SBA Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:SBAC) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Brendan Lynch: Great, thanks, that’s helpful. And maybe one balance sheet question for Brendan. Accounts receivable was flat quarter-to-quarter around $183 million, but it’s up quite a bit relative to the trailing 12-month average price of that. Is there anything specific that is causing that to occur?

Brendan Cavanagh: Not really, because we are obviously focused on aged accounts receivable, which are not – we’re doing fine on collections. So a lot of that’s really just timing around some of the services contracts, generally services related in terms of fluctuations not leasing.

Brendan Lynch: Great. Thanks for the color.

Operator: Next question comes from David Guarino with Green Street.

David Guarino: Thanks. Hey Jeff, I want to talk about that CTIA report you mentioned. What do you think would happen to U.S. macro tower new leasing activity? If the SEC was unsuccessful and they couldn’t get access to new build in that spectrum, do you think we’d see growth trail off from the 5% rate, pretty significantly once the C-band spectrum is installed?

Jeff Stoops: Well, I think you’d see a tremendous amount of increased densification, because that will be the only way to satisfy demand in a spectrum constrained environment. The question is, it’s the age-old question, who’s going to pay for that and are our customer’s buying going to find a good enough return on investment? I mean if there’s no more spectrum Dave, there has to be self-splitting and densification.

David Guarino: Okay, and I guess maybe to dive into the densification side, there’s ample opportunity within your portfolio for that to happen, right? I wouldn’t be fair to say during the 4G build-out the majority that already occurred?

Jeff Stoops: I would say to densify within the existing spectrum and to have no additional spectrum introduced into the system. If you were going to truly build out to the max, to achieve the max 5G capabilities, I would tell you, we have a lot of opportunity and a lot of room on our towers that would need to be filled for our customers to achieve that.

David Guarino: Okay. Maybe stepping outside of the U.S., and it’s been, I guess it’s been over a year since you guys set up operations in the Philippines. Could you just maybe update us on how many sites you own in the country now, and then another with a lot of M&O tower assets sales? Are there any rumors about on the horizon of maybe the M&O’s looking to sell some more assets?

Brendan Cavanagh: Yeah, we’ve got about 130 or so sites right now, then a bunch more in construction, so we would expect to end the year in the high 100s somewhere.

Jeff Stoops: Yeah, and the M&O’s have followed up, I mean there are two real M&O’s. There’s three, but two that really own assets over there, and those customers have continued to hive off chunks of their portfolios, not sure that they’ve done it too many times, but I know there have been follow-ups I think from each of the two big ones there with additional asset sales.

David Guarino: But nothing else on the horizon that you are aware off?

Jeff Stoops: Not that we are aware of?

David Guarino: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: And next we’ll hear from Eric Luebchow with Wells Fargo.

Eric Luebchow: Great, thanks for taking the question. Just curious, for the two large U.S. carriers that are already deploying C-band today, any kind of rough estimate on how many of your sites has been upgraded just to give us a sense for how long the growth there will be in the next few years?