James D. Taiclet, Jr. - American Tower Corp.
Analyst
Brandon, this is Jim. I'll take the first one, and Tom can speak to the margin expansion. We can only talk about what we've done in our company. We're not aware or have visibility to the arrangements and operational plans of any other company in our space. But again, we've just been focused for the last 15 years since I got here on sort of replicating operational excellence from the aerospace industry where I and some of my colleagues have come from here. And in that industry, as I said, and others, schedule, quality, and cost management is what drives purchase decisions in your direction. So we've been trying to make sure that when it comes to a schedule perspective, we have the most reliable schedule when we get an application that the customer can count on in X number of days plus or minus Y number of days, they'll be able to go on air. And that has to do with things like Six Sigma, reducing variation and processes and cycle times, and things like that. So we had 15 years of replacing systems, hiring people, upgrading process – we call it process excellence actually of how we do application to Notice to Proceed, which is when you can install equipment on our sites. On the quality piece, we focused on the very best assets. So what we've bought over the years in the U.S., for example, have been either assets from among the best carrier operators or directly from third-party tower companies like us. We do this for a living. And some of those notable acquisitions and mergers have been SpectraSite back in 2005, the number three independent in our space at the time, very much built like ATC was and added the indoor DAS product as well. Then GTP, Global Tower Partners, again really well-run, fundamentally organized as a third-party tower company in the U.S., and then our last big acquisition from one of the best operators in the business anywhere in the world which was Verizon. Right? So we've really focused on the quality of the asset bringing them in. We've also built thousands of towers in the U.S. to our own spec. And when we buy assets, we have something that we categorize as start-up CapEx which brings those new assets to the quality standard in the field of ours, whether it's road access, structural capacity, et cetera. So we are focused on having high quality assets and a schedule that is very, very reliable. And when we aggregate supply, which is the number of towers in a country, for example, we can also provide, again, really compelling unit economics at high, high volumes for our customer. So we've been focused on schedule, cost, and quality for 15 years to get it to the highest level we hope in our industry, anywhere in the world. And that's what I think is driving our outperformance on organic growth notably in the U.S., but also elsewhere.