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

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Tom Bartlett: I’m certain that there are certain pockets of the United States where we’re already seeing some densification going on in the marketplace. And so I would expect that to continue as penetration continues with 5G sets. Keep in mind, it’s in the carrier’s best interest to deploy out 5G, because it’s going to lower their overall cost of providing service. And so as activity continues to drive and as applications continue to develop and get deployed, you’ll start to see that densification. But — so I think it is already going on. And I would expect that over the next two to three years, we’ll see an increase even in the densification within the market. Also keep in mind that carriers are using slightly higher spectrum bands. And so given the propagation characteristics, they’re going to be requiring higher levels of densification as a result of that as well.

Richard Choe: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Luebchow from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Eric Luebchow: Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. So I just wanted to check in on the LATAM business. Obviously, as you mentioned, some churn impacts this year. Maybe you could break out the impact from Telefonica and Oi in your guide? And what type of visibility you have on churn beyond 2023 when some of these events may resolve and we could see organic growth go back to historical upper single-digit ranges? And then secondly, just a balance sheet question for Rod, obviously, a big increase in interest expense. Maybe you can talk about how you’re thinking about managing the balance sheet this year in terms of fixed floating mix, whether there’s the possibility of terming out some additional floating rate debt given the inverted yield curve or accessing the secured market or anything else you’re looking at to help drive that down? Thank you.

Rod Smith: Yeah. Sounds good, Eric. So when it comes to Latin America, I guess what I would point to is our guide on organic tenant billings growth is a little bit higher than 2%. That comes in a few pieces. The gross new business is going to be in the mid-single digits, let’s call it, around 3% or so. We’re also seeing higher escalators at around 8%. And we do have a headwind of churn of about 8% as well. That’s the bits and pieces in terms of getting into that growth rate. So you can see the churn number is fairly high. We do think it’s temporary, and we do think it will work through it over the next couple of years and get back to a more compelling overall growth in the market. And when it comes to the churn pieces in our guide specifically, when you look out here in 2023, Telefonica is really the biggest piece.

And I don’t want to get too detailed in terms of customers. But I think everyone knows what’s happening in Mexico with Telefonica and then joining AT&T as an MVNO there. So that’s driving a fair amount of the churn. We’re also seeing some churn remaining from American Movil really through the Nextel assets that were purchased down in Brazil. Those are the two things other than smaller churn, smaller customers throughout the region. But it’s really the Nextel and the Telefonica in the bigger piece. And then the Oi piece really is going to be out over time. So there’s a couple of things that I would say about Oi. Oi in total is about $100 million of revenue for us. It represents about 1% of our overall business. About one-third of that is tied in with their landline business, which we fully expect that the landline business of Oi will keep those sites over time.

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