Dave Heimbach
Analyst · Raymond James. You may proceed with your question
Thank you Jim, and good morning, everyone. I'll start by going over some of our operational highlights from the fourth quarter of 2019.On Slide 19, we showed the key metrics of our postpaid wireless business. We had approximately 844,000 postpaid subscribers at the end of the fourth quarter.Net additions for the fourth quarter 2019 were approximately 21,000 for postpaid compared to 10,000 in the fourth quarter 2018. The incremental net gain year-over-year was driven by the second consecutive quarter of record phone additions and record connected device additions on the continued strength of terrific local market execution. Combined postpaid churn rose 15 basis points year-over-year to 2.05%, with phone churn increasing 13 basis points year-over-year and connected device churn remaining relatively flat. Approximately nine basis points of the year-over-year increase in churn was driven by higher port outs to Verizon as a result of more aggressive unlimited pricing in the retail business and continued inroads by Comcast Xfinity Mobile in our region. The balance of the churn increase relates to connected device add-a-line promo roll-off.In contrast, gross adds increased an impressive 32% year-over-year by over 17,000, with phones representing 70% of total postpaid activations and up 19% versus the prior year. Postpaid ARPU declined approximately $1.93 year-over-year, driven primarily by Sprint promotional discounting and, to a lesser extent, the increase in the mix of connected devices in the base. This quarter marks the ninth consecutive quarter we've enjoyed a positive port-in to port-out ratio with a 1.09:1 ratio for the fourth quarter of 2019. We have, however, seen a steady decline in our porting ratio over the last several quarters as weakness in the Sprint brand has begun impacting consumer behavior in our markets, particularly in relation to Verizon. In spite of these headwinds, we continue to increase our retail presence and finished the quarter with 178 Sprint postpaid-branded doors which was an increase of 10% year-over-year. Lastly, 8.6% of our postpaid base upgraded their phone in the quarter and 12.2% of the base was comprised of connected devices such as watches and tablets at the end of 2019.Now, moving to Slide 20, we had approximately 274,000 prepaid subscribers at the end of the fourth quarter. And prepaid gross and net additions were just over 39,000 and 2,400, respectively, for the fourth quarter which was largely consistent with the prior-year period. Fourth quarter prepaid churn dropped four basis points year-over-year to 4.52%, while ARPU increased $0.44 as the mix of our prepaid subscribers on the Boost brand continued to increase slightly to 91.2%.Lastly, we increased our Boost-branded door locations 2% to 162 year-over-year which represents a slower rate of growth than we expected related to the announced plan to sell the Boost-branded subscribers to Dish as part of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger concessions.Turning to Slide 21, in our broadband business, total RGUs grew 3.4% in the fourth quarter to approximately 169,000 compared to approximately 163,500 in the prior year. We added roughly 1,000 net broadband RGUs in the quarter through organic growth and are pleased to report that our legacy broadband penetration increased from 37.4% in the fourth quarter last year to 40.6% this quarter on the strength of our new broadband speeds and rate card. Average revenue per customer increased to $114.19 year-over-year, driven by a combination of broadband speed upgrades and annual video price increases.Substantially all of our homes passed in our cable markets are now capable of broadband speeds of up to 1 gig per second, with approximately 54% of our base in the upgraded areas having migrated to the new PowerHouse-branded rate card. As Chris noted in his opening remarks, the speed upgrades, service improvements and new rate card we've launched in the second half of 2018 continued to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn. In fact, we've enjoyed eight consecutive quarters of year-over-year broadband churn improvement with a 19-basis-point reduction in broadband churn this quarter as compared to the fourth quarter in 2018.Notably, in 2018, over half of our broadband data subscribers were on rate plans of 10 megabits per second or less. Whereas now, two-thirds of subscribers are on plans of 25 megabits per second or higher, with an average subscribed download speed of 63 megabits per second which is well out of the reach of our DSL competitors. I'm very pleased with our team's continued progress in achieving our goal of constructing an even deeper competitive moat in the cable markets we serve.Turning to Slide 22, we added 17 towers in 2019 and increased total tenants by 10% year-over-year to 404. We have 11 towers slated for construction in our 2020 plan and had a backlog of over 140 open orders related to upgrades of existing tenants or the addition of new tenants at the end of 2019.We wanted to provide you a brief update on our progress in the launch of our new Fiber-to-the-Home service, Glo Fiber. Glo offers a compelling suite of services with residential Internet speeds of up to 2 gigabits per second, paired with a whole home WiFi offering. We also offer four tiers of video service delivered via our Glo-branded streaming app and a residential voice offering delivered via Voice Over Ip.On Slide 23, we depicted our fiber and cable footprint, including a table to summarize our progress in each Glo Fiber market. Construction is well under way in our first four markets which include: Harrisonburg, Staunton, Front Royal and Winchester, Virginia. And we'll also begin construction this year in Lynchburg and Salem, Virginia, as just last week, received franchise approval in Roanoke. Together, these first seven markets comprised just over 77,000 target passings.As Chris mentioned earlier, we launched our first Glo Fiber market, Harrisonburg on October 28, with 1,723 households passed at the end of 2019. And as of December 31, Glo Fiber had 126 customers totaling 177 RGUs. We're seeing a 30% attachment rate for our streaming TV service and a 12% attachment rate for our home phone service which is consistent with our projections. While still very early, we're also seeing ARPUs consistent with our current cable markets. And based on our first handful of neighborhoods, we're achieving a broadband penetration rate of approximately 15% after 90 days.Notably, roughly one-fourth of our broadband subs are electing our one gig symmetrical broadband service which retails for $90 a month with whole home Wifi.As Chris noted at the start of the call, we're also making great progress toward our goal of launching new fixed wireless broadband offering in the second half of 2020, targeting roughly 300,000 rural households across portions of Virginia, West Virginia and Southeastern Ohio, where we recently completed the acquisition of 2.5 gigahertz licensed spectrum. We will continue to update you on status of both our Glo Fiber and fixed wireless initiatives as we progress in our build plans and launch of commercial services over the next several quarters.Finally, Slide 24 provides an update to our 2019 capital spending results. Capital expenditures were $139 million at the end of 2019 as compared to $137 million in 2018. For 2020, we plan to spend between $136 million and $154 million in capital, with a year-over-year increase driven entirely by our investment in our new broadband services. The step-down in wireless spend year-over-year relates to a deferral of certain network expansion projects in the Richmond Silver territory as we await further clarity on the impact to our wireless business related to the Sprint and T-Mobile merger.This planned level of spend in wireless this year is more consistent with the maintenance level of spend, assuming no additional territory expansions. And it relates to maintaining sufficient capacity for both the increases in data consumption of our existing subscribers, as well as anticipated subscriber growth in our existing territory.So, thank you very much. And operator, we are now ready for questions.