Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. (NASDAQ:FYBR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Nick Jeffery: Yeah. Hi, Frank. It’s Nick here. So just on Business and Wholesale, I mean the fact is, we significantly outperformed the industry last year in our Business and Wholesale segment. Our Business and Wholesale revenue was down about 1.5% in 2023 versus the industry, which pretty consistently saw mid- to high-single digit declines. And pretty stably so over previous periods, whereas our trajectory is improving. The bright spot continues to be our fiber business in Business and Wholesale as in consumer, which in the Business and Wholesale segment grew by 4% in 2023. So whilst Business and Wholesale did decline modestly in the fourth quarter, as we’ve already said, it is a lumpy business with timing of large contracts and payments and so on.

And we expect that segment to return to year-over-year growth in Q1. So, as Scott already shared, we expect fiber growth to roughly offset copper declines in this segment, resulting in a stable performance overall of plus or minus 1% to 2%.

Scott Beasley: And Frank, on your second question related to CapEx pacing. Yeah, So we said Q1 of ’24 should be similar to Q1 of 2023, but then the difference of the shape, we expect a material step down in Q2 and then Q3 and Q4 (ph) should be lower as well. So that’s primarily due to the pace of activity where we do a lot of activity either late in the year or early part of the year for builds that will open out throughout the year, that’s taking in some inventory that’s doing central office prework and so we’ll see a front-end loaded nature but then have high confidence in that $30 billion to $3.2 billion for the full year. And then on the vendor financing timing, we do think probably more of that gets paid in the first half than the second half.

But again, it’s too early to say exactly what will fall in vendor financing versus cash capital expenditures, but the key is overall capital investment. And that’s one of the reasons we started discussing overall capital investment payment terms with suppliers are really a secondary issue.

Frank Louthan: Great. Thank you.

Scott Beasley: Thanks, Frank.

Spencer Kurn: That concludes our fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. Thanks for joining us and look forward to speaking to you again next quarter.

Operator: Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.