Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. (NASDAQ:FYBR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. (NASDAQ:FYBR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 3, 2024

Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good morning. Thank you for attending today’s Frontier Communications First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. My name is Cole and I’ll be the moderator for today’s call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. [Operator Instructions] I’d now like to turn the conference over to our host Spencer Kurn. Please go ahead.

Spencer Kurn: Good morning, and welcome to Frontier Communications First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. This is Spencer Kurn, Frontier’s Head of Investor Relations and I’m joined on the call today by Nick Jeffrey, our President and CEO; and Scott Beasley, our CFO. Today’s presentation can be followed within the webcast available in the Events and Presentations section of our Investor Relations website. Before we start, please see our Safe Harbor disclaimer on Slide 2. This is a reminder that this conference call may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed today. During the call, we may also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are defined and reconciled in our earnings materials. With that I’ll turn the call over to Nick.

Nick Jeffery: Thanks, Spencer. Good morning, everybody. I’m here today with Scott and we’re excited to share our Q1 results with you. Let’s start with the headline of the quarter. We had a strong start to the year and delivered positive revenue growth for the first time since 2015. This is a major inflection point for our company and it’s a fast follow for us having achieved EBITDA growth last year for the first time in more than a decade. Until now, Frontier has been a story about reinvention. Today, while our reinvention accelerates, our story turns to one of growth. Through consistent execution over the last three years, we’ve delivered an operational turnaround and emerged as a leader in the fiber industry. Let’s talk about how we’ve achieved this.

It all starts with our clear strategy to build fiber, sell fiber, improve service for all our customers and increase operational efficiency. And at the center of our strategy sits our ambitious purpose, to build this digital infrastructure this country needs to thrive now and into the next century. This is the why behind the work that we do and we call it Building Gigabit America. Over the last few years, we’ve advanced our purpose and shown rigor and discipline in executing our strategy. Firstly, we’ve developed the capability to quickly and efficiently build fiber at-scale. We’ve more than doubled our fiber footprint in just a few short years. Secondly, we’ve grown our fiber broadband customer base by nearly 60% since 2020. And today, we have a record 2.1 million customers connected to our blazing fast fiber Internet.

Thirdly, we’ve improved our customer service. 75% of our customer interactions are now digital, driving greater customer satisfaction as reflected in our industry-leading NPS scores. And lastly, we can move faster and with greater efficiency because we’ve created a simpler and more digital organization. Three years of relentless execution has brought us to where we are today, the largest pure-play fiber Internet company in America. On the next slide, you can see that fiber now represents the majority of our business. With 6.8 million fiber passings, simple math puts us at 68% of the way towards our initial goal of building to at least 10 million fiber passings. Our fiber broadband customers now represent 70% of our total broadband customer base and fiber now accounts for more than 50% of our revenue and 60% of our adjusted EBITDA.

We’ve said as fiber becomes a greater share of our business, we become an even stronger company and Q1 is the perfect illustration of this dynamic. Let’s turn to Slide 6 to review the details. I shared at the top of the call that we achieved a positive inflection point in revenue growth this quarter. This is a result of our fast-growing fiber business continuing to accelerate. We grew fiber broadband customers by 18% and ARPU by 6% this quarter. Combined, these two metrics helped us deliver total fiber revenue growth of 10%. As data consumption continues to rise, customers are increasingly turning to the best broadband product in the market, fiber. We’re also seeing this need for speed translating into higher adoption of symmetrical gigabit plus speeds.

And our customers are increasingly purchasing value-added service add-ons such as Whole-Home Wi-Fi and premium tech support. The numbers clearly show how our fiber business is lifting our overall revenue and it’s lifting our EBITDA too. We delivered 5.4% EBITDA growth this quarter as our revenue growth was supported by our continued focus on cost efficiencies. This is in fact the third quarter in a row of accelerated EBITDA growth and our fastest quarter of EBITDA growth since 2016. Before I turn it over to Scott, let’s recap our 2024 priorities on Slide 7. This year we’re focused on driving three simple outcomes. Maintaining strong operational momentum, delivering revenue growth, and accelerating our EBITDA growth. As our first quarter results show, we’re off to a fast start, which puts us in a strong position to deliver accelerated growth for the full year.

I’m excited to provide more detail on our longer-term financial goals and the path for driving increased shareholder value at our forthcoming investor update. The exact timing of which will depend on the strategic review process, which we announced on a previous earnings call. We’re looking forward to this event and I’ll keep everybody posted on timing. I’ll wrap up by saying a huge thank you to our customers, employees, partners and everyone who played a role in building Gigabit America. And I want to say a special thanks to our IT team. A few weeks ago, we disclosed that we had a cyber-incident that impacted some of our IT systems. Our IT team was quickly able to contain the incident and worked tirelessly to get us back up and running. And I’m extremely grateful for all their hard work and dedication and I’m proud of our whole team for rallying together to continue to serve our customers.

So thank you all. Scott, over to you.

Scott Beasley: Thank you Nick, and good morning everyone. We started the year with a strong quarter of operational and financial results. We added 322,000 fiber passings in Q1, which puts us on-track to achieve our goal of 1.3 million passings this year. We also added 88,000 fiber broadband customers in the quarter, resulting in customer growth of 18% year-over-year, while growing ARPU at the same time. Consumer fiber broadband churn was also solid in the quarter, remaining low at 1.2%. Finally, we continued to execute on our cost savings initiatives, and we have reached a cumulative $536 million of savings since we started the program in 2021. These strong operational results continue to drive our financial performance. Our financial highlights are on Slide 10.

Let’s start with revenue. Our first quarter revenue was $1.46 billion, up 2% versus Q1 of last year, and we earned $1 million of net income. As Nick highlighted at the beginning of the call, growing revenue year-over-year was a major inflection point for us. Our $547 million of adjusted EBITDA represents our third consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA growth and our fastest pace of growth since 2016. We also generated $335 million of net cash from operations, bringing this total to $1.3 billion over the trailing 12 months. Slide 11 shows the continued progress that we are making in growing our fiber customer base. We grew our total fiber broadband customers by 18% versus last year. This number is up nearly 60% since the end of 2020. We have driven this customer growth while also accelerating ARPU growth, which as Nick mentioned, grew by 6% year-over-year.

Our ARPU growth was a result of three drivers, introducing faster speed tiers, price adjustments and expanding our sales of value-added services. In Q1, over 60% of our new customers took speeds of 1 gig or faster and nearly 50% of customers purchased at least one value-added service. We are now seeing strong execution translate into revenue growth. Our customer and ARPU growth drove a 24% increase in fiber broadband revenue this quarter, which more than offset legacy product declines. Total revenue growth for consumer accelerated for the third quarter in a row to 3%. Business in wholesale was roughly flat, leading to overall revenue growth of 2%. We expect the trends of accelerating consumer revenue growth in roughly stable business and wholesale revenue to continue for the rest of the year.

Moving to Slide 13, we achieved 5% adjusted EBITDA growth this quarter, driven by 12% growth from fiber products. We are also managing the decline of adjusted EBITDA from copper products, which declined 2% year-over-year. Let’s turn next to Slide 14. We had cash capital investment of $1.0 billion in the first quarter of 2024, down $125 million versus Q1 of last year. Cash capital investment was front-end loaded this year as expected, largely due to the timing of working capital related to the build. We expect to see capital investment decline for the remaining three quarter of the year and we remain on track for our 2024 capital investment to be lower than 2023. As we noted on our last call, we expect to spend less capital on the same number of passings as we consumed pre-work and inventory that we built-up in 2022 and 2023.

Our capital investment mix is also shifting with lower build spend, but higher success based customer acquisition spend as we increase gross adds. We continue to have high confidence that our fiber build will deliver IRRs in the mid to high teens well above our cost of capital. And that once we are through the investment phase, our business should generate significant growing free cash flow. Touching briefly on Slide 15, at the end of the first quarter, we had $2.6 billion of liquidity. Our balance sheet remains healthy with approximately 87% of our debt at fixed rates and we do not have any significant maturities until 2027. Finally, you can see on Slide 16 that we are reiterating our 2024 guidance. Our adjusted EBITDA growth in Q1 gives us increased confidence that we can grow adjusted EBITDA in the mid-single-digit range for the year, which would be a significant milestone in our turnaround.

Before we open it up for questions, I want to say thank you to our Frontier team for delivering another great quarter and a strong start to the year. Operator, we’ll now open the line for questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Michael Rollins with Citi. Your line is now open.

Michael Rollins: Thanks and good morning. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit more about just maybe where you are with the strategic review? And does the current considerations infer that the Analyst Meeting could push beyond end of 2Q and possibly be 3Q in timing?

Nick Jeffery: Michael, it’s Nick here. I mean, as we’ve said before, the Board and executive team are really always looking for ways to create additional shareholder value and we’re continuing to do just that. And the timing of the review is important because with our initial goal of building to at least 10 million fiber passings now firmly in sight, we believe it’s a natural time in our evolution to look at the next phase of our growth. So we continue to look at a number of options, including, as we said, continued optimization of our operations and financing strategy, strategic partnerships, joint ventures, divestitures, mergers and other business combinations. And that work is going on right now very, very intensively. So the review is ongoing.

And of course, we’ll come back and share more news with you as soon as we can. And whilst we did initially expect to host our investor update in Q2, we decided to wait just in case we can get more insights from the strategic review, which would be appropriate to share at that Investor Day. So we’re really looking forward to the event. It’s being planned actively right now and we’ll share more detail on our longer-term goals and plans when we get to that event. But we haven’t got a date yet, but of course, we’ll keep you posted when we do.

Michael Rollins: And just one on the business. Base fiber penetration, if I read it correctly, I think that’s a 44.9%. Can you talk about what you’re seeing in the competitive landscape? And does the progress in the base fiber markets lead you to conclude that there might even be more penetration than 45% over-time in your markets? Thanks.

Nick Jeffery: Yeah. Nick here again. Well, we’ve always said at least 45%. And you’re right to point out that in our base markets, which are our most mature fiber markets, where we have full competition and of course, full FWA overlay in many, many cases, a really good test case for what we think is possible. And in those base markets, we’ve grown penetration from about 40% just over three years ago up to now our milestone of 45% in our mature markets. And I think that really underscores the superior nature of our products, a good execution and the pricing strategy we have of having really the best product that will ever be in this market at a very competitive and attractive price coupled with value-creation mechanisms to drive-up ARPU as you see in our results.

Now, of course, broadband remains a competitive market and we fight hard every single day. But I think what we’re seeing in those markets is great evidence of what will be possible across our whole footprint as we continue to build out. Operator, thanks for that. Next question, please.

Operator: Our next question is from Shipra Pandey with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Shipra Pandey: Great. Thank you and good morning. I have more of a big picture question. Having recently launched coverage of Frontier, one of the main talking points in my discussions so far is, you know the debate of where the industry is headed towards in the future and what the industry structure may look like. There are two developments sort of happening within broadband. We’re seeing sort of a convergence dynamic with wireless and cable players. And so there’s the debate of whether convergence is a necessity to defend the business and retain market share and then also the development of third-party fiber overbuilders and their long-term game plan in the industry. I would just love to hear your views on the topic, what the long-term industry structure might look like and why and where Frontier fits into that picture? Thank you.

Nick Jeffery: Yeah. Thank you. Of course, no one has a crystal ball on this. So you know I can’t give you a precise answer and no one knows what’s really going to happen. But if we just break your question down into its component part, I mean, firstly, convergence. The industry data very clearly shows that the US is a converging market and driven mainly by the cable operators, but nonetheless really converging at scale. Also, just in my work experience and the analysis we’ve done here at Frontier, we can’t find a country anywhere in the world where once convergence starts, it either slows down or reverses. So I think it’s safe to say the US is a convergent market and that will continue to accelerate. However, when I look at the implications for us, as I’ve said on several previous calls, the need for us to have a mobile bundle coupled with fiber will really be dictated by the data that we see.

And there would be two data points we’d be looking at. First of all, does our rate of customer acquisition for fiber products slow down. Secondly, does our churn go up. And as you can see evidenced in our really strong Q1 results today, neither of those two things is true. And that’s perhaps because convergence is a great strategy perhaps for our legacy operators who are defending positions, but we’re an attacker in the market and our goal is to grow. So at the moment, we don’t see the need to add a mobile bundle to our fiber offer. The returns on capital from investing in fiber are amazing and that’s a really good use of our capital. But we’ll watch the data very, very closely. And if we see customer behavior change, then we are prepared, should we need it to work on introducing a mobile bundle.

We have a lot of operational experience in our team in the cellular industry. So we really know how to do it. We’ve kind of laid the groundwork, but we don’t really see it as something we need to do right now. I think on wider industry structures, things like open-access networks and overbuilders. On overbuilders, we see remarkably little activity actually. And I think that’s a reflection of the colossal white space that still exists in the US market to go build fiber. So if you have capital and an intention to build fiber, you should really go to somewhere where there isn’t a great deal of competition and that’s a very big available space for those operators. And that’s perhaps a little bit why we don’t see a huge amount or in fact very little overbuilder activity in our market.

And it could be a reflection of the structure of the market and the fact that capital can be deployed effectively in areas where there’s perhaps less competition and why would you come and compete with Frontier if you didn’t have to? The third point of your question, I think was on open-access networks. And it’s true there are some open-access networks being built. And there’s a discussion around CapEx light models and so on. I would just say building fiber always requires capital. So the question is really whose capital is it and what return can you get from it? And so if there are open-access networks being built that we might be able to access that are adjacent to our existing footprints where we can get great marketing efficiency and drive the kind of commercial and operational performance we want.

We might consider looking at those always driven by the numbers and the returns we could get. It’s not likely that we will open our own networks to open-access because we don’t need to. We’re growing healthily. We’re growing ARPU. Our brand is resonating. We have a great proposition and we don’t need to add anyone else on our networks. Thank you. Operator, next question.

Operator: Our next question is from Sebastiano Petti with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Sebastiano Petti: Hi. Thank you for taking the question. Just wanted to circle back on just the revenue. I think you saw the growth there within the — within the consolidated revenue. Is there any reason to think that that does not continue on a go-forward basis? Should we continue to see the aggregate business grow from here in subsequent quarters? Just wanted to make sure I understand the slide there in your prepared remarks, Nick. And then overall, just going back to the broadband ecosystem, you know obviously, Frontier you know continues to grow aided by the accelerating fiber deployment. But you’re seeing just a slowdown perhaps broadly across the ecosystem. Nick, given your experience in other industries and other markets rather in broadband, anything you see that’s kind of going on under the hood?

Obviously, Frontier positioned well to continue to kind of take gross add share, but are you seeing mobile substitution or any of that kind of occurring within your base? And then lastly, any color you could perhaps provide us on the cyber-incident, perhaps trying to weight how much you are out-of-the market and what that could mean to gross additions within the quarter? Thank you.

Scott Beasley: Sure. Sebastiano, let’s parse that in three and I’ll take the first one and then I hand to Nick on your questions around broadband. So on revenue, we feel good about the start to the year. We’ve said Q2, we expect to be up year-over-year. We expect it to be up sequentially and the same trend should continue with consumer having strong acceleration in business and wholesale roughly flat. And then we have said for the full year, we expect to grow revenue and that would be the major inflection point for full year revenue growth in 2024 versus 2023. Let me take the final part of your question on Q2 net-adds. So we’ve said we expect Q2 net-adds to be up significantly year-over-year. There are some tailwinds, some headwinds.

I’ll give you some color there. On the tailwind side, our sales channels are performing well, our offers resonating with customers and we have the opportunity for some pent-up demand from segments with longer sales cycles like MDU. Now on the headwind side, Q2 is typically the seasonally slowest quarter. ACP has an unknown impact, although we do have solid offers in-place. And then finally, we did have our systems issue in mid-April that you mentioned. Underlying demand is still very healthy, but there might be some of those orders that get pushed into late Q2 or into future quarters. Now we’re going to do everything we can to drive net-adds higher and get those orders installed, but some of them could push into future quarters. So, overall, we feel good about our net add momentum.

We expect a strong quarter in Q2, followed by a strong second half of the year.

Nick Jeffery: Scott, thanks. On the second part of your question, kind of structural slowdown you’re seeing in some parts of the industry. Yeah, look, I think the point to raise there is that what we do is really a scale game. And we are the largest pure-play fiber provider in the US. We kind of got out of the stores early. We were fast on this and you know we have certain structural advantages relative to our competition, for instance, our ability to overlap existing overhead cables with fiber or to use existing duct to pull fiber through that others simply don’t have. So we’ve got a cost and scale advantage and that’s really underpinned our ability to accelerate our delivery. And we’re delivering about 3,500 fiber passings a day and converting those very predictably now into new customers and that flows through into, of course, revenue and EBITDA growth.

And those customers give us an opportunity to upsell both speeds and new services. And as you heard in the prepared comments, we’re now having 60% of our intake customers buying 1 gig and above speeds and more than 50% of our customers taking one value-added service or more. So we’ve kind of got scale, momentum and depth in the industry. Now if you don’t have those things, I think fiber is a very, very difficult market to get into. If you’re sub-scaled, if you’re capital constrained, if your costs are structurally higher than scale operators, I think this is a difficult game to be in. And perhaps we’re seeing some operators, some smaller ones in the market beginning to feel that a little bit more and asking themselves, how do they reach scale.

That’s a question for them, of course, rather than for us. But I think that’s what’s going on. We see from our perspective, a very healthy dynamic and one that continues to accelerate this flywheel effect we’ve talked about before as we build fiber, convert it to customers, upsell and cross-sell, improve customer care, get great NPS numbers that then flows through into our ability to build more, get more customers, sell them more stuff. So that flywheel is working very well for us. Perhaps if you haven’t got scale, it’s less easy to get that going and perhaps you’d struggle slightly more. I’ll just touch briefly on your question on cyber, as I shared at the top of the call, we did have a cyber-incident in mid-April that impacted some of our IT systems.

And I am hugely grateful to our amazing IT team who worked absolutely tirelessly and our core IT systems are now back up and running. And perhaps most importantly, financially, we don’t expect any material impact from this. So thank you for your question. Operator, perhaps we’ll take the next question now.

Sebastiano Petti: Thanks, Nick.

Operator: Our next question is from Jonathan Chaplin with New Street. Your line is now open.

Jonathan Chaplin: Thanks, guys. Couple, probably for Scott. On ARPU, it looks like if we back-out gift card impacts that it grew. Fiber broadband ARPU grew at about 3.5%, which is sort of right in the middle of your range. Is that a good steady state to sort of think about going forward or can you accelerate given the sort of the three drivers you spoke about, Scott, towards the top end of the range? And then you laid out a very clear picture for accelerating revenue growth with consumer accelerating business flat. Does that drive a steadily accelerating EBITDA growth as we progress through the year as well? And I’m wondering if you can, in the context of that, just give us a little bit more color on stack and how you think that evolves in the fiber business? Thanks.

Scott Beasley: Great. Let me take those one-by-one. On ARPU, you’re right, headline number was 6%, that’s very healthy. We have reduced our reliance on gift cards. If you normalize for gift cards and take those out, it was about 3.5% year-over-year and that’s right in the middle of that 3% to 4% a year range that we’ve talked about. So we’re working hard on each of those three levers that Nick described with excellent progress there could move towards the top end of the range, 4%, but we feel good about where we are now in the ARPU trajectory. Accelerating revenue growth. You talked about how — how is that going to flow through into EBITDA growth? I’d say we’re really pleased with our EBITDA performance this quarter. 5% adjusted EBITDA growth was our fastest pace since 2016.

Q1’s growth rate in absolute number give us increased confidence in our full-year guidance, but it’s still early in the year. So we’ve got another three quarters and we’ll work to keep the momentum going, but we feel good about the strong start to the year. And then I think your final question was on subscriber acquisition costs. You know we’re finding subscriber acquisition costs vary by geography and vary by unit type and that every geography we go into has a different ideal sales channel mix. Some of the geographies are — rely much more heavily on door-to-door, some of them are more digitally inclined, some of them we’ve had a lot of sales, a lot of success selling with partners and cross-sell and big-box stores. And so the mix is going to be a big determinant of our subscriber acquisition cost.

Now as Nick mentioned, we are at-scale and we’re continuing to improve our negotiations with partners. We’re continuing to improve our own processes to drive down costs. So while maybe that’s not a near-term thing during this hyper-growth phase, we are working to tighten down subscriber acquisition costs in the medium-term. Thanks for your question, Jonathan.

Jonathan Chaplin: Got it. Thanks. Thanks, Scott.

Operator: Our next question is from Greg Williams with TD Cowen. Your line is now open.

Anton Rinnert: Hi. This is Anton on for Greg. Thanks for taking my question. A good part of the CapEx, capital investment was vendor financing payments. I just wanted to kind of see what the cadence looks like from here on CapEx and the vendor financing payments. You still intend to exit the year with a lower balance on the vendor financing tables than in 2023.

Scott Beasley: Sure, Anton. This is Scott. A few points on cash capital investment. So we had roughly $1 billion in Q1. That was part of our overall $3.0 billion to $3.2 billion guidance that we gave last quarter, it was — and it was roughly $100 million lower than Q1 of last year. So good year-over-year progress. We expect a material step down from Q1 into Q2 and then smaller declines in Q3 and Q4. So we’re highly confident in the range that we gave, and we’re right on track to deliver that. In terms of the vendor financing, you’ll see that we did reduce our balance on payables and vendor financing by about $350 million. We expect that — and we only have about $50 million remaining on the vendor financing. So we expect that to kind of be in that range for the rest of the year, that would imply a large reduction as we exit 2024 versus where we exited ’23. So we feel good about that as part of our capital investment.