Jeffrey A. Stoops
Analyst · Rick Prentiss with Raymond James
Thanks, Mark, and good morning, everyone. As you have heard, we did have another very good quarter, nearing or exceeding the high end of our guidance across almost all key financial metrics. Once again, we led our industry in many important growth metrics. SBA continues to perform in strong and steady fashion. Our organic leasing activity was particularly strong all through 2013 and the primary reason for our outperformance. We experienced strong demand across our entire portfolio, both domestic and international. In the U.S., we are seeing the benefits from that demand in both our leasing and services segments. We expect to benefit from these elevated levels of activity for the next several years as carriers build out their initial 4G coverage footprints to be followed by capacity spending as consumer adoption increases. Commentary from our customers has been very clear, that network speed and quality is now and will remain a primary focus. The path to better network speed and quality is more infrastructure. We are seeing strong activity in both amendments to existing carrier sites and new site locations in the U.S. and our backlogs remain large and continue to replenish. Internationally, we are seeing strong growth in new cell sites with a lot of basic 3G coverage builds ongoing in our markets. We look forward to the buildout of 4G in many of our international markets in the future. As a result of anticipated continued strong demand from our U.S. and international customers, we are guiding to strong organic leasing growth once again in 2014. A portion of the increase in our 2014 leasing revenue outlook is due to higher than anticipated -- previously anticipated organic leasing activity. In the fourth quarter, in the U.S., we had a very busy quarter with respect to new leasing business. And we signed up another high number of both new tenant leases and amendments. Our customers are requesting larger equipment loads, which has a favorable impact on rate. AT&T and Verizon continue to be very busy and represented well over half of our new business in the quarter. As a result, the Mobilitie and TowerCo assets we acquired in 2012 outperformed because they were under index to AT&T and Verizon. We saw another material contribution from Sprint due to its Network Vision project and T-Mobile remains active on its 4G upgrade. We have just started to see 2.5G business from Sprint and have yet to see any 700-megahertz business from T-Mobile. Although there is a chance both could contribute to leasing revenue in the second half of 2014, neither is yet reflected in our leasing outlook for 2014. Our services segment produced another strong level of activity for us in the fourth quarter, once again with the primary contributors being the Sprint Network Vision and T-Mobile 4G projects. Services revenue of over $170 million in 2013 was an annual record for SBA by a wide margin. Our services backlog remains high. We expect continued strong services segment contribution through 2014, although we do expect in our 2014 outlook reflects our work on the Sprint Network Vision project tapering off as the work we were contracted to perform near completion, some of which will be offset by new work on Sprint's 2.5-gigahertz initiatives. We continue to see strong activity in our international markets in both leasing activity and portfolio growth. Leasing activity is mostly new leases, but there is a growing amount of amendment activity. We had a busy year end in Brazil. We closed on our first acquisition from Oi of 2,113 sites and entered into agreement to acquire another 2,007 sites from Oi, which is scheduled to close March 31. We will continue to look for additional acquisition opportunities in Brazil, although now having gotten to scale, we believe that our strategic needs have been satisfied. We are on the process of establishing substantial newbuild and leasing capabilities in Brazil. We now have about 35 experienced employees in Brazil, on our way to 50 to 55 by year-end. We will continue to expand our Brazilian workforce as we grow. But with much of our back-office functions located in the U.S., we expect our Brazilian overhead to grow in the future at a fraction of the rate of growth we expect in Brazilian revenue. With respect to portfolio growth, we had another strong year exceeding the high end of our portfolio growth goal in 2013. We're off to a very strong start in 2014 and we anticipate exceeding the high end of our annual goal by the end of the first quarter. We will continue to look for additional opportunities certainly in our existing markets and potentially some new markets, although our preference currently is to stay in the Western Hemisphere. With our leverage currently below our target range of 7.0 to 7.5x net debt to annualized adjusted EBITDA and within the target range pro forma for the pending Oi transaction, we are seeking additional portfolio growth, notwithstanding already having exceeded the high-end goal of 10% annual portfolio growth on a pro forma basis. Our 2014 guidance reflects only those acquisitions we have under contract today. And if we are successful in consummating some additional acquisitions, our 2014 outlook could increase. We have plenty of resources with which to pursue additional portfolio growth. Our access to capital and balance sheet are both in great shape. Our recent $1.5 billion Term Loan B transaction was very successful and resulted in our lowering our weighted average cost of debt, increasing our average tenure and putting over $150 million into the bank. That additional cash borrowed and currently unused negatively impacts our 2014 outlook for cash interest expense, but the terms were very attractive and we like the liquidity. Our cash on hand, undrawn $770 million revolver and anticipated AFFO generation gives us more than $1 billion of available capital. We have substantially more available when you consider our ability to settle all or a portion of our 4% convertible notes due October 2014 in stock to maintain target leverage should we find a large, attractive acquisition opportunity. Our outlook assumes we use cash on hand to call the remaining $244 million of our 8.25% senior notes and contemplates a $1.3 billion debt refinancing to fully cash-settle our 4% convertible notes without any settlement for stock, so a cash refinancing is contemplated there. We anticipate seeking such refinancing in the third quarter and we have assumed a 4% refinancing interest rate in our 2014 outlook. As our guidance indicates, we expect the current strength in our business to continue through 2014. Our 2014 outlook continues to reflect same-tower cash revenue growth similar to 2013 in the 9% to 10% range before iDEN terminations. We have included no material contribution in 2014 from any customer that was not reasonably active in 2013, so that would exclude DISH and Public Safety. We are anticipating in our services outlook some Sprint 2.5G activity, although not yet in our leasing outlook. Please keep in mind that our 2014 outlook reflects site leasing revenue on a GAAP basis, while our tower cash flow adjusted EBITDA and AFFO outlooks are all on a cash basis. Total noncash leasing revenue in 2014 for the straight-line impact is expected to be approximately $44 million. In the aggregate, we believe 2014 will be another strong year for SBA. Our focus this year is straightforward: execute well against a favorable macro environment, add quality growth assets and continue to take advantage of what is expected to remain a favorable financing market. With our annual portfolio growth goal already under contract, leverage within our target range and tremendous liquidity, we look forward to continuing to improve our international capabilities and realizing strong revenue growth on our high-quality assets. We believe we have SBA ideally positioned for future success. We expect to once again produce material growth across a number of key metrics, including growth in 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 worked 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 move through 2014. And Amanda, at this time, we're ready for questions.