Lumen Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Rollins: Thanks. Good afternoon. Curious if you could share a little bit more detail in terms of what’s happening currently in the sales cycle in the pipeline? And are you entering 2023 with a better backlog, just given some of the announcements that you have had over the past number of months, particularly in the public sector. And then just one other question. On the bridge regarding dissynergies, are those dissynergies isolated to the divestitures, or do those dissynergies encapsulate the decision to separate the operations of mass markets from the business segment? Thanks.

Kate Johnson: Hey Mike, this is Kate. So, to address your question about what’s happening in the enterprise business, the first thing is from a public sector perspective, you are absolutely right. We have a healthy backlog, and we are excited about seeing a lot of that convert this year. Our pipeline continues to be steady and strong. And regarding enterprise decision-making, I think with the macroeconomic environment, we all see sort of more approvals required for purchases of technology. I think that plays right into the pivot that we are making where we need to be great at pitching our value story and how we can help customers address their most existential problems and help them get through those buying cycles. Chris?

Chris Stansbury: Yes. And the dissynergies are really around the divestitures. It has nothing to do with ops. So obviously, there is corporate overhead that doesn’t go away when you sell off big chunks of EBITDA. But there is other efficiencies we can get to internally if we can automate some more things going forward. And that’s really where the focus is there on the dissynergies. Now, I will say that as we were talking about dissynergies last year, we actually thought they would be a little bit higher than where we are calling it for this year, and that’s because we have got some other cost savings initiatives going on internally that we think can start to eat away at that. So, that’s good.

Michael Rollins: And one other follow-up, on the net debt leverage, you mentioned it could be 4 to 4.3. Is that the peak through this whole cycle of getting back towards your goal of EBITDA growth, or is there the potential for leverage to go even higher before it goes lower?

Chris Stansbury: Yes. That is our estimated peak. And quite frankly, that excludes any assumption on the EMEA deal closing, because right now we are assuming that doesn’t happen until early next year. So, when that closes, obviously, those €“ given where leverage is, we said that we would €“ from a capital allocation standpoint, focus on growth and then manage leverage and buybacks dynamically. Obviously, with an exit leverage ratio that high, those proceeds would be focused on debt reduction, and that would bring us back down. But operationally, yes, we would expect that, that leverage is peak as we exit this year because we are doing, obviously, the spending that doesn’t give us all the benefits from that spending until we go forward and then some continued spending next year. But I would not expect it would go above that.

Michael Rollins: Thanks.

Mike McCormack: Thanks Mike. Next question please.

Operator: And our next question is from the line of Frank Louthan with Raymond James. Please go ahead with your question.

Frank Louthan: Great. Thank you. How long do you think it will take to integrate the IT systems from the past mergers? And will you be integrating or changing any billing systems? That’s my first question. The second question, when you talk about getting rid of some of the businesses that you mentioned and don’t really support the growth, how many of the €“ how long will that take, given that some of these may still have longer term contractual obligations or regulatory obligations that may be harder to just eliminate? If you can give us some color on that, that would be great.

Kate Johnson: Neither one of these things are overnight stories. With respect to simplifying the IT infrastructure, it’s complex. We have a lens towards customer satisfaction, customer experience, and that’s driving our prioritization and how we actually do the planning as well as what’s the level of difficulty and how much will €“ how much can we do that will impact things in the short, medium and long-term. So, we are right at the planning stages of building the framework to be able to give you more clarity. The second piece of that was €“ what was the question?

Chris Stansbury: Around their products and sale of products.

Kate Johnson: The simplified €“ doing less and doing it better is the focus, obviously. When we talk about businesses that don’t accrete to the North Star, whenever we have customers, whenever we have revenue, whenever we have EBITDA, we have to be very thoughtful and use a product life cycle framework to evaluate how to move these customers to modern technologies and how to create a great customer experience in doing so, where they can get the benefit of more of our capabilities than maybe some of our partners as well. And that framework is something that is new to our teams in terms of taking a disciplined approach to simplifying and narrowing what we do every day. So, we are right in the early throes of doing that. We are not going to be turning anything on or off overnight without careful consideration.

Chris Stansbury: Yes. And Frank, I would only just add one quick thing there because I know you have been at this game a lot longer than Kate or I have, and that there has been a lot of disaster scenarios with billing systems so I want to address that head on. Part of what we are doing is really determining where we want the endpoint to be, because quite frankly, there €“ in some cases, there is going to be no business case for integrating old billing systems if the products that are supported by those billing systems are maturing out from a product life cycle standpoint. So, in the near-term, it’s really about simplifying what the customer sees, which may not deal with the front end. And then where we can deal with the front end in a seamless way, we will, or we will just migrate to the new thing as we build going forward. So, it’s complicated, as you well know, but we are not blindly running into a billing replacement program.

Frank Louthan: Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

Mike McCormack: Thanks Frank. Next question.

Operator: And our next question is from the line of Nick Del Deo with SVB MoffettNathanson. Please go ahead with your question.

Nick Del Deo: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I have one for Kate and one for Chris. Kate, your predecessor, Jeff, used to emphasize profitable growth and free cash flow per share as kind of the financial measures, he was most focused on. I saw the profitable growth got a mention in the deck. What other financial metrics are you going to be most focused on? And is there anything you need to do to get the organization aligned around them? And for Chris…

Kate Johnson: So