Lumen Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

It’s a new salesperson number. Getting all those people up to speed and with all the tools and enablement materials that they need, some of them coming from markets that – they need to learn some of the telecom. That’s going to take a little bit of time. So, I’m excited about where we are, because we’re – as I discussed, we’re starting to see fruits of the labor. We also have low-hanging opportunities because in the past, we haven’t used sales platforms, data and analytics and AI in the way that I think modern sales forces do. So, I hope that our ramp is quicker. I do think it takes a bit of time for somebody to get to full productivity. And so we’ll be leaning in and trying to accelerate that as often as possible. But more to follow as we can report on the fruits of the labor of the sales team over time.

Chris Stansbury: And as it relates to the debt questions and the rumors that have been swirling in the market over the last few weeks, I want to step back in addressing the question. And just to reiterate, Kate talked about the progress that we’ve been making against the strategy. We had really exciting news yesterday with NAS. And the reason the debt conversation is so important is we’ve got to get the debt structure right at our capital structure write it so that we can fund what we think is a very bright future. So with that, we obviously understand the obligations of our credit instruments, and we don’t believe that there’s been any default under those debt agreements. We remain focused, as we said before, on addressing the upcoming maturities through 27.

And we want to do that in a manner that benefits the company and all of its stakeholders. So just without getting into specifics, I’d say that – we’re open to engaging with our stakeholders to achieve that. And as we previously indicated, we’re going to continue to assess other options to address upcoming maturities in the overall capital structure.

Dave Barden: Okay. Great guys. Thank you both for that. Thank you.

Chris Stansbury: Thanks.

Mike McCormack: Thanks, David. Next question please.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Bora Lee with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Bora Lee: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Just first, understanding any impact is still to be determined back on the leaping issue, is there any residual responsibility for the ILEC acids divestiture APOLLO. And then second, you’ve spoken about trimming the number of SKUs starting with cleaning up perhaps some legacy variations and then moving on to more substantive reductions. Can you just update us on where you are in that process and how that’s been impacting your sales process? Thanks.

Chris Stansbury: Okay. Yes, I’ll take the first one. The ILEC sale was stock sale. So all assets and liabilities were sold with that. And as it relates to our network, we talked about it in my prepared remarks, less than 5% of our 700,000-mile copper network contained lead, and most of that is a conduit based and subterranean. So we don’t think that this is a major issue for us, and it’s something we’ll continue to work on and monitor.

Kate Johnson: And regarding the simplification efforts that we have, we still have our Evergreen simplification process. We’re identifying projects and programs and activities that we stop every day. The SKU simplification was a part of that. It was a major step forward in preparing for frankly, an ERP implementation that is going very well and is on target and on budget, and preparing us to be able to implement streamlined digital enterprise processes for sales and inventory and ordering and all of the things. So the initial reduction was the easy step. The compression beyond that sort of low-hanging fruit becomes more complex as it’s tied to products that are existing in our order and billing systems that would just need more work and more time to be able to prepare to simplify further.