WideOpenWest, Inc. (NYSE:WOW) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Teresa Elder: Thanks, Matthew. Yes. I think I get the gist of what you’re saying. So in the new markets, we do have some competitive dynamics. There’s no question about it. But I believe what we are offering with the fiber-to-the-home with attractive pricing. Once again, actually the simplified pricing where we really are bundling together the key components of the service that customers want, so they don’t have to do a piecemeal. So really being very transparent in all our pricing. That started in our Greenfield markets as opposed to doing various promotions. And that has worked very well in Greenfield, very, very low churn. And we took some of those key learnings along with additional research when we rolled out what we’re doing now in our legacy markets.

So we feel very good about the markets that we have selected and the penetration rate growth and not seeing really anything for churn, lots of good word of mouth. So those markets continue to be good. I think the second half of your question was about, okay, as we look at new markets, how does that compare? What kind of criteria do we use? And how does it compare to our original business plan. We still feel like we are beating the original business plan and some of those metrics we put out way back when we did an Investor Day, I believe, in 2021. And we’re feeling very good about those criteria that we had in the initial model. The criteria that we have for selecting markets is not just about competition, although that is a very important factor, we also look at the density of homes, the cost to build, the ratio of underground to aerial, the growth of the market itself versus is it a market or a city that is retracting in size, the speed with which we can get launched.

We look at so many different criteria. And I think that kind of secret sauce of how we’ve selected markets has proved very positive. We’ve announced some other new markets in addition to the ones where we already have homes passed, and we’re extremely pleased with the early response from the community and how the builds are going. So, so far, so good, and we feel good about our ability to choose wisely.

Matthew Harrigan: And you clearly feel able to continue to finance the new build given the limited free cash generation right now?

Teresa Elder: Yes. We — John put out a guide for what we anticipate in terms of CapEx for greenfield this year of $60 million. Last year, we spent a lot as we did a lot of the upfront work in many of these markets, and those kinds of upfront costs really will support hundreds of thousands of homes, not just the ones we’ve done so far. And John, did you want to add more to that?

John Rego: Yes. So I mean, Matt, it’s clearly less CapEx dollars for greenfield than last year. However, a lot of the upfront work, all the setup building of the hub building a warehouse is getting the materials out there. This year is more purely focused on adding homes passed. And that actually requires less money to set up stuff. So we feel pretty comfortable we’re going to stay on pace. And we still feel pretty comfortable we’ll be on pace that we set actually on the Analyst Day, which was back in 2021. So it’s just a matter of where the dollars are spent. But obviously, we’re watching everything we’ll be careful.

Matthew Harrigan: Thanks, Teresa. Thanks, John.

Operator: Our final question comes from the line of Brandon Nispel with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Brandon Nispel: Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. John, I was hoping you could just address the liquidity position. It looks like you drew on the revolver again. To the extent that you do want to go faster, I’m green it sounds like you’re slowing down quite a bit, at least from a dollars perspective. But what options do you have to get some more liquidity in the business? And then do you think you’ll be free cash flow positive more towards the second-half of the year as CapEx comes down?

John Rego: Yes. So the plan is to be free cash flow positive for the full-year. So we’re doing a lot of different things, Brendan, just so when we are literally taking the expansion capital dollars down, and that’s purely discretionary, so we can do that. As I just said on Matt’s question, we spent a lot of money in 2023, and that was a lot of the setup work. So by spending less money, we can actually just focus on adding homes. So that’s 1 thing for sure that we’re doing. We kind of blurred it out on the call, but we executed multiple hedges on about $500 million of our debt. So that will save us some cash flow as it relates to interest expense. We also took another hard look at the OpEx of the company, and we also referenced that there on the call.