Altice USA, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Altice USA third quarter 2024 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce you to Sarah Friedman with Investor Relations. Thank you, Sarah. You may begin.

Thank you. Welcome to LTCUSA Q3 2024 Earnings Call. We are joined today by LTCUSA's Chairman and CEO, Dennis Matthew, and CFO, Mark Sirota, who together will take you through the presentation and then be available for questions. As today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements, please carefully review the section titled Forward-Looking Statements on slide two. Now turning over to Dennis to begin.

Thank you, Sarah, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. As I reflect on my two years at Optimum, I'm incredibly proud of how far we've come in building the foundation we envisioned. Phase one of our transformation was to stabilize our operations, create a dynamic and innovative culture, and focus on delivering superior products and services over our award-winning networks. We strengthened our leadership bench, broke down organizational silos, and began to implement process tools and system improvements based on feedback from customers and employees. It was a proud moment when we were certified as a great place to work this year because it marked a turning point in our culture, reflecting the revitalization and pride our people now feel to be part of Team Optimum. Quality and value are paramount to the transformation of our customer experience, and so we prioritize both. To drive quality products, quality networks, and quality service, we have made fundamental and comprehensive changes to our operations, which have led to a significant reduction in outages, more reliable products, a smoother fiber migration journey, and strong cross-functional partnerships across our frontline organizations. This work has resulted in recognition from organizations like UCLA, PCMag, CNET, ACSI, and others, acknowledging our progress in customer experience, network excellence, and service leadership across our footprint. From a value perspective, we repositioned Optima Mobile and launched a true mobile strategy. We established simplified and transparent pricing and right-size speeds for almost 1 million customers. This has allowed us to meaningfully stabilize churn in the face of increasing competition from fixed wireless and overbuilders. Simultaneously, we implemented a new level of financial discipline across every area of the business, which has enabled us to stabilize OPEX, capital intensity, and ARPU erosion. Phase one included delivering over $500 million of improvements across operating expenses and capital expenditures. When I started, OPEX was run rating over $2.7 billion and was on a trajectory to keep climbing. We are now run rating closer to $2.6 billion with a path to moderate this further over time. Our capital spend was $1.9 billion in full year 22. This year, we expect $1.5 billion of capex, a reduction of approximately $400 million in two years. In full year 22, our residential ARPU declined over 2% year-over-year, more than a $3 decline. Since then, we've sustained residential ARPU above $135 each quarter, despite challenges from video declines. We successfully moderated this rate of decline in 23 and anticipate further improvement this year. We are proud of the progress that we have made, but we know we have much more work to do. We are now progressing to phase two of our journey, which is to accelerate business transformation. This work will position Optimum to succeed competitively, grow new revenue streams, moderate OPEX, deliver more value to our customers and communities, and return to sustainable growth. In our conversation today, I look forward to providing you with a view into how we expect this transformation to improve our financial and operational trajectory and generate shareholder value. Before diving into the details, I want to take a moment to acknowledge those affected by the recent hurricanes in the southern states. Our hearts go out to all these communities. Hurricane Helene impacted some of the communities we serve in North Carolina. I'm incredibly proud of our team's swift and coordinated response, showing how much faster, more organized and effective we have become under our current leadership. Our teams mobilize quickly to deploy Wi-Fi access and charging trailers, provide connectivity for emergency shelters, issue support to our customers, and restore service quickly. Our commitment to our communities remains stronger than ever as we continue to support their rebuilding and recovery efforts. Let's now turn to slide three to review our business performance. In Q3, we reported revenue of $2.2 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $862 million, and cash capex of $359 million. As we discussed previously, the macroeconomic environment, video cord cutting, and increased level of competition continued to weigh on our Q3 results. However, we remain focused on the elements within our control, driving fiber penetration, accelerating mobile line additions, achieving relatively stable ARPU despite pressure from video losses, and maintaining near record low levels of churn. We also improved capital efficiency year to date and generated free cash flow, all while continuing to improve quality, customer experience, and operational metrics. Overall, along with other operators within our footprint, we continue to experience low levels of activity this quarter, both lower gross ad activity and less disconnect activity. However, we made notable progress in direct competition against certain key competitors. And we accelerated positive momentum around our fiber internet and mobile products, which remain key growth engines for the company. We added 47,000 fiber net additions ending the quarter with 482,000 fiber customers. We achieved penetration of approximately 17% across our total fiber footprint with some markets achieving closer to 30%. This was one of our best quarters for fiber migrations, accounting for over 70% of our fiber net ads, underscoring the strong demand among our base. In Q3, we achieved our strongest mobile performance in four years, adding 36,000 new mobile lines, reaching 420,000 lines at the end of the quarter. We anticipate continued acceleration in mobile as we introduce competitive new offers, expand our product portfolio, maximize the strength of our sales channels, and further scale mobile sales into care and retention. As mentioned, continued low levels of activity coupled with continued competitive pressure across our footprint contributed to broadband subscriber net losses of 50,000 in the quarter. I'd like to provide more insight into the trends we're observing within our footprint. Most of the year-over-year decline in our gross ad performance was seen within our income-constrained customer segment. Contributing to this was the sunset of ACP and fewer additions in our back-to-school university footprint. The roll-off of the ACP program earlier this year had an impact in Q3 on both gross ads and disconnects. We experienced approximately 10,000 ACP-related disconnects in the quarter, primarily driven by non-pay disconnects. Overall, on disconnect trends, we saw strong performance in the quarter relative to our competition. Disconnect volumes improved year over year and outperformed our competitors' rate of loss based on third-party open signal data. Excluding the churn impact from ACP, our underlying disconnect trends have improved. This improvement was in part related to less switching activity. However, it also reflects the continued improvements from our network enhancements, focus on first-time rights, and the introduction of AVA, our internal AI virtual assistant, which helps guide our agents to address the specific individual needs of our customers. From a gross ads perspective, we continued to experience lower activity, which was partially offset by wind share improvements against fixed wireless, mature fiber operators, and steady progress in our new build areas. Last quarter, we noted that July showed stable year-over-year trends. However, as we progressed through the quarter, performance declined due to a slowdown in overall switching volume within our footprint, overbuilders launching in incremental markets with aggressive acquisition offers, and ACP non-pay churn weighted towards September. Lastly, to note, our Q3 ending subscribers and net additions also included a one-time positive adjustment to align to the company's bulk residential subscriber count, resulting in an increase of 4,700 residential customer relationships, 3,800 broadband customers, and 5,200 video customers. Next, I'd like to highlight a few key accomplishments in Q3 related to our financial discipline, go-to-market strategy, and critical network and service enhancements. We demonstrated gross margin expansion of 50 basis points year over year, and we delivered free cash flow of approximately $100 million year to date. We opportunistically used free cash flow for debt repayment, reducing our revolving credit facility by $100 million this quarter. And we now anticipate full-year capital expenditures of approximately $1.5 billion while maintaining high-quality network investments. This is made possible by our new network leadership team's focus on strategic project prioritization, stabilizing network operations, and driving enhanced project efficiencies. Thanks to these efforts, we are implementing a multi-year network strategy that ensures we can compete most effectively at the town and local level. On our go-to-market, we continue to evolve our offers, base management strategy, and drive convergence to effectively compete in every market we serve. In September, we rolled out our latest offers, which enable customers to mix and match the services they take through Optimum, with broadband as the hero product mobile, and our new TV packages as add-ons and a three-year price block for taking all three products. We are pleased with the initial results, including an increase in customers taking multiple products. Additionally, as it relates to our new strategic approach to video, I'm pleased to share that this month we completed the launch of our full suite of exciting new TV packages. Entertainment TV, Extra TV, and Everything TV which deliver content tailored to what customers want at compelling new price points, all available over IPTV and alongside a customer's favorite streaming services. Entertainment TV, which features over 80 top-rated entertainment channels at a $30 price point, has been available since the end of the summer and is already seeing a strong response from customers even before a marketing ramp-up. Starting today, we began offering Extra TV, which brings customers over 125 entertainment, live news, and national sports channels for $85. And Everything TV, which is all that plus regional sports networks and premium networks for $140. Video remains an important product in our portfolio. And together, these three TV packages bring to life the new vision of Optimum TV. which helps break conventional all-or-nothing options to better provide content geared toward customers' unique and modern viewing preferences. These options are made possible by more flexible programming agreements, which enable an improved margin profile. And last, on our go-to-market strategy, we are taking disciplined steps to improve our share of connects, especially in an environment of overall low growth stat activity. We are actively optimizing our sales channel mix, revitalizing our sales teams, and implementing more performance-driven marketing efforts to stay ahead in the evolving marketplace. On our network and service enhancements, we continue to increase fiber passings and we'll end this year as planned with nearly 3 million passings. As a result of our capital improvements and strengthened operations, We have increased our capacity to handle more fiber migrations and significantly improved the migration process as we continue to ramp up on marketing fiber. And as we've discussed over the last several quarters, we have made significant strides in strengthening our networks and operations. This has led to marked improvements in service call and visit trends across our customer base. reflecting our ongoing commitment to enhancing our network and customer experience. Last quarter, we outlined key elements of our long-term roadmap. Turning to slide four, I'd like to dive deeper and size some of the items that we consider potential near-term opportunities. The main drivers of future top-line potential are from improving broadband subscriber trends, as well as better managing our total subscriber base and increasing the number of products each customer takes, with a path to grow mobile to over 1 million lines by 27. In addition to the revenues generated by our core products, we have an opportunity to drive growth through value-added services. This includes our existing portfolio of value-added services, such as the Total Care Support Plan, which fully launched in April of this year at a price point of $15 per month. It also includes the introduction of new value-added products. For example, early next year, we will begin offering customers whole home Wi-Fi to support their evolving connectivity needs and begin offering them the ability to purchase their favorite streaming services directly through Optimum to support their evolving entertainment needs. Products such as Total Care, whole home Wi-Fi, and mobile device insurance have ARPUs in the $10 to $20 range. These products have low to no penetration, and as we launch more over the coming quarters, we are benchmarking against industry standards of over 20% customer base penetration. This represents a meaningful opportunity to drive sustained improvement in ARPU trends over time, while enhancing the value we provide to our long-tenured customer base. Within B2B, we continue to introduce new products to better serve our small and medium business customers. In Q4, we're excited to launch our new connection backup service, broaden our security offerings, and upgrade our pro Wi-Fi solution. These are products with strong ARPUs, which we can drive meaningfully into the base and at point of sale. We have much more to come in B2B by expanding managed services, enhancing security features, and growing our current product offerings. Next, a moment on Fiber. We have a strong portfolio of network assets, including our HFC and Fiber networks, both of which continue to deliver exceptional experiences for customers. Fiber is a differentiated and premium network asset that provides unmatched performance, scalability, and reliability. and we are still in the early stages of unlocking the full potential of this powerful network. Our objective is to upgrade customers to fiber, which delivers many benefits, including elevating customer lifetime value, lowering churn rates, and driving higher ARPUs over time. It also enhances our network efficiency and reduces long-term operational expenses by streamlining infrastructure and support needs. We expect to reach the milestone of 500,000 fiber customers before the end of this year. And through more targeted acquisition and migration strategies, we believe we have a path to grow our fiber base to more than 1 million customers or 30% penetration by year end 26. Moving to the next section, we continue to find meaningful ways to drive operational efficiencies. As we continue to improve our gross margin profile, we are looking to achieve around 70% gross margin by 2026 by optimizing our programming agreements, scaling up our mobile base, and growing our mobile insurance products and accessories. As we are sharpening our focus on business transformation, we are evolving our operational models to fuel growth, simplifying our processes, and leveraging and embracing technology solutions. This includes AI, machine learning, digitization and automation, and institutionalizing experimentation as a core mindset for our people. This work will position us as a digital native company, streamline costs and deliver measurable progress by 2025, including a reduction in our operating expenses over time. We've identified meaningful opportunities to drive efficiencies while simultaneously growing the business and enhancing the customer experience. Over time, these efforts support a return to normalized adjusted EBITDA margins near 40%. Finally, our goal is to sustain a capital structure that supports our long-term operational roadmap. As it relates to capital expenditure efficiency, We will be working towards a path to annual capital spend of under $1.3 billion in 2025, while continuing to invest and upgrade our fiber and HFC networks. Through improved operations, including proactive maintenance efforts and better field productivity, we are maximizing the impact of each dollar invested. In summary, Successfully implementing these opportunities could improve our free cash flow by up to $400 million over time. We remain steadfast on our journey to reshape the business, and I'm confident that we are on a path to return to sustainable long-term growth to deliver value to our shareholders. With that, I will now turn it over to Mark to review our quarterly performance in more details.

Thank you, Dennis. Turning to slide six, first I'd like to spend a moment highlighting the value proposition of our fiber and mobile strategies and the benefits these services are delivering for our business. We have 9.8 million total passings in our footprint, including 2.9 million fiber passings, primarily concentrated in the northeast. Both our HFC and fiber networks are high-quality networks delivering one gig or higher speeds over 95% of our footprint. And when pairing Optima Meet Internet with Optima Mobile, we are seeing improved trends across the board. Customers on fiber have higher satisfaction scores, driven by improved network reliability, higher symmetrical speeds of up to eight gigabits per second, and lower latency. Fiber customers generate 10% higher gross at R2 compared to HFC customers as they subscribe to faster speeds. Our fiber network is designed with robust capacity, easily supporting these faster speeds and increased data usage. 45% of our new fiber customers take one gig or faster speeds, and 28% of our broadband-only fiber customers use over one terabyte of data per month. Our fiber network is even more powerful when bundled with mobile driving deeper customer engagement and retention. Over the past year, we've increased the percentage of our base that takes a converged product of broadband plus mobile from approximately 3% to 5%, with more runway to grow. Converged customers also churn less. Notably, in Q3, our converged HFC broadband plus mobile bundle had lower annualized churn compared to HFC customers without mobile service. And this story is even stronger with fiber. Our fiber base already has experiences 14% lower annualized churn than HFC. But when customers on fiber also adopt mobile, annualized churn improves by 32% compared to our HFC cohort that does not yet take mobile. In summary, whether on HFC or fiber, convergence with mobile deepens customer relationships. increases loyalty, and reinforces the value of our network investments. With this strong foundation, we are well positioned to build on our converged momentum. Turning to slide seven, I'll review our financial trends. In Q3, total revenue of $2.2 billion declined 3.9% year over year. This was driven by residential revenue decline of 5.6%, primarily due to a smaller customer base with most of the decline attributed to video subscriber losses. Residential ARPU of $135.77 declined 1.9% year-over-year and was down just 0.1% sequentially from Q2. The year-over-year decline is predominantly driven by video cord cutting and timing of rate actions, which benefited Q3 of the prior year. Pro forma residential ARPU, excluding the impacted video, is approximately $83, which is flat year-over-year and grew 1% sequentially for the past two quarters. Despite the overall pressure on our residential business, residential mobile services revenue grew 50% year-over-year, which is the fourth consecutive quarter of 50% or higher year-over-year growth. Business services revenue was relatively flat year-over-year in Q3. driven by growth in our Lightpath Enterprise business and offset by declines in SMB and other, which was primarily affected by rate compression in our carrier business in the West footprint. News and advertising grew 9.5% year-over-year in Q3, driven by strong political advertising revenue in the quarter. Despite top-line pressures, we are improving efficiency and managing direct costs, with gross margins increasing by 50 basis points year-over-year to over 68%. This is mainly driven by improved video pricing, optimized programming costs, and improvements in mobile direct profitability. Total adjusted EBITDA declined 5.8% year-over-year in Q3, tied to pressure from top-line growth. Adjusted EBITDA was relatively stable sequentially and drove adjusted EBITDA margin of 38.7%. Total expenses excluding share-based compensation improved by 2.6% year-over-year driven by lower direct costs, including programming, and a slight increase in other operating expenses. Turning to slide eight, I'll review cash capital expenditures and our progress on enhancing and investing in our networks. Cash capital expenditures in Q3 were $359 million and approximately $1 billion year-to-date. representing capital intensity of 15.5%. We anticipate full-year capital spend of $1.5 billion coming in below our initial guidance of $1.6 to $1.7 billion provided earlier this year. This represents a $200 million reduction compared to full-year 2023 capital spend and a $400 million reduction compared to 2022. As Dennis mentioned, as we transition from operational stabilization to meaningful business transformation, we are challenging our business models and accelerating digitalization and automation. We believe by equipping our teams with advanced tools and streamlined workflows, we can effectively manage capital expenditures by prioritizing our highest return capital projects coupled with enhanced efficiencies. Additionally, over the past year, We have refined our procurement operations, including an improved RFP process. We are reengaging with our technology vendors to strengthen partnerships and encourage healthy competition, which is helping to improve our cost profile. We ended Q3 with 2.9 million fiber passings, and year-to-date, we have expanded our total footprint by 156,000 passings across HFC and fiber new builds and edge-outs. We expect to add more than 175,000 new passings to our total footprint in the full year. In addition to footprint expansion and fiber upgrades, our capital envelope supports improving and enhancing our existing networks. We have achieved approximately 99% node health across our entire footprint in Q3 through enhanced monitoring and proactive maintenance. This program ensures consistent, reliable service by proactively identifying and addressing potential issues before they affect customers. As of Q3, we've upgraded approximately all of the WETS footprint to DOCSIS 3.1, and we continue to deploy new digital modulation technologies on our DOCSIS 3.1 network to improve broadband performance. Over 3 million customers will experience better speed attainability and reliability this year, and these upgrade costs less than $350 per node. This allows us to reduce the number of capital-intensive node splits required, and we are performing node splits in a more cost-efficient manner. Our targeted approach to capital spending focuses on high-impact, cost-effective network upgrades and allows us to expand capacity, enhance service quality, and manage future growth within our capital resources. Next, on slide 9, I will review free cash flow trends. In Q3, we generated $77 million of free cash flow and approximately $100 million year-to-date. Our free cash flow trends reflect higher cash interest expense, which stepped up by $115 million in Q3 year-over-year. This is primarily driven by the first semi-annual cash interest payment on the $2 billion new issue in January of this year to refinance prior existing term loans. At the end of September, we terminated all of our CSC Holdings interest rate swap agreements with an aggregate notional value of $3 billion. These contracts were due to ensure in January of 2025 and December of 2026. In connection with these early terminations, we received cash of approximately $43 million. While this provided a positive impact on our working capital for the quarter, it was largely offset by cash outflows from higher cash restructuring, settlements, and transaction costs of $41 million. The majority of these costs stem from net cash settlements payment that was accrued in the prior quarter. And finally, on slide 10, I would like to review our debt maturity profile. We remain well-positioned with a clear runway of no maturities until 2027. At the end of Q3, our weighted average cost of debt is 6.8%. Our weighted average life of debt is 4.3 years, and 71% of our debt stack is fixed. At the end of Q3, we remain in a strong liquidity position of approximately $1 billion through undrawn revolver capacity and ending cash balances. And our leverage ratio is 7.1 times the last two quarters annualized adjusted EBITDA. As Dennis mentioned earlier, we remain focused on exploring opportunities that ensure our our capital structure supports our long-term operating goals. While we are well positioned in the near term, we continue to actively assess all options to maintain a capital structure that supports our long-term strategic objectives. In conclusion, we have the right strategy in place with a focus on operational excellence, elevating the customer experience, and continuing to evolve our go-to-market strategy to meet our customers' expectations. We are confident this strategy will guide us towards sustainable long-term growth, creating value for our customers, employees, and shareholders. With that, we will now take any questions.

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press the star key followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the queue. you may press star two to remove a question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. Thank you. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. And the first question comes from the line of Craig Moffitt with Moffitt Nathanson. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, thank you. So your larger peers saw some improvement in broadband, and it seemed as though that maybe was driven by, at least if you set aside ACP, and it seemed like that was driven to some extent by the softening of the pressure from FWA. I'm wondering if you saw the same thing, and with your broadband ARPU growing sequentially, Is that a sign that you think you've sort of repriced your broadband base to the point where it is now sort of competitively priced and you think you can sustainably grow broadband ARPU with sort of industry broadband growth rates?

Hey, Craig. On the growth ad activity and net ad and just competitive environment, You know, across our footprint, we did see a decline in just gross ad activity of about 11% across the industry. At the same time, we saw a little bit of a decline in disconnects activity as well. And as we look at the competitive landscape, we did see expansion of fixed wireless in the east, particularly as you think about Verizon. Fixed Wireless and Timo. And then in the West, we did see some expansion with AT&T and Timo. And we continue to see fiber overbuilder activity every month. That being said, we are happy with our win-loss percentage continuing to improve as we are starting to compete a bit better with our hyper-local go-to-market strategies. both in terms of fixed wireless and in terms of fiber overbuilders as they launch in our footprints. We are competing more effectively as we start to compete much earlier prior to these announcements and ensure that we can deliver a great portfolio of products. And so we are starting to stabilize across those markets that have already seen overbuilder launches. And so I would say we're continuing to see fixed wireless expand. We're continuing to see fiber overbuilders expand. That being said, I do believe we have the right portfolio of products and we're evolving our go-to-market strategies to compete more and more effectively. There's less jump balls. So I am very pleased with the team being able to keep churn stable, even with these headwinds of increased competition. And I think that's really a testament to the improved quality that we're delivering, quality products, quality service, and quality network. From an ARPU perspective, this has been a journey for us, as you know, Craig. You know, ARPU, we began this journey when I started, and we saw a pretty significant decline, 2% to $3 step down. We've been able to stabilize that across the last seven quarters. That has included putting in place the right price value equation that has helped us tremendously by speed rightsizing customers and giving them the right value as well as launching products like mobile and optimum complete. But then also putting more science behind how we're managing promo rolls and rate increases Unfortunately, we didn't have that infrastructure in place, and now we're able to do that in a way that optimizes monetization and mitigates churn. And so we are confident that we are going to be able to continue to stabilize and ultimately grow broadband ARPUs and customer ARPUs as we further stabilize our promo role rate event process and as we launch new products and new value added services like total care like a whole home wi fi and others and phase one has been all about stabilization and now we're going on the offensive to drive growth.

Thank you yeah.

And the next question comes from the line of Jonathan chaplain with new street research, please proceed with your question.

Thanks, guys. Two related questions on margins. First, on mobile, can you give us a sense of how much of a drag this is creating for EBITDA at the moment? And then what mobile EBITDA would be by the time you get to a million customers at the end of 2026? And then relatedly on margins for 2026, the 40% target is obviously great. It I guess my concern is that we saw the prior management team get quite aggressive on costs and ultimately it looks like that cost the business in the medium term and costs had to increase to kind of repair some of that damage. And I'd love you to sort of just contextualize the costs that will come out between now and 2026 in the context of the big reinvestments you've made in the business and like why we shouldn't be concerned that those costs ultimately have a negative impact on revenue trends. Thank you.

Hey, Jonathan. I'll start and then, of course, Mark can chime in. No, we feel really bullish on this opportunity to continue to optimize efficiency and our operating model and ultimately drive down operating expense. As I've mentioned in previous calls, we've been on a journey to really ensure that we have the right level of quality across this organization in terms of products, network, and service. And that's really allowed us to drive down contact rate, drive down service visit rates, as I've mentioned in the past. And we continue to see marked improvement, 11% call-in rate decline year-over-year, 300,000 fewer service visits, 28% decline year-over-year. And this is just the beginning. This is really just rolling up our sleeves, working hard, working smart, but a lot of hard work. And now as we move forward, we have an opportunity to drive digital, drive automation, drive true transformation into the organization. When we showed up, there was a level of brokenness in terms of processes and capabilities was vast. And we began working hard on things that, quite frankly, Mark and I were working on in other organizations probably 10, 15 years ago. And we've implemented those changes over the last two years and have put a foundation in place to allow us now to drive accelerated growth. And this growth will come on the back of improved customer experience, which will ultimately drive efficiency and allow us to grow revenue. And so we're going to further drive down noise in the system. We're going to further drive down calls. We're going to further drive down truck rolls. We're going to become a digital-first company so that you can buy products from us digitally, so that you can service your products digitally through our apps and online, so that you can pay your bills, so that you can resolve any issues that you have. And this will allow us to drive down noise in the system and ultimately lay the foundation for an optimized operating expense model that will fuel growth as we move forward. Mark, if you want to chime in on the mobile piece.

Yeah, just, again, on operating efficiency, really pleased with the power of AI and how we've deployed that across the footprint and our sales channels. upwards of 6,000 agents are now leveraging AI to guide every single conversation we have with our customers. We're about to launch new AI platforms on why did my build change? And so simple things like that, we're going to be able to answer in seconds versus minutes today. So excited about where we're heading with AI, how we're going to be able to deflect noise out of our network operations using AI technology. From a mobile perspective, again, Very optimistic about what Convergence does for our company. We've seen expansion in direct mobile margins over the year. Very pleased with that. And we think it will continue to serve as a linchpin as far as driving down broadband churn and accelerating lifetime value for our customers. So we're just getting started. When you couple mobile with fiber, as you heard, 32% reduction in churn. And we're really just starting to get going. on these platforms and excited for where it's going to go.

Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

And the next question comes from the line of Cutgun Miral with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the questions. Two, if I could. First, you highlighted a fairly attractive set of opportunities across revenue, fiber, margins, and CapEx. Historically, meeting multi-year targets for not all T specifically, but for the industry overall has been difficult for various companies in large part because of the volatility in broadband unit growth. I know you're not providing explicit multi-year broadband subscriber guidance today, but as we think about some of these margin targets and the free cash flow improvement opportunities you laid out, can you share perhaps what's embedded from a subscriber perspective? And second, On mobile, you outline, again, a compelling case for the benefits of scaling the mobile subscriber base. You talked about a path to growing mobile to over 1 million lines by the end of 27. Not to get too in the weeds here, but this would imply about an average 45,000 that adds a quarter. You just achieved a high watermark for the last four years at 36,000. So, Dennis, I know you hit on a few initiatives, but can you expand a bit more about you know, how you expect to accelerate that pace and what that cadence looks like over the coming years. Thank you.

Thank you, Kaka. And I'll start with mobile because we're really starting to see an acceleration here. This has been a journey for us as we relaunched mobile about 18 months ago. New pricing, new packaging. We launched in our sales channels, of course. We were able to build out retail and transformed them into mobile sales centers. We were also able to pull together acquisition offers like Optimum Complete that are now gaining really nice traction in inbound sales and door-to-door and across the board, we're really in the early innings in terms of the balance of our channels. And when you think of our peers, they do an incredible job selling in retention, selling in care, selling across every touchpoint, and we're just getting started. You know, we've just started to sell in care and retention. We are a little less than 30% participation. And so we have a really meaningful opportunity now to really start to scale across the balance of our internal channels and really start to accelerate into that type of pacing. I ultimately believe that we can get to the pacing of our peers. If you look at what our peers are doing and you normalize for size, I think we should be right in line with them, closer to 60,000 a quarter. But we're going to take it one step at a time and really start to scale out the balance of our channels and roll out some new advanced base management strategies that'll help us drive our customers into retail and ultimately do a better job of raising awareness and consideration amongst our base. Similarly, if you look at the broader set of opportunities, we have exactly the same opportunity. We are launching new products that are very much industry standard products that Mark and I know very well. When you look at opportunities on the consumer side, like total care, like like whole home Wi-Fi. We just launched some new video tiers. These are all tiers that we feel very confident that we can drive in terms of growth that attach, but more importantly, drive attach into the base. And then when we look at B2B, We've spent some time this year really investing in that organization and building up that leadership team. And we're going to be launching some new products to help us expand beyond just being a pipe. We're going to launch products like connection backup and advanced security. We have an opportunity to expand beyond just SMB into mid-market. and enterprise in more meaningful fashions. And so these are all opportunities that we're confident, just like we've been able to relaunch mobile and drive mobile, just like we've been able to really start to accelerate fiber, fixed fiber in terms of the migration process. We have a whole set of new top line opportunities that we're confident we can drive. In addition to all the transformation I discussed earlier, as we leverage digital and AI to transform our operating structure. Mark, anything you'd like to add?

Yeah, just from a broadband perspective, as Dennis mentioned, very pleased with our churn profile. We're hitting all-time lows around churn, and so continuing to drive the right products. We talked about mobile and fiber and how that impacts churn. We'll continue to drive that, so that gives us optimism. around where we head from a broadband perspective. We feel like there is still an opportunity on the gross ad side, especially on the low-income side, where we see most pressure. We're going to work to solve that, and we will in the upcoming quarters. And then just back on mobile, we feel strong about how our new offers are taking shape. Over 60% increase in line penetration from our old offers. So we're feeling optimistic around our trajectory around unit growth.

Yeah, on unit growth in particular, we've seen improvements in our sales channels in terms of productivity and yield. We're seeing strong improvement in our field organization as we talk about completion rate. And now we're laser focused on continuing to drive top of the funnel activity. And we're controlling everything that we can control and We're confident that as the macro environment continues to evolve, we'll be in a good position to take advantage of it as we build the operational execution muscles that we need to to be able to drive activity and performance.

That's very helpful. Thank you both.

Yes.

Thank you.

And the next question comes from the line of Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could maybe address the CapEx reduction for this year and also the out years. Is that entirely due to efficiencies in the existing footprint of spend, or are you seeing the opportunity for reduction or maybe just less strong returns than you did before? And does this in any way sort of, you know, how are you thinking about the relative prioritization of your free cash flow goals versus your subscriber growth goals? Thank you.

Jim, I'm really proud of the team and the work they've done in terms of driving capex efficiency. The team has developed a multi-year network strategy to really ensure that we're making the right investments across the network in the most effective way. Just simple examples. Historically, coming into 2024, the only solution for congestion was doing very costly node splits that cost tens of thousands of dollars. The team is now, the network team and the CTIO organization have identified ways using OFDM and OFDMA to be able to address these congestion issues for a fraction of the cost. And so when you start to look at those types of efficiencies, it really allows us to deploy capital in a way that is much more efficient, much more effective. We're able to continue to drive our new build activities and ensure that we can achieve our new build goals in this coming year. And we're continuing to drive our fiber strategy. We have an incredible fiber network, and our priority is now to drive migrations and penetration of that fiber network. And so we're prioritizing CapEx to help us drive maximum return. And the team is doing this in a much more efficient fashion than we've been able to do in the past.

Mark, if you'd like to add to just Jim on free cash flow. So again, we're trying to take a balanced approach to maximize free cash flow growth. In phase one, as we've talked about, and back in 2022 before Dennis joined and I joined, free cash flow declined $1.2 billion year over year with revenues declining, expenses accelerating, and capital accelerating. In 2023, we slowed that rate of decline to about $300 million. And now we're in a position in 2024 to actually grow free cash flow for the first time. So all of these things ladder up to generating free cash flow. We're really pleased on the capital efficiency. I think we have a laser focus around return on investment, and we see a lot of opportunities to still drive strong return on investments, and we'll continue to do so. But we can do this in a more efficient manner. We talked about our procurement team and our partnership with our network services team and our CTIO team. We're just finding opportunities to work with our vendors to accelerate every dollar we have to spend. So really pleased on the trajectory.

Great. Thank you.

And the next question comes from the line of Frank Luthon with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Great, thank you. So in getting to your target of a million mobility subs by 27, it's a pretty steep ramp from the current run rate. Walk us through kind of what you expect to change there in your approach or to reach that level. And then secondly, do you expect any uptick in Q4 from the political spend as that's wound up or is most of that going to just incremental spending going to digital? Thanks.

Thanks, Frank. On mobile, again, I'm really bullish on our trajectory. We had to relaunch mobile 18 months ago. We've really started to find a nice pacing in our sales channels like retail, inbound sales, door-to-door, and that's been supported by launching new packages like Optimum Complete and really just ensuring that we have a full portfolio of a strong portfolio of mobile products. Now that we have that, we're continuing to expand our sales channel activities across channels like care, retention, and really ensuring that we are driving mobile across every touchpoint that we have with our customers. And so this is where I know some of our peers excel. we're still in the early innings of that. And I'm confident that we're going to be able to get to the pacing of our peers in short order. So we're going to have our best mobile quarter. We just had our best mobile quarter. We're going to continue to build on that and have another great quarter in Q4. We're on track for that. And as we expand into these new channels like care and retention, As I mentioned earlier, we are only at about one-third of the launch so far, and that happened late in Q3. And so we're going to continue to expand that across these channels in the next couple of quarters, and that will support our growth quarterly. And on the political spend, Mark, do you want to chime in on that?

Yeah, we're seeing robust political advertising coming out of the presidential campaign. So we're still feeling optimistic. It drove the strong quarterly results. Feel optimistic for a full year where we'll have a near double-digit growth rate on our news and advertising business. So we feel positive about that.

All right, great. Thank you very much. Thanks, Frank.

And the next question comes from the line of Jessica Rife-Earlrick with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. I guess one on the video, the new video packages. It seems like streaming is in a separate package. I'm just wondering, you know, was there any consideration of including it within one of your video packages similar to Charter, which seems like really a true value-add for subscribers? And on this separate streaming package, do you participate in any of the advertising revenue streamers? And this is to follow up since it's been such a big focus for you guys, Fiverr. It seems like obviously you focus on the efficiencies and customer lifetime value. Are there any revenue differences you see from a Fiverr sub and a traditional HFC sub?

Hey, Jessica. I'll start with fiber, and Mark, you'll keep me honest on hitting all these points here. But we have an incredible asset in fiber. We see that every day in the market, that fiber is an incredibly valuable asset. We have 2.9 million growing to 3 million homes. The capacity and performance of the fiber network is really something we're incredibly excited about. We are seeing the benefits of fiber as we look at Our customer base, those that are migrating, we are finding better churn, better customer satisfaction. We are able to drive ARPU growth as we move customers over to fiber. These customers are taking 40% plus in terms of gig and multi-gig services. And so we're excited about fiber and continuing to drive fiber and accelerate fiber. We've had one of our strongest fiber quarters, and we're going to continue to accelerate as we go into Q4 and into 2025. When you talk about streaming and our new video packages, we are excited about our new video packages. Entertainment TV has 80 great channels. Extra has 125, everything. has all of that, and regional sports. And this is all about providing customers the right content, curating the content and getting them the right content at the right price. And early next year, we're also going to be launching our billing on behalf of capabilities where we'll be able to more seamlessly bundle in streaming services. This is why we're so bullish on launching and driving our stream set-top box, It's an Android-based set-top box that we've launched across the east. We're going to be launching that across the west. We're at 30% today. We're going to complete that launch next year. And so we're going to drive the launch of that box so that we can launch these packages and bundle in, have the options to bundle in streaming as we move forward.

Mark, anything you'd add? I think it does, it provides an opportunity for future advertising upside. We currently don't have that now, and so that's an opportunity for us.

Thank you.

And our final question comes from the line of Sebastiano Petty with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to see if perhaps you can update us on what your future plans are for the fiber passings from the 3.0 million that you're at today. Just any color on there and how you're thinking about that relative to HSC, particularly against the backdrop of the updated CapEx envelope that you outlined today. And then particularly within that, you know, how should we think about migrations and what that might mean from a margin perspective as you ramp the level of fiber migrations within the base here.

Hey, Sebastiano. Yes, we're very bullish on our fiber network, and we've built out 2.9, going to 3 million, and our major focus now is driving penetration. We've solved a number of the operational and technical issues, and so we're ramping this past quarter. About 70% of our net ads were driven by fiber migrations, and so as we embed the process into all of our channels, like care, like retention, like retail. We're confident that we're going to be able to continue to drive the growth of fiber. We're looking at our CapEx spend and our multi-year strategy. We want to have the right balance in terms of growing new passing, building fiber, and then driving fiber migration. And so that's there will be a balance there as we come think about the near term we do think that we want to focus on driving fiber penetration and continuing to drive new build four of the fastest growing cities in the country out of the top 16 are in our footprint and so we want to be able to invest there and we're doing that in a fiber rich fashion And so that's our near-term focus, and we'll continue to build out fiber opportunistically where we think we need it to be able to compete effectively.

And if I can ask one follow-up question, just against the backdrop of what we're seeing across the ecosystem, particularly, you know, on your competitor's side, the M&A angle, I mean, how is Altice perhaps thinking about that as either a buyer or seller or particularly depending upon the outcome of maybe the election and maybe a pro-business climate. Is that anything to update or how you see the landscape unfolding over the next several years as perhaps convergence and consolidation becomes more pronounced?

Thank you. Sure. We're always open to value accretive transactions, but there's nothing to announce today. Our focus is to continue to drive our go-to-market strategy and drive growth of our broadband business, both on HFC and fiber, and that's what we're living and breathing every day. So nothing to announce today.

I would just add it just further supports the value of our fiber assets and shows how powerful that is. So pleased to be able to continue to drive more and more customers onto this incredible network. Thank you.

At this time, we have reached the end of the question and answer session, and I would now like to turn the call back over to management for any closing comments.

Thank you all for joining. Please reach out to Investor Relations with any additional questions.

And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Have a great rest of the day.