Crown Castle Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Crown Castle first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please say no to a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one. After all your questions, you may press star and two. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Ben Lowe, Senior Vice President of Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you, Jamie, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we discuss our first quarter 2023 results. With me on the call this morning are Jay Brown, Crown Castle's Chief Executive Officer, and Dan Schlanger, Crown Castle's Chief Financial Officer. To aid the discussion, we have posted supplemental materials in the investor section of our website at crowncastle.com. that will be referenced throughout the call this morning. This conference call will contain forward-looking statements which are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, and the actual results may vary materially from those expected. Information about potential factors which could affect our results is available in the press release and the risk factor sections of the company's SEC filings. Our statements are made as of today, April 20, 2023, and we assume no obligations to update any forward-looking statements. In addition, today's call includes discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Tables reconciling these non-GAAP financial measures are available in the supplemental information package in the investor section of the company's website at crowncastle.com. So with that, let me turn the call over to Jay.

Thanks, Ben, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us on the call. We continue to see positive underlying demand trends as 5G is developed across the U.S., driving first quarter results that were in line with our expectations and no changes to our 2023 outlook. As we discussed in the press release, we expect our near-term results to be impacted by a combination of the Sprint network rationalization and a higher interest rate environment, which will result in minimal dividend growth in 2024 and 2025, despite strong projected underlying growth throughout our business. Looking past these discrete items, we believe our strategy will allow us to deliver on our long-term target of growing dividends per share at 7% to 8% per year. Our strategy is to grow revenues on our shared infrastructure and invest in new assets that will generate additional future growth. By executing this strategy, we aim to deliver the highest risk-adjusted returns by consistently returning money to our shareholders through a growing dividend. This strategy is underpinned by the durability of the underlying demand trends we see in the U.S. Growth in our business has consistently been driven by our customers investing in their networks with the deployment of more spectrum and cell sites to keep pace with the rapid growth in mobile data demand. The need for substantial investment in networks has persisted from 2G through 5G. Slide four focuses on wireless capital spending since the early days of 4G to support mobile data demand that has increased by a factor of 62 times since 2011. While industry-wide capital may vary year to year, particularly as new spectrum is acquired, wireless capital spending throughout the deployment of 4G was relatively consistent, averaging approximately $30 billion per year. During this time, priorities shifted back and forth between acquiring new spectrum and deploying that spectrum with the addition of new cell sites, with both being essential for our customers to keep up with the increasing data demand. With our shared infrastructure model, we have helped our customers to maximize the benefits of these investments by lowering the cost of deployment. This value proposition has allowed us to generate significant growth in our towers business throughout the 4G rollout, and we added to that growth with investment in small cells, which began to play a critical role in helping our customers keep up with the increasing demand in the later stages of 4G. Each new generation of wireless technology has provided expanded capacity for connectivity, and over time, it also created a platform for innovation that expanded how we use and rely on our mobile devices, driving ever-increasing demand for data and connectivity. As a result, we expect our customers' network and investment in the 5G era to exceed what they spent during deploying 4G. Since we are still in the early innings of 5G, we believe these positive underlying demand trends will support our ability to sustain at least 5% organic tower revenue growth and continued acceleration in our small cell business. In the first two years of 5G deployment at scale, we led the industry with organic tower growth of greater than 6%. Additionally, we believe our current small-cell backlog provides line of sight into doubling our on-air nodes over the next several years, which we expect will drive double-digit small-cell revenue growth beginning in 2024. Looking at how our overall strategy is performing, since we established our long-term dividend per share growth target of 7% to 8%, per year in 2017, we've delivered 9% compounded annualized dividends per share growth, returning $12 billion, or 20% of our current market capitalization, to our shareholders over that period. And we have been able to deliver these results while limiting our risk by focusing on the U.S., which we continue to believe is the best market in the world for wireless infrastructure ownership. Over the long term, the durability and scale of wireless data growth in the U.S., combined with our unmatched opportunity to benefit from the likely decade-long 5G development, gives us confidence in our ability to deliver on our long-term target of growing dividends per share 7% to 8% per year. We believe this growth, paired with a dividend that currently yields about 5%, provides the potential for shareholders to compound double-digit total returns over a long period of time. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dan.