11 months after announcing the deal. I'd like to thank everyone who played a role in getting this across the finish line in good time and with little drama, just as we promised to you.

I'd also like to share how proud we are of the entire WarnerMedia team David inherits an organization with one of the best global portfolios of beloved intellectual property, a team with unparalleled talent and one of the few truly global direct to consumer players as evidenced by the continued growth in HBO Max and HBO subscribers which closed this quarter at nearly 77 million, globally up 3 million from last quarter and nearly $13 million year-over-year. We're excited about the potential for continued HBO Max growth as the service launches in more new territories.

Warner Bros Discovery, is well positioned to lead the transformation we're seeing unfold across the media and entertainment landscape and like many of my fellow AT&T shareholders who own a stake in this new and promising enterprise we're excited to continue to watch their success and the value they create as one of the leading global media companies. So, let me turn to AT&T and the new era and opportunities ahead of us. Our transaction marks a critical step in the repositioning of our business. We're now able to focus intensely on what we believe will be multi-year secular tailwinds in connectivity.

We now have the right asset base and financial structure to devote our energy to becoming America's best broadband provider. Over a 5-year period, we expect a five-fold data increase on our networks and we plan to capitalize on the growing desire from consumers and businesses for ubiquitous access to best-in-class connectivity solutions. The results we've achieved the past 7 quarters, all while undergoing a significant repositioning of our business give me confidence that we can accomplish this goal.

Our first quarter financial results are consistent with our expectations and once again demonstrate that our teams are executing well against our consistent business priorities. We're seeing record levels of net additions in mobility and consistently strong AT&T fiber growth, thanks to our disciplined and consistent go-to-market strategy. In mobility, our strong network performance, simplified offers and improving customer experience brought in the most first quarter postpaid phone net adds in more than a decade, surpassing last year's then decade best first quarter total, and we're confident we can continue this momentum in a disciplined manner given our subscribers' success has come from diversified channels that span consumers and businesses.

In fiber, we continue our great build velocity and now have the ability to serve 17 million customer locations. This expansion continues to allow our business to grow and this quarter we achieved overall broadband subscriber and revenue growth as our fiber net adds more than offset legacy non-fiber broadband losses, and I'm pleased with the improved fiber momentum we're seeing with our Multi-Gig plans launched early in the first quarter.

It's also noteworthy that we're experiencing improved subscriber growth following the introduction of our straightforward pricing across the fiber portfolio which does away with discounted introductory pricing. This improvement in share gains suggest that consumers are finding value in higher quality services when they're made available to them. So taking a step back, let's review our progress over the last seven quarters. During that time, we've added industry-best subscriber totals of more than 5.3 million in postpaid phones and nearly 2 million in AT&T fiber as our fast growing fiber revenues now make up nearly half of our consumer wireline broadband revenues.

This is real and sustainable momentum. We also continue to emphasize effectiveness and efficiency across our operations. As we shared at our Analyst Day last month, we expect to achieve more than $4 billion of our $6 billion cost savings run rate target by the end of this year. Our focus on driving efficiencies continues to show tangible results from our network build out to customer experience. As we told you, we're initially reinvesting these savings to fuel growth in our core connectivity businesses. However as we move to the back half of this year, we expect these savings to start to fall to the bottom line. Our success over the past 7 quarters can also be attributed to our focus on better recognizing in delivering on what customers want.

Our mobility and fiber net promoter scores are up year-over-year and near historically low churn levels across all businesses demonstrate how our improvements to the customer experience are real and delivering a positive impact. Our business wireline unit continues its transformation, as we move through this year we have planned to accelerate the pace at which we reposition the business as we focus our energy on growing repeatable core connectivity and transport solutions where we have owners economics.

At the same time, we'll continue to rationalize reselling low margin third-party products and services. The expansion of our fiber footprint is enabling our business portfolio to target significant opportunities in the small and medium business market allowing us to capture a greater portion of the opportunities in core transport and connectivity. In addition as we open up relationships with more customers, we'll have incremental opportunities to continue our growth in business wireless. We expect to take advantage of these near-term opportunities to help stabilize our business wireline unit, as we simplify the portfolio and grow connectivity with small to medium-sized businesses complementing our leading enterprise position.

As we thoughtfully fuel growth for services powered by our owned and operated connectivity assets, we're also being deliberate in how we allocate our capital. We've taken significant steps to improve our financial flexibility and we're now in a much better place to grow our business as we significantly invest in the future of connectivity through 5G and fiber. With the completion of the WarnerMedia Discovery transaction, we've monetized more than $50 billion of assets. Since the beginning of 2021 and with this transaction, we reduced our net debt by approximately $40 billion in April. As we share, we feel as though we're really well suited to navigate this unique moment in time.

This leaves us in a much better position to pay down debt. In fact, we've already addressed some of our near-term maturities paid off over $10 billion in bank loans. This improved financial posture gives us the flexibility to carefully and prudently use the balance of the WarnerMedia proceeds to reduce our outstanding debt by opportunistically using the evolving higher rate environment to redeem debt securities at lower prices while also working to reduce cash interest. In addition our expectations for continued strong cash generation provide us with incremental capabilities to reduce leverage while still paying an attractive dividend yield near the top of the Fortune 500.

This improved financial flexibility also allows us to pursue durable and sustainable growth opportunities that offer future upside for customers and shareholders. If you couldn't tell I'm proud of all the work the team has accomplished to reposition the business over the last 7 quarters and could not be more excited about this next chapter for AT&T. And all our teams are thrilled about the momentum we're generating with our deliberate and focused approach in attracting and retaining customers.

I'll now turn it over to Pascal to discuss the details of the quarter.

Pascal?

Pascal Desroches
Chief Financial Officer at AT&T

Thank you John and good morning everyone. Let's start by taking a look at our first quarter consolidated financial summary on Slide 5. It's important to note that our first quarter consolidated results include the contributions of WarnerMedia and that last year's first quarter included results of our US video business and Vrio. Accordingly, our reported results do not provide a clear reflection of our business on a forward-looking basis. So let me quickly cover a few key points before reviewing the financial results of our new standalone AT&T operations on the next slide. On a consolidated basis, including a full quarter for WarnerMedia, our adjusted EPS for the quarter was $0.77 compared to $0.85 in the first quarter of 2021.

In addition to merger amortization, adjustments for the quarter were made to exclude our proportionate share of DIRECTV intangible amortization and the gain in our benefit plans. Year-over-year earnings declines were primarily driven by WarnerMedia and to a lesser extent certain onetime costs in the communication segment. The declines in earnings at WarnerMedia reflect increased investments incurred in launching CNN Plus and expanding new territories at HBO Max.

HBO Max and HBO Now reached an impressive global subscriber base of nearly 77 million. WarnerMedia's results were also impacted by the advertising sharing agreement entered into with DIRECTV upon its separation in last year's third quarter and the termination of HBO Max wholesale agreement with Amazon late last year. When excluding revenues from our US video business and Vrio from the prior year quarter AT&T consolidated revenues were $38.1 billion, up 1.6% or $600 million year-over-year.

Cash from operations came in at $5.7 billion for the quarter. Overall spending was up with capital investments totaling $6.3 billion. Free cash flow was $700 million for the quarter. WarnerMedia had declines of $2.6 billion in free cash flow year-over-year. This decline was driven by $1.2 billion in lower year-over-year securitization of receivables in advance of the transaction. $600 million in higher cash content spend, increased investments in HBO Max global footprint and ramp up with the CNN Plus launch as well as NHL right payments and other working capital changes. Now, let's look at our financials for the new standalone AT&T on Slide 6.

On a comparative like-for-like basis our financial results for the quarter are in line with our expectations for how we expect the year to trend. However, our subscriber metrics came in better than we expected, as market conditions remained strong. This gives us confidence in the annual guidance provided at our recent Analyst Day. Revenues were $29.7 billion up 2.5% or $700 million year-over-year driven by wireless and broadband revenue growth, partially offset by declines in business wireline. Adjusted EBITDA was flattish year-over-year as lower retained video costs were offset by peak impact from our 3G network shut down, continued success based investments in wireless and fiber and the launch of Multi-Gig fiber plans. We remain confident that Q1 will be the trough in our year-over-year adjusted EBITDA trajectory.

We continue to expect the year-over-year trend line to progressively improve through the year. On a comparative basis adjusted EPS for the quarter was $0.53 versus $0.58 in the first quarter of 2021 due to higher equity income from DIRECTV and lower interest expense. Cash from operations came in at $7.7 billion for the quarter. Overall spending was up year-over-year with standalone AT&T capital investments of $6.1 billion, free cash flow was $2.9 billion. As expected cash flow this quarter was affected by several factors. First, higher capital investments as we ramped fiber deployment and prepared to deploy our 5G mid-band spectrum bands in the back half of the year.

Second, the absorption of 3G shutdown impact, third increased employee incentive compensation benefits paid in Q1 fourth, lower proceeds from securitizations. DIRECTV cash distributions were $1.8 billion in the quarter, which is modestly better than the $1.5 billion contribution in last year's first quarter. We continue to expect about $4 billion distribution for DIRECTV for the year so we do expect some moderation. Given that Q1 is a seasonally low quarter for free cash flow and many of the factors impacting free cash are not expected to repeat we remain confident in the guidance we provided you during our Analyst Day to achieve free cash flow in the $16 billion range for the year and on a standalone basis.

Looking forward, we expect to incur restructuring charges over the next few quarters as we continue to execute our transformation initiatives. The cash impact of these charges has already been contemplated in our full year free cash flow guidance. Now, let's turn to our subscriber results for our market focused areas on Slide 7. Diving a bit deeper into our business unit level performance, the story continues to be simple and straightforward. The consistent, disciplined go-to-market strategy we implemented almost two years ago continues to work very well and we're delivering strong momentum in growing customer relationships with 5G and fiber.

In the quarter, we had 691,000 postpaid phone net adds, as John said, this marks our best first quarter in more than a decade. This total also excludes impacts of 3G network shut down of more than 400,000 postpaid phone. Consistent with industry practice we have treated this reduction as an adjustment of our base at the beginning of the period. Churn also remained near historically low levels thanks in part to our improving NPS which is being driven by an enhanced customer experience, the strength of our network and our consistent and simple offers.

We're growing our customer base with this disciplined approach. Our teams have maintained a strong focus on growing the right way with high quality intake and by investing in existing customers. As mentioned in March, we're focused on incentivizing customers to shift to our current unlimited rate plans which are designed for the 5G era and to better meet each customer's unique needs and provide greater value to both existing and new customers. Looking at AT&T Fiber, our customer base continues to grow as we expand availability at the best access technology across our footprint.

We had 289,000 AT&T Fiber net adds in the first quarter and we expect to accelerate growth from here. To say we're excited about the underlying momentum of the business would be an understatement. Where we have fiber, we win and gain share and our deployment plans remain on track. We now have 6.3 million AT&T fiber customers up 1.1 million compared to a year ago and we expect customer momentum to accelerate from these already stepped up levels. We continue to see strong demand for AT&T Fiber as customers seek out faster broadband speeds at an attractive price and our fiber churn remains low as AT&T Fiber continues to offer a great experience and a consistently high net promoter score.

Now, let's take a deeper look at our Communications segment operating results starting with Mobility on Slide 8; our Mobility business continues its record level momentum. Revenues were up 5.5% with service revenues growing 4.8% due to subscriber growth. Impressively this growth in service revenue comes despite impact on service revenue of our 3G shutdown and without a material return of international roaming revenues. Consistent with our comments on Analyst Day Mobility EBITDA declined 1.8% year-over-year, largely due to a number of one-time related factors.

EBITDA was negatively impacted by over $300 million due to the 3G shutdown costs and the absence of FirstNet and CAF II reimbursements. We remain confident in our stated expectations for mobility adjusted EBITDA trajectory to improve through the course of the year as these impacts moderate through the balance of the year. Overall, we continue to see healthy mobility demand while our guidance does not factor in industry demand levels replicating the strength we experienced in 2021, our Q1 results came in better than anticipated.

Both our postpaid phone and prepaid phone churn remains near record low levels despite a modest uptick among lower income cohorts as certain pandemic level benefits wear off. Now, let's turn to our operating results for Consumer and Business Wireline on Slide 9. Our fiber growth was solid, as we continue to win share where we have fiber. Even with expected declines from copper-based broadband services, our total consumer wireline revenues are up again this quarter growing 2% due to higher broadband ARPU and fiber revenue growth.

Our Fiber ARPU was approximately $60 million with gross addition intake ARPU in the $65 to $70 range. We expect overall fiber ARPU to continue to improve as more customers roll off promotional pricing and onto simplified pricing constructs we introduced earlier this year. In addition, with the launch of our new multi-gig speeds in January, we have even more opportunity to move customers to higher speed tiers. Over time, we expect these factors to serve as a tailwind to the trajectory of our Fiber Optimal.

We also continue to accelerate our fiber footprint build and now have the ability to serve 17 million customer locations. As you heard us share on Analyst Day, our planned center on pivoting from copper-based products to fiber as we make this pivot, we expect positive EBITDA growth in 2022 driven by growth in broadband revenues. Also to help provide you with greater insight into the performance of our consumer wireline fiber operations, we've provided additional metrics in our trending materials that can be found on our IR website. Looking at business wireline, we continue to execute on our rationalization of low-margin products in our portfolio.

In the first quarter, we experienced some impacts by the timing of government sector demand due to delays in passing the federal budget which caused steeper than expected revenue declines. However, we expect demand to rebound later this year. While the rationalization of our business wireline portfolio creates incremental pressure on our near-term revenues, it also allows us to focus on our owned and operated connectivity services as well as growing 5G and fiber integrated solutions.

Both areas, business 5G and fiber continue to perform well benefiting our mobility segment with business solution wireless service revenue growth of 8.4% and a sequential increase in our FirstNet wireless base by about 300,000. We remain comfortable with our guidance of Business Wireline EBITDA down mid-single digits in 2022. Shifting to Slide 10, I'd like to reiterate our overall capital allocation framework moving forward. With the completion of the WarnerMedia transaction AT&T received $40.4 billion in cash and WarnerMedia's retention of certain existing debt.

Additionally, AT&T's shareholders received 1.7 billion shares of Warner Bros Discovery representing 71% of the new company. This transaction greatly strengthens our balance sheet and provides us with financial flexibility going forward. We now have a simplified capital allocation framework. First, we plan to invest in our strategic focus areas 5G and fiber. As previously shared, we expect standalone AT&T capital investments up $24 billion in 2022 and 2023. Starting in 2024, we expect our capital investment to begin tapering to around the $20 billion range as we surpassed peak levels of investments in 5G and transformation. The completion of the WarnerMedia transaction also marked a significant step towards achieving our established goal for net debt to adjusted EBITDA in the 2.5 times range by the end of 2023.

We've shared as we get closer to this target we expect our financial flexibility to improve this increases our ability to pursue other ways to deliver incremental value for our shareholders. As previously shared, we expect to deliver annual total dividends of around $8 billion, which represents a $1.11 per common share. This remains an attractive dividend and places AT&T among the very best dividend yielding stocks in the US. Now, let's take a step back and look at the free cash flow generation expected from our business.

As outlined at our Analyst Day, we expect to generate in the range of $20 billion of free cash flow in 2023. After paying dividends and non-controlling interest commitments we expect to have at least $10 billion of cash remaining and beyond 2023 this pace of cash generation will be helped by the tapering down of our capital investment. This is why we continue to feel very comfortable with our capital allocation plans. As I've stated, we're in a much stronger financial position to pay down debt and at the end of the first quarter, more than 90% of our debt portfolio was fixed and we do not have near-term needs to issue debt.

In April, we improved our net debt by about $40 billion and paid down over $10 billion in bank loans, providing us with a lot more financial flexibility. We also provided notice that we plan to redeem an additional $12.5 billion of bonds by mid May, reducing our near-term maturities. For the balance of the WarnerMedia proceeds, we plan to reduce our outstanding debt by focusing on pay down of commercial paper to improve our liquidity and opportunistically using the higher rate environment to redeem debt at lower prices. So, we feel really confident in our ability to pay down our current debt maturities in an effective manner and reach our goal for net debt to adjusted EBITDA.

Amir, that's our presentation. We're now ready for the Q&A.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thank you Pascal. Operator, we're ready to take the first question.

Skip to Participants
Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from the line of John Hodulik of UBS, please go ahead.

John Hodulik
Analyst at UBS Group

Great. Good morning guys. Couple of questions on the margins, if I could first maybe on the consumer side. Numbers were a little bit better than we thought. I mean, if you look back to 2019, you guys were generating margin in the 39% 40% range. Given the change in the mix there and the higher ARPUs do you think you can eventually get back to those kind of level? And then I guess on the other side of the ledger, consumer -- the business segment continues to be weaker than expected, and thanks for the color there, but how much visibility do you have and any improvement in the margins and the declines there and any other color on that sort of rationalization of the portfolio, you guys, keep talking about and should we see this improvement, even if we see some economic headwinds later in the year? Thanks.

Pascal Desroches
Chief Financial Officer at AT&T

Hey, good morning John, how are you? In consumer wireline first, let's -- the thing to keep in mind is in repositioning this business, we over the last several years, we've been investing in our fiber footprint and investing in launching a new -- new parts of our footprint. What happens going forward is, as the business add subscribers we expect margins to continue to improve and our cost base is relatively fixed once we've the laid fiber out so we do expect improvements over time. We haven't guided in terms of specific margins, expect to generate but we feel really good about the long-term view of this business. I mean, you look at others in this space margins are really attractive.

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

And John, I'd add to that, if you go and then you kind of decompose what's in the transformation program and where we're targeting improvements in our operations, in our business and things like reduction of call center activity that ultimately moves online etc, all those things feed directly into that business -- it will allow us to scale that into the right kind of margin structure that I think we've historically been accustomed to given the long-lived nature of the asset base that we're deploying.

To answer your question on the business side, I'll tell you what we have visibility to is, we've shared with you our move is to be driving harder at owned and operated infrastructure into the low end of the mid part of the market and in order to do that that's highly correlated to where we're deploying new fiber or where we have existing infrastructure deployed. We have good visibility to that part of it. So we know, as we deploy what we open up in terms of new market opportunity.

In some cases, in order to get that market we're shifting our distribution channels, so there is work going on around how we ultimately position and distribute the product, both directly through our own sales force as well as through other third parties. That's an execution issue. While we have control over how we progress on that, obviously, any time you scale up new channels and you work through things there's things that you run into that are unexpected or that allow you to move left to right that you have to adjust to.

But that's nothing new that's the kind of thing we work with and I think in terms of working through those issues, they usually are cycles that matter from a quarter or two. They're not the kind of things that you hit a brick wall and can't work your way through, that's the area that I would say maybe we don't have perfect visibility over but it's a question of whether you trust we can execute. And I would tell you, my view is, we know how to do these kinds of things. I think I shared with you, on the Analyst Day one thing that is very clear as we walk into this segment with the AT&T brand on the product and service it's incredibly well received and as I mentioned in my opening remarks, when we walk into these customers, we have the opportunity to talk to them about a new product.

It oftentimes leads to a second discussion about possibly moving other parts of their services like wireless in that transaction and that's the power of us in the business segment, being able to go in with a complete portfolio of owned and operated wireless and direct fixed transport.

John Hodulik
Analyst at UBS Group

Got it, okay. Thanks for the color guys.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thanks very much John. Operator, if we can move to the next question?

Operator

Michael Rollins, Citi. Please go ahead.

Michael Rollins
Analyst at Smith Barney Citigroup

Thanks and good morning. As you look at the postpaid phone volume growth in the quarter, how much of that do you attribute to better market share versus just better overall industry growth? And can you frame how the economics of these mobile postpaid phone customers are evolving when you consider the ARPU churn as well as the cost of acquisition?

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Mike. Sure. Obviously we don't we're first, so we don't have information as to how others are going to report this quarter. Clearly, from the way we look at the data have some view of what's going on in the market and I can tell you without backing that up with the actual reports from others we believe the overall market still remains pretty strong and that we're seeing, what I would say consistent volumes to what we saw in 2021 in terms of gross add pool that is occurring in the market and I think we shared with you, as we were guiding, we expect that to maybe taper down a little bit this year as we're giving you our estimates and our expectations.

And so far, at least through the first quarter we haven't seen that materialize at this juncture and I would expect -- I don't know, but my guess is after everybody reports I won't be surprised if trends are similar to what you've seen in previous quarters in terms of flow share overall for our business. I don't want to overdrive my headlights on that, I could be surprised by what somebody puts on the table, but from my market sense and the data I didn't see a material shift in overall flows here this quarter versus previous quarters and I feel really good about that, especially given the nature of some of the promotional activity that occurred during the fourth quarter of last year that we chose not to chase, stayed very consistent in the first quarter of this year with our strategies and approach and others are throwing a lot of different things out and I don't see us out there with BOGOs and I don't see us out there with $1000 incentives to switch that others are using in the market. We've been very stable in our approach and I think the thing that I would point to in terms of the overall economics is look at ARPUs, they remain very, very stable as we've told you that we're going to remain despite all the gains that are coming in here. And as we shared with you in Analyst Day, our cost per gross adds are getting better, not worse because we're scaling in a way now, where our fixed cost structure is obviously being spread across a larger number of subscribers on any given quarter. That's a good dynamic that's going on there and our churn numbers continue to be very, very strong with our customer lifecycles actually looking better than what they've historically looked that means better value. So, as we've been sharing with you all along, feel really comfortable that the economics of these customers that we're bringing in are no different right now than they were a quarter ago or two quarters ago or three quarters ago and we'll take these customers all day long.

Pascal Desroches
Chief Financial Officer at AT&T

Mike, I would also just add as a reminder, our fastest growing plan is our Unlimited Elite, which is our top-tier plan, so that tells you the quality of what's happening in the overall wireless base.

Michael Rollins
Analyst at Smith Barney Citigroup

Thanks.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thanks very much Michael, if we can move to the next question, operator?

Operator

Brett Feldman, Goldman Sachs, please go ahead.

Brett Feldman
Analyst at The Goldman Sachs Group

Thanks, and it's actually sort of a two-part question on inflation, the first part is we saw one of your competitors earlier this week announce they were going to be increasing or have increased minimum wage for their retail workforce and a big part of their customer facing workforce. So, I was hoping you can maybe comment on what you're seeing in terms of labor cost and labor supply and whether or what you anticipated in your outlook for this year for inflationary cost pressures on the workforce? And then second John, I think you've made some comments recently that if you did see inflationary pressures persist, you might look at what your pricing was, and I think it was implied that you could take price up?

I was hoping you can maybe just elaborate on how you think about your pricing model if we were to remain in the sustained inflationary environment and what gives you confidence you can execute a degree of pricing leverage even as the market remains competitive? Thank you.

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Sure Brett. How are you? So look there is no question, there's wage inflation in the environment and quite frankly, it's 7% inflation. There's no question there's pressures across a broad segment of goods and services and we're not insulated from that. I don't think anybody in the industry is insulated from that and it's not a good position for the overall economy to be in and I think from a policy perspective it needs to be addressed. We were pretty deliberate when we did planning for 2022 acknowledging that we expected, we'd see some wage inflation and compared to previous years, as we've built the plan, we assumed upticks in wages as a result of that and we did several revisions late in the planning cycle that I would say those amounts added something with the B into overall cost structure into our expectations around that.

We're in the middle of -- as you know we have labor contracts, our labor contracts are extended and ultimately program out wage increases and we have the luxury, in some cases given the way the current wage market or job market is set up that people stick around and work here because we have great benefits for middle class folks and they often go beyond the ways than somebody gets paid and as a result of that we've been managing through the dynamics of the wage -- the labor market pretty well. I will tell you, we're in the middle of some negotiations right now -- those negotiations are likely to land at a place that I think is consistent with how we built the plan this year which was a stepped up wage level from previous historic levels.

I'm not happy about the fact that wages are rising as fast as they are. We're having to deal with it. It is going to drive a bit of an uptick and what I would call per individual wages. The good news is we're doing a lot of investment in other forms of mechanization and automation in our business and some of that investment is helping us keep a lid on some of the wage related inflation costs. I would also point out that as you look other parts of our business for people deploy long-lived infrastructure like fiber networks, wages are a portion of that deployment cost, not all of that deployment cost and they are capitalized and they are taken over the life of the product that stays in service for many, many, many years.

So while obviously, we'd like to pay less in wages it's not the end of the world when we're seeing a little bit of an uptick. It's a small portion of the cost of deployment and we can ultimately recover that over the long life cycle of the product, especially if prices ultimately go up in the market. Now, to your question on pricing I'm not going to give away or announce any here, it's not appropriate to do that, but I'll go back to the comments I made -- excuse me, a couple of weeks ago, which is broadly across the board in the economy right now we are seeing inflationary pressures and the consumers seeing at every place that they go it's my belief and if we do not see some moderation in this fairly quickly then I think every business in the United States is going to be dealing with the cost of inputs.

And I don't see the wireless industry being immune from that nor any other industry being immune from that and as I shared earlier, there's a lot of different ways you can deal with price adjustments, there's a lot of different tactics and approaches you can use, but when we're looking at a customer base satisfied as we are, when we look at a customer base with some of the value we've been putting back into the product and service over time. When we look at our current churn levels, do we believe we're in a position if we're forced into a situation where we have to start maybe taking some price that we can do that and move it through? Our history would suggest that we know how to do that and we can do that and we'll be very smart and judicious as we have to apply it.

But, running this business and not sitting here and evaluating where we have options to move on pricing and be successful I wouldn't be doing my job properly and I want to maybe go back to the comment I made in my opening remarks. If you look at what we've done on our fiber product this last quarter, we went to a simplified price structure and I want everybody to understand what this means -- we are not out in the market right now selling on 12-month promotional pricing on broadband. We are selling the customer on a stable price, the duration of their relationship with us.

In many cases, we're in the market at a minimum of $10 higher to the promotional price that cable or the other broadband competitors have in the market. And our volumes were still stellar and they're continuing to grow and we're doing incredibly well in that market and it's a reflection of the value of the product and the service that we're bringing in, that we're able to do that. It's an example of us being able to smartly understand where there's value and where there's opportunity for us to work the overall value equation including price to be able to manage our business effectively and we'll continue to do that.

Brett Feldman
Analyst at The Goldman Sachs Group

Thank you.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thanks very much Brett. Operator, can we can shift to the next question?

Operator

Phil Cusick, JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Phil Cusick
Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Hey, a couple of follow-ups. First, let's dig into the postpaid phone adds a little more this quarter. Is there any impact from your own 3G shutdown in the reported adds and what about the shutdown of T-Mobile CDMA network. Do you see any impact there in the first quarter and maybe second quarter?

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Hi Phil. The short answer is no on the first one. As you know, we don't -- when we count net adds of migration of the 3G customer to another service plan is in the net add that's just the migration and so there wouldn't be any impact to that, as we've shared with you, we restated our base numbers, those are out there for you to see. And so, I think everything you can look at including looking at ARPU characteristics after the restatement. You should look at it and I would actually say this is probably one of the best air interface transitions I've ever seen, when I think about the shutdown of the 2G network and now the shutdown of the 3G network on a proportional basis and the number of subscribers and what we were able to do here.

I think the team executed incredibly well. Relative to the flow share in the market today, I think we have seen over the last several quarters Sprint is an issue for T-Mobile to migrate and manage and I know they're having to touch that base as they're shutting down the CDMA network and moving things through and anytime you do that, that can be disruptive to the customer base. And I think we've benefited in some flow share from Sprint customers who have been evaluating what they want to do and see AT&T as a good choice and a good value as they make that decision.

So, whether or not they want to get a new handset and who they want to get it with and there has been an element of that in the flow share in the market over, not just this last quarter, but several quarters as this has been going on and there was an element of it in this quarter, but I don't think it was anything that was out of pattern from what we saw in previous quarters.

Pascal Desroches
Chief Financial Officer at AT&T

Yeah. Phil just as a reference point 300,000 of the net adds this quarter were from FirstNet. Again nothing to do with the 3G migration.

Phil Cusick
Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Okay. And then second, if I can, we've got a guide out there for 3% plus service wireless service revenue growth. You did 4.8% this quarter, is there -- I mean there's comping issues but anything in the numbers that we should think is going to be a headwind that would drive a significant deceleration? Thank you.

Pascal Desroches
Chief Financial Officer at AT&T

We feel really good about how the business is performing and we guided to 3% plus, as you've heard from John previously, this management team is in the realm of trying to put out guidance on a conservative end of the spectrum. With that said, the one thing I would remind you, as you move through next quarter we're going to have a full 3-month impact of the 3G migration. So, that is going to hit ARPU some, but we feel really good about the overall pace of the business and how we're executing.

Phil Cusick
Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Thanks Pascal.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thanks very much Phil. Operator, if we can move to the next question?

Operator

Simon Flannery, Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Simon Flannery
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great, thank you very much. I wonder if we could talk about C-band a little, I think you said that you would be ramping the deployments later this year. If you could just give us some updates on when we expect that to really start scaling and what you're seeing in the supply chain then. And there's been a lot written about fixed wireless recently and we've seen some good momentum in that market. As you get the C-band up, what do you think in terms of out of market opportunities or even the opportunity to upgrade some of your DSL base that may not be getting fiber anytime soon or non-fiber base? Thanks

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Hi Simon. So the scaling on C-band is happening now and it will continue. As we told you, we're deploying midyear, that's when we have the right kind of equipment for our one-touch work between the two different spectrum bands that we can touch the tower once and move through. We have capabilities to do pre-work on that. Obviously there are things that we can deploy today to get ourselves ready, make sure that we're in the right position and we can start spending on and be in a position to scale that, turn out pretty rapidly as we hit mid year. So I'd say, as we told you, you already seen it move into some of the capital numbers in this quarter and it will continue to ramp as we move through the middle of the year and then that positions us to do the rapid turn up in the second half of the year and hit the POP targets that we've communicated to you through the Analyst Day.

On supply chain, I'm conservative on this I don't ever want to say we're in good hands but here is the dynamic that I think is occurring. I actually think for the industry in aggregate globally there are going to be some supply chain pressures. At least from what I know aware, chip manufacturing is going back into some of the key OEMs. However, I think what you should keep in mind is that the North American market, is an incredibly profitable market for providers of equipment on a global basis.

If you were to start ranking it relative to other continents, it is the most profitable market of any continent out there. And so, as a result of that, if you're into a situation where there is some degree of constraint I think if you're an equipment manufacturer, you have the motivation to make sure that you supply your most profitable market first. And as a result of that, I don't want to say that we're out of the woods but I think that we're likely to see a prioritization given the dynamics of this market that may put other parts of the globe, a little bit lower down the list in terms of availability of equipment and services moving forward.

So, right now I think we have a good handle on things that our vendors are telling us they can meet or build expectations. We've done a lot of second order diligence on our equipment. We're not just taking their word for it. We look at sourcing on key components that we can't do every element, and sometimes it's the smallest and silliest things that end up causing a problem. We've looked at the harder things like at chip levels and feel that there is confidence in those estimates right now that they can bring them through.

And so I'm not expecting that to be a problem but as you know, the global supply chains are fragile right now and crazy things happen, whether it's neon gas coming out of Ukraine or whatever, and we'll continue to work through that. On the fixed wireless side, I think you hit the nail on the head, look we have hundreds of thousands of fixed wireless subscribers already. We've used it pretty aggressively, in parts of the business segment where a particular business customer that we support finds it to be the right and best solution for how their particular business is set up.

We continue to believe that there are going to be applications for fixed wireless deployment moving forward and we think our network will be well suited to do that after we get through the mid-band deployment. But to your point, it's going to be, what I would call use specific. I don't intend to go into dense, urban and metropolitan areas where I can build fiber infrastructure and offer broadband and try to use fixed wireless as the solution to serve broadband customers where we see estimates traffic growing 5 times over the next 5 years and performance requirements needing to get significantly better and we watch our fiber base, we watch our customers and we don't believe and we watch our copper base of customers and we don't believe a product that's doing sub 100 megabits is going to be a viable product in the market over the next couple of years, based on how we're seeing consumers use the service and what they expect to do in some of these urban areas where there is broader and more dense environments with more people in a living unit.

But there are clearly places in more rural areas where a fixed wireless will be the best way to get the most amount of bandwidth out to a customer and we believe we can play in those spaces and there'll be some former ADSL locations or fixed wireless will be a substantial step-up in opportunity and there's going to be places where the government comes in with subsidy and very less densely populated areas that fixed wireless is going to be the solution and sure there may be some niche customers who can live on a very niche oriented product for their particular use characteristic and find it interesting, but I don't believe that's the main part of the market and I think it's really hard to market niche broadband products frankly, over time, and I think market performance of what we're able to do as we blanket an area with a robust fixed fiber broadband service are showing in the numbers that we're putting up in our performance in the market right now.

Simon Flannery
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great, thank you.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thanks very much, operator if we can move to the next caller?

Operator

David Barden Bank of America. Please go ahead.

David Barden
Analyst at Bank of America

Hey guys. Thanks so much for taking the questions. A few higher level questions about the new AT&T John or maybe old AT&T depending on how you think about it. Is the new AT&T maybe -- I'm gonna be greedy, ask three questions. Number one, is the new AT&T a dividend yielder or a dividend grower? The second question is John, I think at the Analyst Day you previewed that your plan was after the separation that you would kind of refresh AT&T's go-to-market plan, I was wondering if you could kind of maybe share an evolution of those thoughts or set some expectations around what we should see?

And then finally Pascal, could you kind of describe and maybe share a little of the geography about how the go forward financial relationship between AT&T and WarnerMedia Discovery will work, i.e., offering HBO Max for free in the wireless business and those sorts of things. That'll be super helpful. Thank you so much guys.

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Hi Dave. Let me just give the front end I'll try to do all three of them and then Pascal can jump in and offer any he wants. I think we're a dividend competitor moving forward, meaning I want the dividend to remain at a competitive level relative to others out in the market, which means I will pay attention to the yield of the dividend. As we've told you as we move past 2023 and we start to think about what we do with discretionary capital, as we have the balance sheet where we want it to be, the Board's going to evaluate where the best returns come back into the business. And there's a lot of choices at that point and that could be what we choose to do on equity, it could be choose -- on what we choose to do with dividend, it could be choose -- it could be choices on what we make within deployment on new business opportunities within the business for organic growth. We'll evaluate those and the complete portfolio where we stand and the relative competitiveness of the value proposition of the AT&T equity with others in the market and adjust accordingly. And so, to answer your question, we'll will pay attention to the yield, but I don't necessarily intend to every quarter look at it and say my expectation is that I have to grow the dividend in any given quarter, relative to not answering the question of how do we stand competitively in the market and whether or not we think we've got the right kind of mix of how we're investing our capital and deploying it within the business.

When you ask about refreshing the go-to-market plan, possibly two things are driving that; one could be comments I made about what we're doing to refine the brand if that's kind of the angle that you're going after -- is that where your question is?

David Barden
Analyst at Bank of America

I think more specifically John, the market theme you're kind of -- highlighted this as a positive, your very consistent go-to-market plan on customer retention, the new and existing customer handset upgrade plan. It's been pretty solid for almost two years now and I think you hinted that there would be a change. And I think people are interested in hearing a little bit more about it?

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Well, there will be a change when it doesn't work and it's working just fine. And I'm probably not going to tell you what the change is going to be when it doesn't work anymore because that would [Indecipherable] but it's working just fine, and I would have guessed maybe last year that we might be hitting a point where we had to think about it differently. We're not. And I think that's great. We have thoughts on where our next path will go, if we need to go down that path but we're not at that point at this juncture. I love the momentum we're seeing, I think it was a great quarter. I like what we're seeing right now and I like that we're watching others having to, in any given week or month, adjust their approach in the market while we continue to do exactly what we're doing and as we continue to have the opportunity to grow our footprint between the two services it opens up even more opportunity for us to do things on a combined basis that we're seeing really good progress on.

Admittedly, our new footprint is still relatively small, it will grow over time but I'm really excited about what that means for us moving forward in the future and I think as I would stress, one of the things that's really important to understand is we're not getting our growth just through one set of go-to-market actions here. I know you're focusing your thinking about what we're doing in the consumer space right now, but I want to stress FirstNet has been really strong for us. What we're doing in the business customers that we have close relationships have been really strong for us, we're going to see us start to grow in some wholesale revenues later this year that we have not had in our mix up to this point in time.

So, our growth portfolio is a balanced portfolio and it's not hinging on any one strategy and I've been saying this all along that you need to understand that there is not any one thing we're doing. It's a variety of things that we're doing on distribution that are adding up to the sum total of this and feel good about that. Your last question on financial relationship with Warner Bros Discovery; we expect there is going to continue to be a relationship with Warner Bros Discovery going forward.

I expect that, that relationship will still be important to both companies but I don't expect over time that it's going to be ultimately exclusive. I think Warner Bros Discovery will want flexibility to be able to do things with a variety of players in the market. I think I understand why they'd want to do that. I think there are things that AT&T can do to accommodate that and still have the right value proposition for our customers moving forward, but I still expect they'll be in a strong trading relationship given what we've had in the market is a portion of the success that we've had and being able to keep and retain customers moving forward, and we'll fine tune that a bit as we move forward and make sure it's right for both companies.

But I don't expect that will continue to be, what I call a captive or exclusive arrangement. Pascal, do you want to add anything?

Pascal Desroches
Chief Financial Officer at AT&T

The only point Dave, I'd say, on your first question on dividend yield growth, we've said this -- the way we're thinking about generating returns going forward dividends are only one part of it. We're going to hold ourselves accountable to growing earnings at the stock price and it's a mix of overall return to our shareholders and that's what we are looking to optimize over time.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thanks very much David, operator we can shift to the next question?

Operator

Douglas Mitchelson, Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Douglas Mitchelson
Analyst at Credit Suisse Group

Thanks so much. John, following up on the media side with regards to media streaming piracy, is there a place for AT&T to gain any economics by helping streaming services reduce piracy given the breadth of your broadband footprint? I mean Netflix losing $50 billion market cap yesterday suggests there might be value to the streamers and I would think of the important the value given your customers of HBO or however that evolves and to help size that how much password sharing, did you see with HBO in the US and then if I could just sort of follow up Pascal, I just wanted a clarification, the capex guide $20 billion of cash spend plus paying down $4 billion of vendor financing in 2022, what should we anticipate for capex purchased on new vendor finance? Thank you both.

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Doug. So if I go back, and I don't know I don't play historian here, but if I go back probably three years ago there were several comments I made or observations I made about the SVOD business, one of which was managing customer subscriptions was going to be an important element of the long-term sustainability of the business and that was at a time when I think somewhere in the industry maybe advocating that rampant password sharing was somehow a good thing for these products. And I had a little bit more jaded view of that and I think there were probably some articles that were written that criticized me for having a little bit more jaded view of that.

But it drove a lot of thought process at the front end of the HBO Max product where we were thoughtful about how we've built the product. We were thoughtful about making sure that we gave customers enough flexibility, but we don't want to see rampant abuse and so I'm not going to go into all the details, but there are a lot of things and features built in to the product that are consistent with the user agreement that has terms and conditions of how they can and can't use it, and we've enforced it.

And we've enforced them obviously in a way that I think has been customer sensitive. You don't see anybody complaining massively about it, but I can tell you that we actively, in any given month are looking at how particular users are using the product and have features and capabilities technically to limit what I would call rampant abuse. And so, I would tell you that I think that's the right way for the industry to be managed and I think maybe some are going to adjust practices and approaches over time to try to get their arms around that, but I don't think it's the broadband providers role in making that happen. I think it's the owner of the application's role in making that happen, and I don't necessarily expect that we'd be trying to work on a product or service to market back to other providers to say we can help you manage that.

I think there are adequate tools available in software and then how you manage your application to be able to do that and I can tell you from our own experience, we feel like we've done that reasonably effectively in the interest of the product. I'll let Pascal go ahead and maybe pick up second part of the question.

Pascal Desroches
Chief Financial Officer at AT&T

Hey Doug, here's the way I think about. We haven't provided guidance, specifically on how much vendor financing commitments will enter into each year but we provided overall cash payment guidance. And so, we provided for 2022 and 2023, both years is $24 billion. So anything we do this year we'd have to pay next year and that would be captured in that $24 billion guide and so while we haven't provided guidance, you should have a pretty good sense about where the overall trajectory should be.

Douglas Mitchelson
Analyst at Credit Suisse Group

All right.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thank you very much Doug. Time for one last question operator?

Operator

Walt Piecyk, LightShed Partners. Please go ahead.

Walt Piecyk
Analyst at LightShed Partners

Thanks. Pascal, I was hoping to unpack some of the fiber comments that you made earlier; you talked about rising subscriber growth over the course of the year. And then John you talked about basically higher ARPUs or basic charging $10 higher than cable. I guess first, when you look at the 289,000 that you did this quarter, what was the mix of conversions from your own customers versus taking it from other competitors that are out there? And then secondly, in terms of fiber, if you think about higher pricing, are you still seeing that kind of the penetration rates after year one and year two that we've historically seen when other companies have built out fiber or is there higher pricing changing kind of the penetration rates that you think you can achieve in the first, second, third year of rolling out these new services?

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Yeah, Walt let me see if I can answer your question and Pascal can jump in if he wants to. First of all we don't disclose the mix, but what I would say to you is what you should understand is we do give you some information that you should be able to understand that we're getting a healthy growth of new subscribers to AT&T. You know, I think our aggregate share numbers in broadband in the market today and you know where those stand. We've shared with you our pen rates after we're in the market about three years has roughly an equal split of market share which is a substantial increase to where our aggregate market share in the broadband business previously stood.

You can't in a 3-year period of time of fiber growth to get to equivalent market share in an area, do that without taking customers from the other side of the house. It's mathematically impossible to do that, and so I think the way you think about it if I were in your shoes being an analyst and you look at cash flows over a 3-year period and you look at footprint expansion and you see that market shift, you should conclude over time that we're actually picking up because I've described it, share points in a way that I've never seen a product move in my career.

Now, admittedly we put a lot of money into this infrastructure and we should expect to see that kind of a share point move and we're getting it. So, we are winning our share of new customers as a result of this and we report to you as well our aggregate revenues and we report to you our growth and decline in our fiber and our copper base and I think it's pretty easy for you to see the motion of what's happening in the copper base as to how much of it is likely moving to fiber and how much of it isn't and I feel really good about how we're competitively performing. I see nothing in our performance that suggests we should be tamping down ultimate pen rates because of our approach, quite the opposite.

As we shared with you, our pen rates are accelerating they're not declining. If you look at where we were several years ago in a lot of our new builds right now we're achieving year two pen rates in year one. And there's a lot of reasons behind that not just one, but the great product is the foundation of it. But part of it is how we are building right now, we're much less Swiss cheese, which allows us to be a lot more effective in our marketing and we've developed much better tactics as we move into a neighborhood to be able to get early adopters to move in at a much higher rate and pace and that has a huge impact on the economics of the business case.

If we sustain that moving forward I'm going to frankly be re-looking kind of the overall economics of the fiber business case, because one of the big variables on leverage in the business case is if you can accelerate your penetration by a year, it dramatically improves kind of the return characteristics. So, I'm really proud of what the team has done in that regard and we have no expectation by the time we get to year three that that's going to suggest that we shouldn't expect our split of the market as a result of that.

Remember, we're not charging more to the customer. We're giving the customer a better experience, we're getting rid of promotional pricing. It is a pain point for customers, they hate it. They hate the 12-month mark and when they're using another service that 12-month mark means price is going up $15 or $20 and that's just a really bad thing for a customer. And so now, we put out a very simple, straightforward constant price where the customer isn't going to see that step up at 12 months. They know what the equipment pricing is on the front end, they're getting a square deal, they're getting a great product and they're happy as clams and it shows in the data.

Walt Piecyk
Analyst at LightShed Partners

Thanks. And apparently, I guess the high split investments if you can call it that by cable is not really helping to fight those share shifts. Can I just switch to wireless John, you mentioned about wholesale as another component of growth. And then I looked at the wholesale revenue this quarter and it didn't move much from Q1. I guess that just implies that you are in the very early stages of the shift of that DISH wholesale traffic to your network? How do we expect that to ramp? Is it linear? I know you've already started to connect to DISH, how should that play out over the course of 2022 and 2023?

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

It's an accurate assumption Walt, it has to do with the ramp directly from DISH and I think the way you should think about this and it's public information, I think DISH got a little bit of a reprieve from T-Mobile on some of the legacy network availability and some help on that slowed down the front end a little bit and I think you're aware where DISH is in their deployment and debugging their network, so that it actually can function and work properly. I think they recently announced a milestone as to what they're doing around that.

Those two things are the drivers of when that transition occurs combination of when those customers need to move off of another network as well as DISH starts to move people on to their network, new customers coming in, those all play in the wholesale arrangement as that volume starts to ramp. So, I think a surrogate for understanding that trend line we'll be watching the loading of new customers onto DISH's new network capabilities.

Amir Rozwadowski
Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations at AT&T

Thanks very much Walt. And with that, I'll turn it over to John for some final comments.

John Stankey
Chief Executive Officer at AT&T

Just really briefly to all of you. First of all, thanks for joining us today and I really want to extend my thanks and appreciation to all of you on the call. I know it's been going on internally at AT&T in terms of the number of filings, schedules we had to develop, the information we've had to put out over the course of the last month or so and I know that, that puts a lot of work on all of you to kind of parse through that, get through this transition that we've been working through as a business.

I want to extend my appreciation for your patients in that regard. And what I can promise is, it should settle down here a little bit going forward and I am as excited about that as I'm sure you are. So thanks very much for being with us today and we'll talk to you again in 90 days.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]

Corporate Executives
  • Amir Rozwadowski
    Senior Vice President Finance & Investor Relations
  • John Stankey
    Chief Executive Officer
  • Pascal Desroches
    Chief Financial Officer
Analysts

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