Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (NASDAQ:SHEN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

James Volk: Yes, Frank, it comes down quite a bit after that. So by — as we slow our capital spending and we have this a fairly sizable opportunity to continue to monetize by adding customers, the incremental margin on a new customer once you’ve built out the network and you’ve launched the network, the incremental margins are quite high. You’re in the 60%, 70% range. So to answer your question, we expect net leverage to go below 3x by ’27 and maybe even at the end of ’26.

Operator: Dan Day with B. Riley Securities, your line is open.

Daniel Day: Just first one for me. If you could just comment on labor availability, either for you or your contractors as you build out the network, whether that’s getting better or worse into 2023. And any impact that might have on your cost per passing going forward?

Edward McKay: Yes, this is Ed. I’ll comment on that. So our labor availability has been fairly steady. In fact, we’ve got more construction crews working right now than we have in the history of the Glo project. So we feel like we’re in pretty good shape there. We have seen impacts from inflation. Our costs for both materials and labor have gone up 5% to 10%. So we’ve previously disclosed, we expect a range of $1,000 to $1,400 per new Glo passings. Up to this point, we’ve been in the lower half of that range. We do think those inflationary factors will push us up higher into that range. Another factor there is some of the markets we’re building in now are less dense and they have more underground construction, so that’s driving the cost per pass up slightly as well.

Daniel Day: Great. That’s helpful. I know video is increasingly less important part of the business going forward, but you lost almost 2,000 video subs. Just wondering if there’s anything you did to kind of push people out of the video product in the quarter. It just seems like an elevated number relative to the last few quarters or was just kind of maybe a onetime random blip there?

Edward McKay: Yes, nothing specific in the quarter there. We continue to see cord cutting. We have been passing along our programming cost increases to our customer, so the rates have been going up. So I think that does tend to push customers away as well.

Daniel Day: Yes, got it. And then last one for me. When we think about the Glo Fiber ARPU, are you being somewhat promotional in terms of getting people to switch? And then like after a year or 2, maybe those promotional rates were off and ARPU could — there could be a tailwind there longer term? Or is kind of the price to price and you’re letting the product speak for yourself to get people to switch over?

Edward McKay: So yes, the price is the price we offer 1 month free of service to new customers, but that’s really the only real promotion we’re running right now. We’ve really been focused on having fair, steady pricing and not having this massive price increase like some of our competitors do after 12 or 24 months.

Operator: Hamed Khorsand with BWS Financial, your line is open.