Rod Smith
Analyst · Ric Prentiss. Please go ahead
Thanks, Tom, and good morning to everyone on the call. I hope you are safe and healthy. As you saw in today's press release, we had another solid quarter throughout our global business, driven by consistent demand for our mission-critical tower assets. Before we turn to the accompanying charts, I would like to highlight a few specific accomplishments for the quarter. First, we met our revenue. Adjusted EBITDA consolidated AFFO expectations which I will discuss in more detail shortly. Second, we had solid organic tenant billings growth across our business led by Africa at nearly 10% and Latin America at over 7%. Third, we constructed more than 500 towers across our international footprint. And finally, we further strengthened our investment-grade balance sheet by issuing $2 billion in senior unsecured notes across multiple tenors with very attractive economics. Now, let’s turn to the details of our second quarter results. Please turn to Slide 8 and we will review our property revenue and organic tenant billings growth. Although we experienced some unfavorable FX translational impact, primarily resulting from the global pandemic, overall, we generated solid underlying revenue growth. In the interest of understanding our fundamental operational performance, I’ll be referring to growth rates for some of our key metrics on an FX neutral basis in addition to our standard as-reported basis. As Igor mentioned earlier, our second quarter consolidated property revenue of nearly $1,900 million grew on a reported basis by $44 million or 2.4% over the prior year period. And on an FX neutral basis by $158 million or 8.6%. Our U.S. segment represented 57% of our consolidated property revenue with international comprising the remaining 43%. A key contributor to our consolidated property revenue was our tenant billings revenue of $1,620 million, which grew by nearly 10%. The components of our tenant billings growth included around $71 million in colocation and amendments. Roughly $50 million in contributions from escalators and $72 million in day one tenant billings from acquisitions and new builds. These positive items were partially offset by churn impacts of $46 million and $2 million in other items. Our U.S. property segment revenue totaled nearly $1,100 million for the quarter and grew by $80 million or 8% over the prior year period. Our international property revenue of nearly $806 million declined by $36 million or 4.3% as compared to last year’s levels, primarily due to the FX translational headwinds we just discussed. Moving to the right-side of the slide, you will see that our consolidated organic tenant billings growth was in line with our expectations at 5% for the quarter. For our U.S. property segment, organic tenant billings growth was 4.7% comprised of new business activity which contributed 3.7%, escalators, which contributed 3.2%, churn of 1.9% and a roughly 30 basis points negative impact from other items. As expected, this growth rate reflects a sequential deceleration driven primarily by relatively modest contributions to our new business from T-Mobile over the last few quarters. With that said, and as I will discuss in more detail when we review our updated outlook, we have seen new business activity from T-Mobile begin to pickup with further acceleration anticipated towards the end of the year. Our international property segment organic tenant billings growth was 5.4%, led by Africa at nearly 10% and Latin America at over 7%. Europe was just over 2%, while India was 0.4%, again, in line with our expectations given anticipated churn and general market conditions. The component parts of international organic tenant billings growth where new business activity which totaled nearly 7% are mostly local inflation-based pricing escalators which contributed 3.7% and other items which contributed around 20 basis points. These items were partially offset by churn of 5.3%, much of which was in India. Now, please turn to Slide 9 and we will review our adjusted EBITDA and AFFO results. Our second quarter consolidated adjusted EBITDA of just over $1.2 billion grew on a reported basis by about $28 million or 2.4% over the prior year and on an FX neutral basis by $19 million or 7.6%. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 63.3%, up roughly 70 basis points over the prior year. This increase was attributable to a combination of our solid organic growth, diligent focus on cost controls, and a favorable impact of some incremental net straight-line. These favorable impacts were partially offset by approximately $21 million in bad debt reserves, against certain receivables in India. Although we operate in 20 countries, our U.S. business again drove the substantial majority of our property segment operating profit in the quarter accounting for 68% of the total, while our international business generated the remaining 32%. Moving to the right-side of the slide, you can see our consolidated AFFO of $924 million grew on a reported basis by nearly $15 million or 1.6% over the prior year and on an FX neutral basis by around $69 million or 7.5%. Consolidated AFFO per share of $2.07grew on a reported basis by $0.03 or 1.5% over last year’s levels and on an FX neutral basis grew by $0.15 or 7.4%. This growth in AFFO and AFFO per share was driven by our previously discussed growth in adjusted EBITDA, as well as interest expense management, careful oversight of cash taxes and lower maintenance capital spending. Let’s now take a look at our updated expectations for 2020. Before I get into the numbers, I want to cover a few of our high-level assumptions. First is our updated expectation regarding the post-merger acceleration in new business activity from T-Mobile. Our prior outlook assumed activity levels would have materially increased by now and that we would be seeing increased levels of new business from T-Mobile starting this month. Although, we have seen a modest increase in activity, it has not yet reached the level we expect to eventually see, based on the T-Mobile’s public comments. As a result, we now expect this acceleration of new business to come much later this year. Consequently, we are reducing our U.S. organic tenant billings growth expectations for 2020, which I will discuss in more detail shortly. Next is our updated expectations regarding customer collections and additional reserves for some bad debt. For the most part, tenants throughout our footprint have continued to pay on-time and without interruption through the pandemic. However, in India, we have layered in approximately $65 million in additional bad debt assumptions for the full year. This is primarily attributable to the expected timing of payments from the government owned carrier BSNL, as well as the possibility that Vodafone Idea future payments become interrupted or delayed as they weigh a final outcome of the ongoing AGR court proceedings in India. Additionally, we have assumed roughly $10 million in incremental bad debt reserves for a few tenants in Africa. Lastly, we have updated the foreign currency exchange rates in our full year outlook. The impacts of these revised FX rates on full year expectations, as compared to our prior guidance are estimated to be a positive $45 million of property revenue, $20 million for both adjusted EBITDA and consolidated AFFO. Aside from these adjustments, our other high-level assumptions remain largely consistent with our prior view as demand for our telecommunications real estate across all of our markets is expected to remain solid. If you’ll please turn to Slide 10, I will now review our revised outlook midpoints. Our updated guidance for property revenue is $7,720 million, which is a decrease of $30 million compared to the midpoint of our prior outlook and reflects a growth rate on a reported basis of 3.4%. On an FX neutral basis, the growth rate is approximately 8%. For our U.S. segment, we now expect property revenue of $4,380 million, which is $35 million lower than our prior projections. About $20 million of this decrease is attributable to the timing of T-Mobile activity with the remaining $15 million or so being driven by an adjustment in our non-cash straight-line revenue expectations as a result of an accounting true-up. For our International segment, we now anticipate property revenue of $3,340 million, which is $5 million higher than our prior expectation. This is being driven by roughly $45 million in favorable FX impacts, along with around $10 million in other outperformance, partially offset by a $50 million currency neutral decline in pass-through revenues across our footprint due to lower fuel prices. At a high level, our expectations for our international businesses are broadly consistent with our prior outlook, which demonstrates the critical nature of our assets, as well as the effectiveness of our more than 5,000 employees across the globe. We could not be more proud of the way our global teams have performed throughout this pandemic. Moving on to the right-side of the slide, we now expect organic tenant billings growth to be between 4.5% and 5% on a consolidated basis. This includes projected U.S. organic tenant billings growth of approximately 4.5% for the full year. As I just mentioned the change to our U.S. expectations is driven by our adjusted timing assumptions around T-Mobile’s activity ramp up with us rather than a fundamental change in underlying long-term trends. For our International segment, we are reaffirming our outlook for organic tenant billings growth of approximately 5%. Moving on to Slide 11, you will see that we now expect our full year adjusted EBITDA to be $4,930 million, which is $40 million below the midpoint of our prior outlook and reflects nearly 8% growth over the prior year on an FX neutral basis. The drivers of this reduction in outlook are, a roughly $75 million increase to our bad debt reserves, primarily in India, and approximately $17 million reduction in net straight-line, and a $10 million reduction from our services segment which is the result of the revised outlook for T-Mobile activity. These negative impacts are expected to be partially offset by a favorable FX translational impact of $20 million, as well as an additional $42 million or so of general outperformance we now anticipate throughout our business, particularly on the direct expenses and SG&A side. As part of our adjusted EBITDA projections, we now expect cash SG&A as a percent of total property for the year to be in the high 8% range or around 7.4% excluding bad debt. Lastly, we now expect consolidated AFFO for the full year to be $3,670 million, which is $20 million above the midpoint of our prior outlook and reflects nearly 9% growth over the prior year on an FX neutral basis. We have been able to offset the expected decline in cash adjusted EBITDA through, $25 million and lower net cash interest, $10 million in lower cash taxes, $10 million in reduced maintenance capital expenditures and about $20 million in FX favorability. On a per share basis, we expect to generate consolidated AFFO of $8.23, up $0.05 relative to our prior guidance. Moving on to Slide 12, let’s review our capital deployment expectations for the year. Our full year dividend subject to the Board approval is expected to be approximately $2 billion resulting in an annual common stock dividend growth rate of right around 20% once again. As previously discussed, in future years, you could expect our dividend to grow roughly in line with our REIT taxable income. That will be consistent with our REIT requirements, as well as with our internally held dividend philosophy and is likely to result in growth rates dipping below 20% beginning next year. Subject to Board discretion, we anticipate the impact of any deceleration in the growth rate to be gradual and expect our dividend to grow between 15% and 20% for each of the next several years. We also expect to deploy nearly $1.1 billion towards our CapEx program with more than 85% of that investment being discretionary. This is down $25 million from our prior outlook with $15 million in lower redevelopment CapEx and an additional $10 million decline in maintenance CapEx. We have spent roughly $757 million on M&A so far this year including our acquisition of MTN’s minority stakes in our joint ventures in Ghana and Uganda earlier this year and our entry into Poland through a small transaction in late June. The purchase of TATA’s remaining interest in our India business, which at current exchange rates had an approximate value of $329 million is currently pending regulatory approval in India. We continue to expect to complete the purchase of these shares this year. We also deployed around $56 million through share repurchases earlier in the year. This combined with our year-to-date dividend declaration of $967 million brings our total capital returned to shareholders so far this year to over $1 billion. Finally, as a step towards ensuring we have access to a wide variety of options for raising capital, we intend to implement an aftermarket stock offering program. We anticipate having the ability to from time-to-time sell up to $1 billion of our common stock. It’s our intention to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, which may include investment opportunities or debt repayments among other things. Turning now to Slide 13, I will briefly discuss our investment philosophy, historical capital allocation and the associated financial returns. Since 2010, we have deployed nearly $46 billion through a combination of common stock dividend, our internal capital investment program, M&A transactions and common stock repurchases. As you can see on the capital deployment chart to the left, approximately $27 billion was invested in M&A. Over $10 billion was returned to our common stockholders through the combination of dividend distributions and share repurchases. Roughly, $7 billion represented discretionary capital investments and with the remaining $1 billion being dedicated to non-discretionary maintenance capital projects. As Tom alluded to earlier, the vast majority of investments to-date have been geared towards macro towers. This has been guided by our longstanding investment objectives, which have always been and continue to be focused on generating maximum total shareholder returns by driving long-term AFFO per share growth and attractive return on invested capital, all while prudently managing risk. Based on our significant experience and our constant review of all types of communications infrastructure, we view macro towers, whether in the United States or in select international markets as the most compelling assets for us to own as we pursue our investment objectives. Likewise, as we explore innovation initiatives as a means of extending our platform of communications real estate our longstanding investment objectives and our disciplined approach will remain the same. As you can see, from our historical results, our investment process has worked well for our shareholders. A key element of our success has been that our tower portfolios, regardless of where they are located shares several value-creating characteristics including the ability to monetize growth in mobile data consumption, significant and proven operating leverage driven by contractual escalators, new business commencements and a high likelihood of multi-tenancy and very low ongoing capital maintenance. Lastly, the high quality nature of our model is highlighted in our consistent and attractive financial returns. In the last decade, we have added more than 153,000 sites, many of which were less mature towers located outside the United States and came with lower, day one tenancy and margin profiles. Even taking this into account, as you can see on the charts in the right, our return on invested capital has risen by around 50 basis points over the last ten years and stands now at nearly 11%. We view this as a testament to our disciplined investment approach and the powerful operating leverage inherent in the tower model. We can now turn to Slide 14 and I’ll make a few closing remarks. First, we finished the second quarter with a solid set of results and believe we are well positioned as we head into the second half of 2020 and beyond. Pro forma for refinancing activity earlier this month, we have over $5 billion in total liquidity with an average tenor of more than six years and an average interest cost of under 3%. This position reflects our early redemption of all of our 2020 and 2021 senior notes, which leaves us with no senior note maturities until 2022. As Tom and I both discussed, outside of translational FX effects, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business thus far have been modest. We are pleased to see our global infrastructure assets play such a critical role in keeping people connected through this difficult time. And in closing, I will make two final points. First, we are energized about the United States as we look out over a multi-year period. We expect the new wireless landscape to drive higher levels of network deployment activity as C-band spectrum becomes available. DISH begins rolling out their network and 5G activity across the industry lands up. And second, our international markets also show great promise as our primarily large multinational tenants continue to invest heavily in their networks including around $30 billion expected in 2020. Networks across the globe are seeing tremendous growth in mobile data usage as consumers gain access to advance handsets than applications and we expect a long cycle of carrier capital spending to support these trends. From our advantage point today, we continue to be excited about the future of wireless communications and the central role our real estate will play. With that, operator, will you please open the line for questions?