Pascal Desroches, chief financial officer of AT&T, has revealed an update on the company’s business performance at the Credit Suisse Communications conference.
AT&T’s network is performing as well. The company accelerates its deployment of C-band spectrum and it expects to cover 200 million people by the end of 2023, strengthening its ability to deliver even faster average speeds across the country, Pascal Desroches said.
Desroches indicated that AT&T’s outlook includes expectations for elevated wireless competition and thus recent promotional activity by rival wireless providers does not come as a material surprise.
AT&T’s plan to double the size of fiber footprint to about 30 million customer locations by year-end 2025 would open up new use cases and opportunities given the company’s integrated fiber deployment strategy and penetration trends in areas where fiber has already been deployed.
AT&T is targeting 67 to 70 million HBO Max customers by the end of 2021.
Desroches reiterated the guidance AT&T previously provided for 2022-2024 after the expected close of the pending WarnerMedia-Discovery transaction: Low-single digit revenue CAGR and mid-single digit adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS CAGR.
The company expects to increase capital investment to around $24 billion annually, focused on 5G and fiber. The company expects net debt to adjusted EBITDA in the 2.6x range after the transaction closes, moving to less than 2.5x by year-end 2023.
