American Tower Corporation (NYSE:AMT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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David Barden: Hey guys. Thanks very much for taking the questions. So, I guess the first one would be, Tom, thank you for your commentary around kind of the commitment to deleveraging. And I think you said ‘there’s nothing compelling out there,’ significant differences between bid and ask on the buy side of that equation. So, to the extent that, that is true, is that what’s informing your openness now to looking at an equity sale of the India market? Meaning that if things are too expensive to buy, maybe now is the right time to sell. And is that exclusive to the India market, or as you look across the portfolio, could you make the same argument that maybe it’s an interesting time to monetize Latin America or other pieces of that?

Part two of that would be is now the right time to think about this given the situation with VIL, or should we wait until that situation maybe resolve itself and then we think about an equity sale? And then, Rod, if I could — so you went out of your way to mention that the financing impact on the AFFO — attributable AFFO per your calculation is going to be about 8% for the year. Absent that and absent the provisions for VIL, we might be seeing an underlying 8% to 9% AFFO growth per share. Is that our takeaway for how we think about 2024, that obviously, other things aside and the fundamentals across the world that our starting point for thinking about 2024 is an 8% to 9% FFO growth business. Thanks.

Tom Bartlett: Okay. Dave, you got a bunch of stuff packed in there. Let me start to — no. Relative to the M&A in India, there’s not a direct connect between the two. They are somewhat mutually exclusive types of decisions. And it really becomes, again, part of a broader portfolio kind of conversation relative to what we think may make sense for the portfolio in terms of driving further value over time. India is really just kind of an opportunistic at this point in time. And really, it’s — we’re in kind of the exploration mode at this point. A number of things going on there. And to the extent that there is, again, a value creation opportunity for us, we can continue to enjoy the growth of the market and utilize that capital in other parts of the world, including using it to further de-lever, perhaps more — even more quickly than we would have otherwise thought is not a bad thing.

So, there — I understand the kind of the connection that you’re drawing there, but I’m not really looking them in that way. And I really do believe the paths are separate.

Rod Smith: Good morning David I’ll take the next one here on the AFFO per share growth. So, you can see in the chart that we laid out, we have FFO per share going from $9.76 to really down to $9.60 on an attributable basis. As we mentioned, the financing costs, you can see on the chart there, the $315 million represents about $0.68 of that or about an 8% headwind. The 405 is what’s coming from our regional businesses, including our corporate cost centers. And that 405 represents about a 9% growth. So that’s kind of a core growth rate that we’re generating from our operating. The FX headwind is about 1%. And then VIL represents about 2% headwind. And when you put it all together, you get to a negative 2% growth. But to the extent that the financing impacts here really are one-time, which we expect, we expect interest to kind of peak this year and then — in the middle of this year and maybe trend down towards next year, assuming they stay flat or even decline and become a tailwind next year.

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