American Tower Corporation (NYSE:AMT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

However, as GEN AI evolves, we would expect the balance of workloads to shift from large language model development, intensive training and public prompts to specialized inference-based use cases as productivity gains from the deployment of custom models accelerates. At this stage, when low latency interconnection high power density and distributed high performance compute become the priorities, we believe CoreSite and ultimately, our distributed portfolio of franchise real estate assets across the U.S. are going to be optimally positioned to benefit. On that note, we’ve continued to see progress toward the realization of demand cases that support our initial edge thesis, and we believe we have an opportunity to enable a more efficient exchange of network traffic and support cloud services and peering in a more distributed manner.

As a result, we’ve been working both internally and with external stakeholders to develop an edge model we can execute on as compelling opportunities present themselves. In our initial assumption that through CoreSite, our seat at the table and visibility into the customer demand environment would be materially enhanced is holding true. We’re increasingly seeing interest from potential customers looking to extend technologies such as private cloud computing AI and 5G applications closer to the end device through a more distributed architecture. This is resulting from several key demand cases including availability of future power requirements, business efficiency, revenue generation opportunities and customer experience. When it comes to power, CoreSite has secured significant future power availability and is insulated from expected shortages in markets like Northern Virginia.

However, power constraints in general are increasingly in focus in legacy data center markets. In this case, we believe our distributed land footprint in Tier 2 and 3 markets with significant power availability and capability to connect back to CoreSite campuses can serve more distributed power capacity needs, while enabling customers to enjoy the interconnection benefits of the CoreSite ecosystem. And as potential customers increasingly focus on new revenue opportunities and customer experience including through the proliferation of applications like next-generation gaming, AR and devices and wearables that leverage interactive AI, we believe we have a compelling combination of distributed points of presence and interconnection capabilities that can be extended to a broader edge.

In addition, by prioritizing our existing owned real estate, which in many cases is already designated for use as digital infrastructure, we see an opportunity to drive a significant time to market advantage and reduce overall development costs, which could be compelling to customers and enhance returns on investment. As a result of these factors, we continue to work towards establishing a repeatable, rapidly deployable design with initial capacity in the 1 megawatt range, which could then be scalable to incremental megawatts with interconnection to multisite campuses as demand dictates. As always, we’ll assess potential growth at the edge through the prism of our disciplined capital allocation framework committing capital only if the opportunity meets our investment criteria and aligns with our long-term strategic vision of growing our interconnection ecosystem in a way that maximizes shareholder value.

In closing, the bottom line is that we remain at the relatively early stages of a 5G and network technology evolution that we believe will necessitate continuous incremental investment in existing infrastructure like towers, data centers and distributed edge infrastructure. We also believe that ongoing technology developments will unlock new capabilities that will drive the next wave of innovative and data intensive consumer and enterprise devices and applications. And American Tower, with its leading tower portfolio and real estate footprint combined with a highly interconnected data center ecosystem is in a truly differentiated position to serve the network infrastructure needs of the future. Before I hand the call over to Rod, I’d like to close my remarks by congratulating Steve Vondran, who effective November 1 will hold the role of Global Chief Operating Officer until February 1 of next year, at which point he’ll transition to the position of Chief Executive Officer; and Bud Noel, who will become our new Executive Vice President and President of our U.S. Tower Division.

The Board and I have worked diligently on succession planning weighing the merits of an external search against the talent we have within our organization. Steve joined American Tower in 2000 and currently serves as the Executive Vice President of our U.S. and Canada business, including both towers and data centers. For the past 23 years, Steve has been instrumental to the growth and sustainability of earnings from American Tower and has built tremendous credibility with our global organization his peers, the Board of Directors, the American Tower investor base and our customers. All this to say, Steve is a clear candidate to lead American Tower in its next growth phase. And over the next several months, I’ll work closely with Steve, the executive leadership team and the Board to ensure a seamless transition.

Lastly, I want to thank all of the incredible American Tower employees around the world both past and present, our customers and investors for their support and confidence you’ve demonstrated since I joined in 2009. Although, this is a difficult decision on my part, I look forward to the time ahead with family and friends and new challenges, while watching the company under Steve’s leadership continue to succeed. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Rod to review our latest results and updated outlook. Rod?

Rod Smith: Thanks, Tom. Good morning, and thank you for joining today’s call. In Q3, we continued our trend of strong performance, driven by solid demand for our diverse global portfolio of assets. Against the challenging macroeconomic backdrop, we remain focused on delivering results and creating value by driving organic growth across our existing portfolio and demonstrating global operational efficiency and cost management in support of attractive margin expansion. At the same time, we are committed to strengthening our balance sheet by enhancing our liquidity extending our maturities, reducing floating rate debt volatility and making progress towards our leverage target. These efforts coupled with the evolving technological trends highlighted by Tom, remain key drivers of our current performance and give us confidence in our ability to drive sustained growth over the long term.

Before delving into the specifics of our Q3 results and raised outlook, let me touch on a few highlights from the quarter. First, we saw a continuation of solid trends across our global operations, driving consolidated property revenue growth of 7%, consolidated organic tenant billings growth in our tower business exceeded 6% for the third consecutive quarter and was complemented by over 9% revenue growth in our data center business. As a result of this strong performance and visibility extending through the end of 2023, we raised our full year expectations across nearly all segments, which I’ll discuss in more detail later. Next, our keen focus on cost management resulted in conversion rates exceeding 100% and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of roughly 290 basis points year-over-year and still over 215 basis points when normalized for the prior year VIL revenue reserves, complementing our operational efforts.