T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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So they’re actually not growing the porting side of their business at the same rate as the non-porting side of their business, instead kind of printing postpaid ads. They might be coming over from prepaid. They might be just simply net new. They might be kind of dropped in the bag. I don’t really know. There’s probably several different factors to it. And we just — we don’t know quite how to unpack it because we don’t have all the information. I mean, we double-click into things like Verizon’s wholesale revenue and note that it’s not growing. That’s sort of an interesting diagnostic for us that helps us understand what might be happening. So anyway, hopefully, that helps it. Our industry-leading account growth of 299,000 shows that T-Mobile is winning the switching decisions in high-quality prime paying families, the kind everybody is going for.

Peter Osvaldik: Yeah. And on CapEx, Phil, the way I think about next year, although we’re not specifically guiding is we’re still comfortable in the 9 to 10 range that we gave out. Remember, I wouldn’t take Q4 as a jumping-off point because really, the way Ulf and team have built this is a very lean manufacturing approach to the build one of the secrets to our capital efficiency there. And so it isn’t that I take a run rate and an exit run rate and projected, but $9 billion to $10 billion feels about right for next year at this point in time.

Mike Sievert: On speaking of a lean network performance machine, I think it would be a good time to just stop and take note of what’s been delivered with this incredibly capital-efficient profile that you’re asking about. Ulf and team, you guys deserve incredible credit. We’ve now reached 285 million people with ultra-capacity 5G. This is something that neither of our competitors — principal competitors have promised to ever do, certainly not in the next two years. And so we’ve been talking about this idea of being two or more years ahead in the 5G race. But if anything, it’s expanding. Maybe you could share a few of the statistics of kind of where we are and also a little shadowing of where we’re going.

Ulf Ewaldsson: Well, thanks, Mike. And yes, the last quarter, we actually pulled ahead in our leadership. And 285 mid-band POPs, we’re heading towards 300 by the end of this year. We have to remember that we reached 200 mid-band POPs two years ago in 2021. On our low band, we reached 300 two years ago, where others are now pulling into the station. It gets harder and harder with the POPs as you grow through every 100 million POPs takes about 3 times the efforts in terms of upgrading and building new towers to be able to deliver the same POP growth. So this network is just fantastic and we are so proud of it, and we’re proud to support also what Callie commented on earlier, 5G being capable of not only being that tremendous consumer driver, it also drives now more and more of the business inside the enterprise space, which is a dream for Oliver [indiscernible], who has followed the 5G for many, many years.

On top of that, we have lots of room to move ahead. We have today 255 megahertz of spectrum that is dedicated to 5G on our mid-band. And you have to remember that our low band is all dedicated to 5G. When others are talking about their coverage, they’re sharing this between LTE and 5G, and we’re not — we’re dedicating spectrum. The mid-band megahertz will grow to 200 megahertz dedicated to 5G by the end of the year by migrating more LTE spectrum over to 5G. And then we haven’t even started on what we can use for ’24 and beyond, which is our C-band. We can use our 345 auction results. We can use our 108 auction results, which is enhancing our 2.5 capabilities even more, and we have yet to re-farm spectrum, for example, on AWS as well. So there is just so much more for us to run at and I couldn’t be more excited that we’re extending our lead in terms of our network.

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