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

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But what’s interesting is if you and several of your neighbors all did the same, the end person would get a no because it’s a dynamic model. What we’re selling is excess capacity. And because of that, what we — our modeling shows us that we will get to, as we said at the very beginning, about 7 million or 8 million households with this excess capacity model that’s not burdened by capital. And since it’s not burdened by capital with an already built mobile network that you need for great coverage and competitiveness, we’re able to profitably build this business at very low prices. It’s just a win-win for a sort of single-digit penetration part of the market. Now to the premise of your question and what Ulf was getting into, of course, we’re studying whether there are ways to go beyond that initial excess capacity capital free model, capital-free ish model.

And we haven’t drawn any conclusions about that yet. I mean, we’re looking hard at millimeter wave. We’re looking at whether or not dedicating mid-band spectrum to HSI would make sense, whether they’re nonstandard-based solutions. And we just haven’t drawn any conclusions. It’s not immediately obvious that there are economic ways to grow this business beyond its initial single-digit penetration. But you may see us doing trials in the marketplace as we experiment with this and try to crack the code. And so you’ll hear about us trying millimeter wave things or MDU strategies or non-standards-based solutions to see if there’s a way to get after it. And you see us trialing fiber, whether or not there’s a way for our team, our distribution, our brand to add value in the fiber ecosystem and I’ve made mention of that before.

All these things are things we’re doing to try to learn. And the good news is we’ve got some time because we’ll hit this kind of initial terminal sizing of HSI, still we’ve got two more years to run. So our heads are down seeing if there’s a way to crack the code on this.

Peter Osvaldik: And of course, any of the things we do there that we just talked about, a capital burden model or something with fiber or all things that would have to be accretive to our Analyst Day guidance that we put out there.

Mike Sievert: Good. All right. Operator, next question.

Operator: That will come from the line of Tim Horan with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Timothy Horan: Thanks. Just curious, why wouldn’t you be raising fixed wireless prices now? It seems like you have very, very strong demand from everything we hear out there and you kind of have somewhat limited supply. And I guess related to that, the Go5G plan, can you give us some color what that means for ARPU growth in the next couple of years? Thanks.

Mike Sievert: Okay. Let’s start with the second one on Go5G and where is ARPU going and ARPA and all that stuff. Peter, we can start with you.

Peter Osvaldik: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll let John comment on the success of Go5GPlus. But as I always say, when we think about ARPU and you saw a sequential increase of about $0.20. And we continue to believe on a year-to-year basis, ARPU will be generally stable. There’s probably some potential for sequential increase again from Q2 to Q3. And since it is such a mix-driven metric, and you have to put everything into it, whether we’re talking about all the benefits we see from Go5GPlus whether we talk about the benefits we see from a segmented approach, whether it’s military, 55 plus and how those might be lower ARPU customers than the average that we see but are high CLV customers coming in very high-quality customers. Similarly, in Business.

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