Michael Prior
Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open
Thanks, Justin. As usual, I will start with some highlights for the quarter. So, overall results for the quarter were consistent with trends from the second quarter and our expectations for continued sequential improvement, driven primarily by the restoral of revenues in the Virgin Islands and growth in other international telecom markets. Results in the other segments were in line with expectations, including a year-over-year increase in the Renewable Energy revenues, reflecting the growth of India solar power revenue. In other developments, during the third quarter, we reached an agreement to sell our U.S. solar power facilities, we are granted additional one-time hurricane relief funds by the SEC and our main U.S. Telecom subsidiary was awarded $79 million in federal funding over 10 years through the CAF II auction process to deliver fixed wireless broadband and voice services in selected areas of the Southwestern United States. So with that, I will turn to more specifics by segment, starting with International Telecom. As noted in our release, we’re finally in the end phase of the post-hurricane network reconstruction in the Virgin Islands. The effect of this was clear in our quarterly results and we expect to continue to reconnect customers and build back wireline revenue as we got the Is and cross the Ts. The rebuild took longer than we hoped and cost more as well. Much of that due to the extraordinary circumstances, but the team has been and still is working very hard on the effort. From an investor rather than customer viewpoint, the obvious question is that, at what point will revenues for that market return to pre-storm levels? The short answer is we’re not certain, but we expect it will take a while. Our new network is performing at levels above the pre-storm experience as you might expect, given all the equipment and network tuning work. So we do think we will continue to regain customers and even gain market share over time. On the other hand, when customers have had such a long outage, they do not all reconnect. In some cases, the premise might no longer be occupied. In some cases, they may have found an alternative service, and in others, they’ve decided they no longer need a particular service, such as a home phone. So we think full recovery of wireline revenues for existing services is a best case scenario, and if it happens, will take some time. The last thing to note for the Virgin Islands was this quarter reflects, as I mentioned briefly above, an additional receipt of short-term funds from the FCC, which helped defray some of the heavy costs incurred to date, and we’re working to secure additional long-term funding to support the extraordinary cost of providing wireline services throughout the territory. In other markets in the segment, things are less dramatic and proceeding well. We’ve expanded and brought forward a fiber-to-the-home program in a couple of markets because of strong customer demand and good economics for the incremental builds. Resulting revenue gains have well outpaced declines from video and voice attrition. This trend is clear in the published subscriber numbers with segment wireline data subscribers up 10% over the past year excluding unknowns involved in the Virgin Islands. Wireless subscribers were essentially flat, and this is an area of focus moving forward as we think we should be able to grow these levels. Another area in which we think we can see significant gains in this segment for 2019 and beyond is expanding cash flow. Outside of the obvious benefit of finishing 2018 with its heavy spend on major and simultaneous network builds and upgrades, we think there are gains in operating efficiencies to be realized and we’ve a number of initiatives to improve productivity. That is necessary not just to improve economics, but to strengthen operational and competitive resiliency. Moving to U.S. telecom, results for this segment were broadly similar to what we expected, and there will continue to be additional pressure on year-on-year revenue comparisons in the next few quarters because of the recently closed sale and some smaller items such as the ending of a 5-year subsidy program for certain rural areas. As we’ve discussed in recent quarters, our legacy business faces more downward pressure than upside, but we've been active in positioning ourselves for future growth. In addition to the various initiatives we covered last quarter, as I mentioned earlier, we recently won an award of $79 million over 10 years through the Connect America Phase II auction, subject to satisfying the terms and conditions of the award and the program. There were 200 auction participants and we were the sixth largest winner. The award covers the build-out of broadband networks in many different rural communities in the Western United States, most of which are in or near our mobile operating area, and thus, easier for us to have visibility into the cost required to satisfy the build requirements. This was a great win by our team and we look forward to bringing more broadband connectivity to these underserved populations and helping to close the digital divide. In Renewable Energy, the main development was the transaction that we entered into in September to sell all of our U.S. solar power facilities for an estimated total value of over $120 million. If the deal closes in November as we currently expect, the transaction will lock in a very nice return on our original investment in December 2014. The market for this type of high-quality commercial/industrial solar portfolio is fairly robust at the moment. And while we’re content with holding the assets for the long-term, with our investment profile, we felt it made sense at this time to recycle the capital we deployed. In India, we also have good news to report, though of a more modest and incremental nature. The Vibrant Energy team has made various improvements in operating efficiency of the plants and operations. And at the same time, we’ve developed a fairly large pipeline of potential C&I projects in the market. We are in the midst of examining our options as to how to execute on that pipeline and how that fits into our broader strategy for the market and the sector. In other developments outside of our current operations, I know there's always a question as to the potential for investing our balance sheet capacity, which is substantial in relation to the existing portfolio. Last quarter, of course, I talked a bit about some earlier stage Greenfield telecom infrastructure opportunities we’ve launched or funded. These are proceeding well to date, but it is still early and we have no major milestones for those businesses to discuss at this time. But more generally, as noted in my opening remarks, we think there could be additional opportunities to invest in shared communications infrastructure, in particular. We bring much more than capital to that space, and we think there is a need in the industry to lower costs and eliminate unnecessary noncore network duplications. So in summary, we’re happy to be substantially done with the hard work of the network rebuild in the Virgin Islands and I want to thank our team for their relentless focus on this major project. We are also happy to be nearly done with another year of very high capital expenditures in our International Telecom properties and look forward to the prospect of generating higher cash flows and returns on those investments. Further, our team did a very good job on the solar asset sale. In securing critical additional government funding for the -- both for the VI network rebuild, and opportunistically for the expansion of our rural broadband network in the western United States. And that's it for me, Justin, over to you.