American Tower Corporation (NYSE:AMT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tom Bartlett: No, it’s really not. As a matter of fact, if you saw the numbers coming in from the field in terms of what they expected to build, it’s significantly higher, candidly. And what I — what we do is, we ratchet that back and look at the opportunity and look at where we can drive the most value there. So there’s nothing going on there with regards to the pullback on sites. By the way, we will see different levels of site build in each one of the countries, just like we see different levels of colos, amendments depending upon what densification looks like and what the carriers are looking like. But now I wouldn’t read in anything in terms of the pullback on India new builds for 2023.

Nick Del Deo: Okay. Okay. That’s helpful. And then maybe turning to CoreSite, since you’ve had it for a little more than a year. It seems like things are going consistent with your underwriting, maybe even a bit better. I guess bigger picture, any key learnings you’d highlight now that you’ve had a chance to have deep discussions with CoreSite’s customers and your tower customers about the vision for how you could integrate those assets or have them work together? And I guess, more generally, any adaptations or refinements of your plan versus a year ago that you’d want to highlight?

Tom Bartlett : Yes. No, nothing specific. I mean, I — we have a fair amount of history in the kind of in that particular part of the infrastructure business. We knew what the model was that CoreSite was delivering on with their customers and how significant interconnection was in terms of driving value for their customers as well as for the cloud and service operators, and that demand continues. And it’s a significant barrier to entry for others to be able to compete against them. I’m continually incredibly impressed with the team and how they think about returns and how they think about the relationships with the customers. So — but that wasn’t surprise, because I thought that candidly through the entire due diligence process.

So I knew the quality of the group. We did enjoy significant growth in 2022, which I think just goes to the strength of the team and strength of the value proposition that they’re offering their customers. And we believe that 2023 is going to be another strong year. We still have, as you would expect, a significant amount of energy around what the edge will ultimately look like. We have created an advisory board. We have a lab set up. We have plans to start to look at building out some of that capacity. We’ve identified about 1,000 sites within the United States that can handle up to over a meg of capacity. And through the relationships that we’ve been able to develop really through CoreSite with the cloud, we remain really optimistic about what that opportunity is going to look like and how we’re going to be able to drive incremental business to our tower site, which is in and of itself has a strong competitive barrier given the ownership that we have of the land and of the site.