Jeffrey A. Stoops
Analyst · Jonathan Atkin with RBC Capital Markets
Thanks, Mark, and good morning, everyone. Happy Election Day. As you have heard, we did have a great quarter, meeting or exceeding the high end of our guidance across key financial metrics. Once again, we led our industry and a number of important growth metrics, including growth and AFFO per share. Our organic leasing activity was particularly strong, with the highest revenue added per tower in many years. We expect strong levels of activity to continue through the remainder of 2012 and all through 2013. We are experiencing strong demand across our entire portfolio, both domestic and international. In the U.S., we are in the middle stages of 4G deployments for some customers and early stages for others. We are seeing the benefits in both our leasing and services segments. We expect to benefit from this technological upgrade for the next several years, as carriers build out their initial coverage footprints to be followed by capacity spending, as consumer adoption increases. We are seeing cell splitting in certain 4G markets, although domestic leasing activity continues to center around customer overlays and upgrades to existing antenna sites. Internationally, we are seeing strong growth in new cell sites, with a lot of basic 3G coverage builds still ongoing in Central America. And we look forward to the introduction of 4G into those international markets in the future. As a result of anticipated continued strong demand from our U.S. and international customers, we are guiding the strong organic leasing growth in 2013. In the third quarter, we had our most active quarter with respect to executed lease amendments in the company's history. AT&T and Verizon continue to be very busy and represented well over half of our new business in the quarter. We saw a substantial increase from Sprint due to its Network Vision Project, and we have just began to work with T-Mobile on its 4G upgrade. In the third quarter, we entered into an agreement with T-Mobile extending the length of the terms on approximately 2,800 legacy SBA Towers and providing for increased cash escalators for certain period of time in exchange for T-Mobile's rights to deploy 4G equipment on a lesser number of sites. This agreement has since been extended to 520 TowerCo towers, where T-Mobile was a tenant. With the agreements now in place, T-Mobile's working hard to bring 4G to our sites, and that now makes all 4 U.S. carriers extremely busy with us on technology upgrades, positively impacting both our leasing and services segments. Our services segment produced the highest revenue and gross profit in 7 years, with a level of activity that has consistently grown as we move through the year. We expect continued strong services segment contribution for the remainder of 2012 and all through 2013. We had a good quarter building towers and buying or extending the land under our towers. We were tremendously busy in the debt capital markets, raising $2.2 billion in 4 separate transactions in the third quarter alone. We acquired 37 towers in the quarter, as we're ready to close the pending TowerCo transaction. We closed the TowerCo acquisition on October 1, adding 3,256 towers. As of today, we own 16,517 towers and have increased our portfolio year-to-date by almost 60%. The integration of our acquisitions is going very well, and the assets are attracting good demand from our customers. A sizable amount of our backlog relates to these new assets. One of the clear benefits we are enjoying from these acquisitions is the reduction in SG&A expense as a percentage of revenue, reflecting our ability to maximize the efficiency and capabilities of our back office. As Brendan mentioned, SG&A expense has declined as a percentage of total revenue, and we expect additional reductions as TowerCo is reflected in our results of operations. Given our success with these acquisitions and our expectation of being backed within our target leverage range of 7.0 to 7.5x net debt annualized adjusted EBITDA by the end of the fourth quarter, we are ready to continue with additional portfolio growth. We will look both domestically and internationally and believe that we will find some attractive opportunities that will meet our investment requirements. We are once again establishing a goal of 5% to 10% portfolio growth in 2013, while maintaining our target leverage levels. Our initial 2013 guidance reflects a lower level of portfolio growth. And if we are successful in consummating some acquisitions, I would expect our initial 2013 outlook to increase. Speaking of international, we continue to be very pleased with our international activity. International towers have grown to 1,716 at the end of the quarter, an increase of approximately 150% over the year-earlier period. International site leasing revenue grew 121% year-over-year. While U.S. portfolio growth occupied most of our focus this year, we continue to have an interest in expanding our international business into new markets. We expect in 2013, that we will be actively looking for the right new international markets in which to expand as well as continuing to materially grow our existing international markets. Our access to capital and balance sheet are both in great shape. We've had a very successful year in the capital markets. We've termed out all of the debt associated with our Mobilitie and TowerCo acquisitions on favorable terms and interest rates. While our undrawn $700 million revolver plus cash on hand is more than sufficient to satisfy in cash all of our expected obligations related to our 1.875% convertible notes due May 2013. We are planning on some additional debt financing prior to the May 2013 convert maturity. We're planning on this so as to preserve our revolver availability and to ensure that we will be able to stay fully invested to our target leverage range, if we so choose. Our outlook assumes $600 million of such additional debt financing. As our initial 2013 guidance indicates, we expect the current strength in our business to continue into 2013. One of the drivers of this substantial growth we expect to set forth in our initial 2013 outlook is strong, anticipated organic lease up against a much larger portfolio of towers. With respect to organic Tower cash flow growth, we are forecasting materially the same level of incremental organic carrier activity on a cash revenue added per tower basis in 2013 as we expect for 2012. We see a tremendous amount of amendment activity again in 2013. We have included no material contribution in 2013 from any customer that was not reasonably active in 2012, so that would exclude DISH, Clearwire and public safety. Our 2013 outlook includes benefits from the Sprint and T-Mobile agreements to both cash and noncash site leasing revenue, but our Tower cash flow, adjusted EBITDA and AFFO outlooks are all on a cash basis. Total noncash leasing revenue in 2013 is estimated to be approximately $60 million. For those of you doing margin analysis, since our definitions of Tower cash flow and adjusted EBITDA exclude noncash items, you need to subtract noncash items from site leasing revenue to calculate margin. When you do, you'll see that we are expecting relatively stable margin performance in 2013, notwithstanding having added a substantial number of lower-margin Mobilitie and TowerCo assets. And this is a result of expected strong organic leasing growth. In our site leasing revenue outlook, we have factored in a churn allowance in the guidance, which includes all known churn plus an additional unallocated amount similar to those churn levels we have experienced during the last couple of years. On the services side, we are expecting another strong year similar to full year expected 2012. With respect to net cash interest, we are assuming 3 month LIBOR remains at or below 0.5% throughout 2013. As is our custom, our outlook includes only those towers we own, intend to build or have under agreement to acquire as of today, and we do not guide to any stock repurchases. As a result, we are today, including our initial 2013 guidance, a level of discretionary capital investment well below 2012 levels and well below our guided AFFO. As I mentioned earlier, it will be our goal to invest additional amounts of capital and portfolio growth or perhaps stock repurchases or perhaps both. Assuming the one additional financing contemplated in our outlook ahead of the maturity of our 2013 convertible notes, we will have significant liquidity that could be deployed for additional asset growth and/or stock repurchases. Based on our estimated 2013 year-end run rate adjusted EBITDA, we could invest approximately an additional $750 million or more into portfolio growth and still maintain our target net debt annualized adjusted EBITDA leverage levels. In the aggregate, we believe our initial 2013 outlook is strong with potential opportunities for improvement throughout the year. Our focus next year is straightforward: Execute well against a favorable macro environment, add quality growth assets and continue to take advantage of what is expected to be a favorable financing market. We expect to, once again, produce material growth across a number of key metrics, including growth at AFFO per share. Before we open it up for questions, I want to recognize the contributions of our employees and customers to our success. Our employees work really hard to achieve the goals of our customers. They do a great job, our customers recognize that, and as a result, we are a preferred provider for our customers' network needs. Our customers are, and we think will remain extremely busy, improving and expanding their wireless networks. We look forward to continued success as we finish this year and move into 2013. And Lola, at this time, we're ready for questions.