Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. (NYSE:TDS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Austin Summerford: Simon, this is Austin. On your second question, yes, our towers do have incremental capacity. We believe the vast majority of them have incremental capacity from where they are today. In addition, there’s always the option to invest to a structural modification to add capacity to the sites as well. So we feel good about where we are there.

Simon Flannery: And any quantification of the how long and how much the remaining T-Mobile churn is?

Austin Summerford: I’m not going to provide any more detail right now.

Operator: Next, we’ll go to Michael Rollins with Citi.

Michael Rollins: When you look at the totality of wireless performance, are there geographies or segments where you’re seeing material growth in subscriptions, postpaid phone subscription and revenue versus maybe other areas or products or verticals that it’s tougher such that when we look at the total portfolio performance, it’s actually not a fair representation of what you may be experiencing when you go 1 or 2 levels deeper.

Laurent Therivel: Mike, it’s good to hear from you. I’d answer that question in a few different ways. I mean, certainly, when you look at different products inside of our business, we’re seeing certain areas of the business with really attractive growth. So we certainly talked about fixed wireless in a fair amount of detail. That’s one area where we’re seeing a lot of growth. In our business segment. Our IoT business is up substantively year-over-year. We’re seeing really good growth on the private networking space. And by the way, the private networking space, it’s also helping us pull through professional services. And so that’s an attractive growth area for us. We’ve talked mostly on fixed wireless. We’ve talked mostly about the consumer side, but we’re actually seeing some really attractive growth on the business side as well.

We’ve recently launched a failover product that we’re seeing really nice growth on. And if you’re trying to follow the growth in our financial statements, some of the fair amount of the growth on the business side doesn’t actually show up in our subscriber count because it’s being sold through indirect channels, and so it will just show up in our revenue count. And so there certainly are some substantive bright spots. From a geographical perspective, what I would highlight is that 50% of our footprint does not have cable competition in it. We are seeing increased pricing competition from cable and where we see that, it creates incremental competitive challenges. And so as you would expect, where we don’t see that increased competitive challenge from cable, we see some better subscriber results.

So different ways of kind of getting at your question. We certainly have plenty of attractive pockets but broadly across the business, we do see gross add challenges. I’d also just point to churn, right, where last year, we were quite aggressive with our existing same as new promotions. Those moved our in-contract rate from mid-50s, 57%, 58% up into the low 60 percentile in contract customers. And where we have those customers in contract, we see far better churn profiles. So it certainly is not ubiquitous performance completely across all our products and all our footprints. You’ve got highs and lows as you would expect. Hope that gives you a sense, Mike.

Michael Rollins: And I just had a follow-up question. So I recognize you can’t speak to the strategic review of UScellular per your prior comment. But the language was very specific that TDS is also performing a strategic review of UScellular. So should investors take that to mean that TDS as a company expects to still be an outstanding independent company regardless of what happens to UScellular? Or does TDS also — the future of TDS get incorporated into this review for UScellular?

Laurent Therivel: Yes. It’s an incredibly elegant way to try to get me to talk about the release, but I’ll just point you back to the 13D. I think the language in it is about — I think, as clear as we’re going to be, and I think it probably provides as many details as we’re going to at this point. So I would just refer — I would reference you back to that document for that question.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Next, we’ll go to Sergey Dluzhevskiy with GAMCO Investors.

Sergey Dluzhevskiy: LT, my first question is around the business and enterprise side. So obviously, it’s a growth vertical that you see out there for the company. I guess as you look over the last 12 months, I guess, what has been the largest achievement on that front? And also, what are your expectations for this vertical over the next 12 to 18 months, what would you consider a success? And at what point do you expect this business to make a more meaningful contribution to UScellular results.

Laurent Therivel: So business is an interesting space for us because the — if I take a step back from our business, and I will answer your question, but if you take a step back just from our business and you look at 5G. With the exception of fixed wireless, the emerging use cases that are going to monetize the investments that the industry has made in 5G increased speed, better latency. Those use cases are increasingly going to be on the enterprise side. And so whether it is connected manufacturing, whether it is connected health. Most of those initial use cases, digital twins, those are going to leverage enterprise. And so we made a pretty substantive investment in enterprise distribution so that we could be ready for that and we’re seeing the payoffs from that investment in distribution, particularly in areas that I mentioned before, I think private networking, I think IoT, and I’ll point particularly — you asked for a specific accomplishment.