Soomit Datta: Yes, that was a question.
Balan Nair: So we actually feel pretty good about it. We spent — there’s 2 things that happened there. At the end of last year, when T-Mobile really went aggressive on their subsidies. I mean, they were offering iPhone 14 to AirPods being $600 million to — sorry, $600 buyout contract. We have matched it through the end of last year — and of course, Chris and I were not very happy with the free cash flow implications of matching that. So in the first-half of this year, we kind of slowed down the subsidies. And subsequently, you can see that our net assets plan. It gets us the right flat is slightly south, but kind of noise. So you can say it’s just flat. And then what happened in the second half of this year is we did a number of changes in our executive team in Puerto Rico on the product side.
And so we’ve been looking at it through a new lens. And with the iPhone 15, we’ve come back into the subsidy game quite aggressively both on the iPhones as well as non-Apple devices as well. And my sense is, next year, you’re going to see postpaid do better. You’re going to see prepaid do better as well. We just launched a new prepaid promotion that I think will capture attention. It’s a four by 20 plan, and you get four lines, $20 each. It’s very aggressive. And the reason we couldn’t do some of these things before is we didn’t have our IT stack. So I did indicate earlier that in January, we’ll have our own postpaid, where we will exclusively sell on our own postpaid stack, but on the prepaid side, we stood that up already. So as of last week, we can just do whatever promotions we want.
And so we’re going to get aggressive in the prepaid. And as you look at our mobile business and the number — and the lines that we’ve lost, most of it is on the prepaid side. So this will now short the prepaid with the Boost transaction with DISH, which we should call sometime next year. That will give us more channels on the prepaid. So we feel like the prepaid will get back to a good place. And then on the postpaid side, we’re back in the subsidy gain. The returns are actually quite good on that. We’ve kind of stretched it in a way that I think works really well for us. So we’ll get back into the Catcher business. And you should look at us in ’24 and ’25 after we have our own stack running on our own network that we will be the attacker in Puerto Rico.
And that’s our mobile play going forward.
Soomit Datta: Just a quick follow-up as — just on the tower deal, that’s a great deal, which has just been announced. Could you give any — you said it was a great free cash flow multiple. Any kind of steer as to what the multiple will be? What sort of free cash flow will kind of fall out as a result of that transaction. And I just wondered, are there more towers to come? Or is there potentially sort of other infrastructure you’re looking to monetize at this time as well?
Balan Nair: I’ll answer the last question first. No, we’re not looking at any other infrastructure to monetize at this point. Of course, you know we will be very opportunistic. But that’s not what we’re looking at. This — our deal is we kind of like bundled up a lot of the towers that we thought we should put in the days and any more towers, what we thought we should transact. We’ve included in this whole cohort. And we feel really good about it. I’m glad you asked the question because the press release went out right before the call. Literally, we were closing the final points on the deal until like 5:00 this morning, 5:30, and then about 6:00 still getting some governance issues resolved. And that’s why it was very late on the press release coming out.
But we are really excited to hear about it. You asked about the multiple. We agreed with the — sorry, with the buyer that we wouldn’t talk too much about the multiples. But you can imagine, it’s highly accretive. It’s very, very happy with it. The headline price is that the EBITDA — Chris, John, can I talk about the EBITDA numbers, no. Okay, just check in my general counsel, yes, we probably won’t say the EBITDA hit on it, but you can clearly imagine it’s not that significant.
Soomit Datta: Great. Okay, thank you.
Balan Nair: Yes, we’re excited about it, Soomit. That power deal is a good one.
Operator: Thank you. And our next question goes to Matthew Harrigan of Benchmark. Matthew, please go ahead. Your line is open.
Matthew Harrigan: Thank you. Speaking of good ones, per megahertz pop price on the second transaction with this seems really good, especially for that quality spectrum. I know it would be a discount to the U.S., but you really — if you take out the 120,000 mobile customers, you’re also getting — it looks like it was just a really good deal for you. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the pricing and the input for Puerto Rico relative to the — relative to the States?
Balan Nair: Sure. Puerto Rico always straight in the auctions. There’s a slight discount against Mainland for a couple of reasons. One, the potential buy is — they’re limited. Two, it’s kind of a captive market. And so it’s always traded at a slight discount because it’s easy to build a lot more towers there as opposed to just relying on spectrum. Now having said that, the team has done a tremendously good job. I think it’s a win-win for both us and DISH on that. It’s quite accretive for them, accretive for us. It’s accretive for them because they don’t have to build out in Puerto Rico. We are going to take on the build-out obligations over there in Puerto Rico. And so it saves a lot of CapEx that they can focus in Mainland — our General Counsel was at the SEC yesterday at the Justice Department and did a tremendous job explaining the rationale for the deal together with the executives from DISH — and so we feel positive about it.
