Lumen Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Jonathan Chaplin: Thanks, guys for squeezing me in. I had just a couple on the mass markets business. I was wondering if the timing of when you think you’ll get to the end of your inquiry into how best to monetize these assets, whether it’s wholesale agreements or JVs or selling off markets. And I’m wondering, if you look at different assets differently as you go through that process. For instance, you’re more likely to hang on to fiber assets and sell copper assets or vice versa. And then on net adds, the result was really strong this quarter, as you mentioned. I’m wondering if the momentum that you built in the quarter continues as we go through the year or if you sort of reached a new level and this is the new normal. Thank you.

Chris Stansbury: Yeah. So as it relates to the market by market assessment, I don’t want to put a time frame on that because I think it’s something that we’re going to continue to look at. But as we have news, we’ll certainly share it. The net add performance, we’re not committing at this point to see that increase quarter-on-quarter. That said, as we have scaled the marketing and continue to refine that approach, that’s obviously the goal. So I can tell you that there’s just intense focus from the team on driving that performance, and hopefully, we can continue to show good results in the coming quarters.

Jonathan Chaplin: And one more, Chris, if I may, on ARPU. It’s the one where I’d expect ARPU to be sort of accelerating for you guys as well. It’s a bit slower for you than it is for peers. Is there something, given that you guys have this or the fastest fiber products in the market, most of your subs are taking a gigabit per second. Is there something holding back ARPU growth?

Chris Stansbury: There’s nothing structurally that’s holding it back. Obviously, as we’re driving penetration, we’ve got to make the trade-off between — at what time do you raise prices, right? Do you do it at the front end and then try to drive penetration or is that something that changes over time. And again, there’s a lot of work that’s done really on a market by market basis, given the competitive environment to determine that. Our view, my view is, we’re far better off driving sub growth as fast as we can, obviously, taking the price that we can along the way. But to turn this into a pricing game upfront rather than driving overall customer adoption, probably not the best approach.

Jonathan Chaplin: Makes sense. Really appreciate it, guys.

Operator: That does conclude our question-and-answer session. And with that, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your line. Have a great day, everyone.