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AT&T Inc. (T)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 22, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the AT&T third quarter 2015 earnings call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Later there will be an opportunity for your questions, and instructions will be begin at that time. I'll now turn the conference over to Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Mike Viola. Please go ahead, sir. Michael J. Viola - Senior Vice President-Investor Relations, AT&T, Inc.: Okay, thank you, Cathy. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter conference call. Thank you for joining us today. With me on the call is John Stevens, AT&T's Chief Financial Officer. John is going to provide an update with perspective on the quarter, and then we'll follow that with a Q&A session. Let me remind you that our earnings material is available on the Investor Relations page of AT&T's website, and that's ATT.com/investor.relations. But first, I need to call your attention to the Safe Harbor statement before we begin. As you guys know, it says that there could be some comments today that might be forward-looking, and as such they're subject to risks and uncertainties. Results may differ materially. And additional information is available on the Investor Relations page of AT&T's website. With that, I'll turn the call over to AT&T's Chief Financial Officer, John Stephens, to discuss our financial and operational highlights. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Thanks, Mike, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today and for your interest in AT&T. Before we discuss the quarter, I'd like to take a moment and do a quick reset of what we have put in place at AT&T. With the close of our DTV acquisition, we became a unique U.S. competitor. We are the first scaled…

Operator

Operator

Certainly, that will come from Amir Rozwadowski with Barclays. Go ahead, please.

Amir Rozwadowski - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Thank you very much. I wanted to touch upon the commentary around cash flow, John, if I may. If we take a look at your raised outlook for the year, it does seem as though there's a little bit of a tempering in the cash generation in the fourth quarter. I would love to hear about what you're spending priorities are, and more specifically how to think about the longer-term cash generation capabilities of the joint entity. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Great, Amir, a couple things. One is there's always some seasonality in the fourth quarter with the holiday sales in our wireless business with the purchase of handsets and so forth. So there's always some seasonality, as you would find also with our wireline, particularly our large business segment. Also, we generally have larger tax payments at the end of the year than we do earlier on, so those are the things that are impacting us. But I would tell you if you do a year-over-year comparison to where we're at and what we're projecting with regard to the $15 billion range or better, I think you'll see that we're continuing to have really good cash flows throughout the rest of this year. Secondly, with regard to future years, we would stand by what we've said earlier. That is that we expect free cash flow to provide us with a dividend payout ratio that's in the 70%. We're not moving away from that. We're not shying away from that at all, and expect that to continue to be the case. We're certainly proud of these results and glad that we exceeded what we had promised, but we're going to be careful and prudent in predicting our results as we go forward. But we're real excited about where we stand and the future cash generation of this business.

Amir Rozwadowski - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Thank you very much. And then if I may, a follow-up here in thinking object the joint entity moving forward, particularly when it comes to the potential opportunities with positioning the company and targeting your end markets. At your analyst update, you had highlighted that there are areas for potential cross-synergies, revenue synergies and opportunities. Specifically, I'm thinking about the 15 million DIRECTV households that don't have access to AT&T Wireless services. I was wondering if you can give us some color in terms of how you plan on going after that opportunity and how we should think about leveraging the breadth of the full portfolio to target areas where you may have one subscriber on one service and not on the other. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Right, let me take that quickly. First of all, the first revenue synergy that we've really gone after and we've seen good success and, quite frankly, we're very excited about the results is in the cross-selling of DIRECTV as a satellite product in our company-owned stores. We have about 2,300 company-owned stores, and virtually all of them are actively selling DIRECTV now. And some of them never sold a video product before, so we had to do some training and some learning. But what we found as we came through the quarter, we were able to sell more and more out of those stores. And we got very optimistic about it, and it gives us optimism for the fourth quarter. So that sales effort and that first line of synergy, if you will, from revenue opportunities from the retail distribution chain is working, and we're real optimistic about it. The second one with regard to cross-selling DIRECTV and the wireless customers, we needed to go…

Amir Rozwadowski - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Thank you very much for taking the questions. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: No problem.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from John Hodulik with UBS. Go ahead, please.

John C. Hodulik - UBS Securities LLC

Management

Okay, great. If we could focus a little bit on the guidance, first of all, John, is it possible for you to give us where we are on a year-to-date basis in terms of the $2.68 to $2.74? And then maybe what's driving the change in terms of is it just wireless margins that they were definitely ahead of where we were, or are you realizing synergies faster or if there are any other moving parts would be great? Thanks. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Yeah. So we're at the $2.09 mark today, and that was ahead of our prior plans. As you know, the $0.74 was ahead – I'll say it was ahead of our most recent plans. That has really been driven by cost efficiency. And it's driven by savings across the board, whether it's a lower number of calls into the call centers, whether it's the really top-notch performance of our Digital First initiatives, whether it's the streamlining of our installation process through our, what we call Project Halo or High Automation Low Overhead process, whether it's the software-defined networks. All of those things, whether it's just blocking and tackling, taking calls into the call center and getting answers right the first time, all of those things, all of those things are driving cost savings. And we have seen some better performance, as I mentioned, in our Business Solutions. Our Business Solutions team is really doing well in a tough economy, particularly in the enterprise and the public sector space, but really, really well in the small business space. And that gives us optimism. As we mentioned with wireless, we're seeing growth in that area. But we are seeing the acceptance of our Network on Demand, our NetBond, our software-defined networks all moving customers in a positive direction. So it's all of those things giving us optimism for the fourth quarter. With that being said, certainly wireless and its performance goes without question that it is helping drive earnings performance.

John C. Hodulik - UBS Securities LLC

Management

Great. Thanks, John. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Thanks, John.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike McCormack with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Michael L. McCormack - Jefferies LLC

Management

Hey, guys. Thanks. John, maybe just to dig a little bit into the churn commentary, your thoughts on whether or not we're seeing a spike up in involuntary. And then how does that pace out if we look at the feature phone subs? Are those the ones that I'm assuming most at risk there? And then secondly, just on the ARPU side, I know last quarter you benefited from year-over-year easy comps. I'm assuming that as we get into the fourth quarter, we should restart that trajectory and year-over-year declines getting better? John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Let me take them separately, Mike. On the churn, first and foremost, yes, the feature phone churn is hitting us and having an impact on us, and those are decisions we made not to chase those customers. Can't make the math work on not only the pricing for those customers but the impact throughout our base. But secondly, we believe that we're picking that up and showing tremendous improvement in the prepaid space with Cricket. So we are seeing total churn come down, which I think is really important. With regard to ARPUs, we did have an easier comparison in second quarter of 2015 to second quarter of 2014 because of some promotional activities that took place in second quarter of 2014. But we've seen stabilization in our ARPUs and in our total service revenues, so we feel optimistic about the business going forward. But once again, we're going to be focused on profitable growth, not just chasing customer counts or specific targets. We're going to really be focused on just getting the most profits out of the business.

Michael L. McCormack - Jefferies LLC

Management

John, just a quick follow-up on the churn commentary. Is there anything happening on the involuntary side that you're seeing there? John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: No, Mike, I wouldn't turn you to that. We haven't seen a significant change in bad debts. I'd like to point or forced off (36:48). I wouldn't point to that. Our customer base is – quite frankly, we're very lucky to have the quality customer base we have. We're very fortunate.

Michael L. McCormack - Jefferies LLC

Management

Great. Thanks, John John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We'll now go to Phil Cusick with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Philip A. Cusick - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

Hi, guys. Thanks. So first on EPS, should we be thinking for 2016 of the mid-single digit or better off of the $2.71 midpoint, or should we be thinking about it a different way given the DTV deal? Thanks. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Phil, let's look at it this way. We're not changing our guidance for 2016 going forward, so the mid-single-digit growth rate is still good.

Philip A. Cusick - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

The $2.71 is the... John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: I'm not going to refer to – it's still good even with this adjusted guidance.

Philip A. Cusick - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

Okay, so $2.71 is the right starting point. Thanks. And then on Project Agile, can you give us an update on what the overall cost-cutting level is here and how we should think about that pacing in the next few years? John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: I'd say this. We're going to expect it to continue growing over the next few years. What we had said originally was that we were shooting for $3 billion of cost savings. I would suggest to you that we're probably somewhere between a third and a half of the way there, and that we plan to at least get there, get to that total target or exceed it. And then I'd point to the $2.5 billion of targeted DTV merger synergies. And certainly based on what we know now, we expect to see us get there or exceed those. So those would be the two points. I would hope that we could exceed the Project Agile targets based on the progress we've made so far. These efforts do take time and investment, and we've been spending that time and investment over the last couple years to get here. We're seeing the results pay off. We're going to keep our focus in this direction, but we would hope to be able to exceed it.

Philip A. Cusick - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

Thanks, John. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We now have a question from Simon Flannery with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Okay, thank you very much. Good evening. John, can you talk a little bit about the video momentum? And you went through some of the channel changes here. On a net basis you did have subscriber losses, but I think you said before that you're hoping to grow your video subscribers over time. So perhaps you can just take us through the quarter and you showed some good gross adds on the DTV side. What's going on there with churn, and when do you expect to return to positive video adds? Thanks. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Simon, good question. I think we had a slide on this with a chart that can tell you what was going on. Prior to the deal, there was some real pressure in the satellite video area. Performance was less than it had been last year. And then as you see it coming out after the merger and after we started rolling out sales in the stores, you could see that we really picked up the trend, and we expect that to continue. Secondly, with the rollout this quarter of the, if you will, one-truck roll or single-service experience where we can install TV and broadband at the same time, we not only expect the satellite TV to pick up, but we also expect the broadband, IP broadband, to pick up because people buy those things together. And so we're hopeful that we're going to see – we'll be able to show you some improvements and trend improvements continuing off of the third quarter in the fourth quarter. I won't make any predictions…

Operator

Operator

Thank you, and our next question is from Brett Feldman with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Brett Joseph Feldman - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Just a quick point of clarification and then a question. You talk about the fulfillment accounting methodology change in the slide. Is that your previous methodology change from August, or was there something new? John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Brett, that's the same change. And if I could, before you ask your question, let me give you guys some insights on it. On a year-over-year basis in this quarter, the fulfillment accounting had about a $0.02 impact. That is the differential between applying it to DIRECTV and U-verse this quarter as opposed to just applying it to the U-verse product last third quarter of 2014, and so that did give us some help. Additionally in this quarter, I want to point out. We had about $0.01 of help from the CAF [Connect America Fund] funding activity that went on and what we applied for. By the same token, we had about $0.01 of hurt or pressure from the Mexico operations that we didn't have last year. And if you look at our income tax expense, except for setting aside anything that we treated otherwise, there's about $0.02 of income tax pressure, EPS pressure from income taxes. So when you look at the fulfillment accounting and the other unique items that occurred, they balance off with the CAF funding and fulfillment accounting generating about $0.03 of benefits, and Mexico and the income tax was generating about $0.03 of pressure. So we treated those all as going – because they're going to be going forward, because they're going to be continuing, I want to make sure I pointed that out. With…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from David Barden with Bank of America. Go ahead, please.

David William Barden - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess two if I could. Just first, John, a little bit following up on that question, just in terms of looking at the new way that AT&T is presenting itself to the marketplace, should we be looking at modeling the wireless business separately and the consumer business as giving us two very unique pictures of two very unique businesses, or is this really just AT&T Wireless the way it's always been run and we really should just be thinking about dividing it between the two pieces? That would be the first one. And the second one is on CapEx. There are so many now new parts of the business. Could you give us how CapEx is now being allocated between the Latin America, Mexico, and the domestic business units, and how we should think about all those different pieces trending? Thanks. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: So a couple things. One, David, for investor and analyst ease, we've provided total wireless and then provided the consumer wireless, the ability to get to the business wireless, and we've tried to be very upfront with regard to our financial presentation. So hopefully we've been successful with that. But we tried to do that to make sure you had that information. Two, I would suggest to you that as you look at it, the margins and the EBITDAs and profitabilities are – they are certainly different but they're not materially different. They don't significantly skew one way or the other. So I'd just make that observation for you. With regard to how you model, I'll leave that to you guys' modeling. I can tell you the way we focused on it is what the business relationships we're selling…

David William Barden - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Got it. Thanks, John. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Thanks, David.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question will come from Jeff Kvaal with Nomura. Go ahead, please.

Jeffrey Kvaal - Nomura Securities International, Inc.

Management

Yes, thank you all very much. I was hoping that we could spend a bit more time talking about churn. It seems as though there are some natural feature phone issues that are on the postpaid side anyway. Prepaid is faring quite well. Could you help us understand if we should be expecting more of that across the industry? Is this an AT&T-specific item that will stick us with for a few quarters, or how we should see that? And then secondly, I'm wondering on the DIRECTV synergies. What might be the first opportunity that you would have to update us on whether you are on or ahead of plan for that $2.5 billion? Thank you. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Sure. On the feature phone phenomenon, I would tell you that yes, our base of feature phones continues to get smaller. So over time, we'll lessen the impact this has on our churn. Secondly, Jeff, I would leave it to you guys to talk about it or to decide whether others in the industry are taking this approach. It appears to us from where we see customers moving around that some of the other carriers are not taking the same approach, and they're focused more on customer counts than they are necessarily on the profitability of the customers. But I think you would be the better judge of figuring that out. And I say that based on the offers I see that we are dealing with and the noise in the market. On the $2.5 billion, I think first and foremost, you'll see it in our results. But with regard to updating you, I think we'll continue to update you on the process like we've done today where we talked about how the retail stores are generating sales exceeding our expectations, how the single-truck roll is going to start rolling out November, those kinds of things. And I think you'll see us also update you like we did with the Viacom announcement where we basically said that we're going to get best-in-industry pricing for our platform. And so that would imply that we are getting to or meeting or exceeding our synergy targets. With regard to specifically reporting on the $2.5 billion number, I don't expect to be doing that the rest of this year or early next year because we are still in the midst of really getting it done, and we're more focused on getting it done than we are on reporting out on what it is.

Jeffrey Kvaal - Nomura Securities International, Inc.

Management

Okay, thank you very much, and we'll try and sort it out. You aren't making it easy for me in my first quarter, but I'm doing my best. Thank you. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: I'm sorry about that, Jeff.

Jeffrey Kvaal - Nomura Securities International, Inc.

Management

No, no. I'm delighted to be here. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: We're trying to make it as easy – we really did put the financial statements together in a way to try to make it as easy as possible to see.

Jeffrey Kvaal - Nomura Securities International, Inc.

Management

Thank you, I appreciate it. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: So we'll do our best.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question will come from Michael Rollins with Citi. Please go ahead.

Michael I. Rollins - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Broker

Hi, thanks for taking the questions, two if I could. First, going back to the 2016 guidance where you described improving free cash flow, I was curious if that relates back to the free cash flow guidance in August. Or does that now refer to the updated free cash flow guidance for 2015? John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: That applied to the free cash flow guidance of $13 billion or better.

Michael I. Rollins - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Broker

Okay. And then secondly, can you just talk about in wireless how you're thinking about device installments versus the possibility of using leases as an alternative financing mechanism for customers, and how you see the environment evolving competitively for your mobile smartphone customers? Thanks. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Mike, good question. First and foremost, with regard to installment plan versus a lease, we certainly have the financial capability and wherewithal to manage either one, to do either one, and we're open to it. But quite frankly, right now our customers seem quite pleased with the installment program. And simply put, they seem to like it because at the end of their term, they own the phone. And the phones have continued use and functionality for them, and they continue to use that. And to some extent, we're seeing a side of that from this continued use of bring your own device activities in our company where people are bringing in devices that they already own and hooking them up to our network. But from a company perspective, it's more of a decision, and Ralph de la Vega and Glenn Lurie and the team follow it really closely. It's more about what the customers want. And if we see that the customers are going to want that program, we'll certainly consider – we certainly have the capability to do it. But right now we believe that the customers' satisfaction comes from that ability to own the phone at the end of that agreed-to term, and they feel real comfortable about that. And quite frankly, the difference in price I don't think is measurable from a lease to the – depending upon what situation you have. But when you get down to the real costs of it, it seems like it's worked out well for us by doing the installment plan.

Michael I. Rollins - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Broker

Thanks very much. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Sure. Michael J. Viola - Senior Vice President-Investor Relations, AT&T, Inc.: Cathy, we'll take one more question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That will come from James Ratcliffe with Buckingham Research. Please go ahead.

James M. Ratcliffe - The Buckingham Research Group, Inc.

Management

Great, thanks for taking the question, two if I could. First on wireless and just following up, broadly do you see value in actually selling the phone to the customer? In other words, does it matter whether somebody gets their new iPhone from you or orders it from Apple and it sits on their books? And secondly on broadband, a couple quarters now where you're overall losing customers. Can you just give us a little insight on what the trends are in DSL and particularly where those losses are coming? Are those people in areas where you don't offer U-verse, or is it additional migration over to U-verse in areas where you do offer it? Thanks. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Sure. On the value side of customers, it's more about being able to provide in the stores a full scope customer experience and take care of all their needs. That's what we're concerned about. From a perspective of – if they buy the phones somewhere else and bring it to us, we're thrilled with serving them in that way. We don't have the cost of handling the phone or we don't quite frankly have the cost of financing the phone either on an installment plan or through a subsidized program. So we're open to it. Right now on the equipment installment program that Apple has, they sent us a high number of phones through that program, and that's fine. We love to serve our customers that way. And if that's how they choose to buy the phones through Apple and Apple finances them, that's something we can definitely work with. So it's really more about what does the customer want, and how we make sure that we provide choices and services to…

James M. Ratcliffe - The Buckingham Research Group, Inc.

Management

Great, thank you. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: Thank you. John J. Stephens - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive Vice President: With that, I want to thank all of you for being on the call today, and I'll just give you a few closing comments before we go. The third quarter clearly delivered on our transformation strategy. We saw double-digit growth in our key financial metrics, including another outstanding free cash flow quarter. The integration of DIRECTV is also on track. We expect to meet or beat our $2.5 billion cost synergy target, and we're just beginning to unleash potential promotional activities to drive bundled sales. You can see our increased confidence in the guidance update, where we raised our adjusted EPS and free cash flow expectations for the year. We believe this is just the beginning. We are positioned as a unique competitor and the first scaled communications and video provider to offer fully-integrated nationwide products, and we fully expect to increase our momentum as we go forward. Thanks again for being on the call. On your way home tonight, please don't text and drive. Remember, it can wait. And as always, thank you for your interest in AT&T and have a good evening.