American Tower Corp (AMT) — Q1 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, and thank you for joining American Tower's First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. We have posted a presentation, which we will refer to throughout our prepared remarks under the Investor Relations tab of our website, www.americantower.com. Before the rest of my comments, I'll note that due to COVID-19, all of us on the call this morning are dialing in remotely from different locations. So to the extent there are any minor technical difficulties on the call, we would ask that you bear with us. Our agenda for this morning will be as follows. First, I'll quickly summarize our financial results for the first quarter. Next, Tom Bartlett, our President and CEO, will provide some brief commentary on our U.S. business. Next, Rod Smith, our Executive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer, will discuss our Q1 2020 results and updated 2020 outlook. And finally, our Executive Chairman, Jim Taiclet, will share a few closing remarks. After these comments, we will take your questions. I'll remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Examples of these statements include our expectations regarding future growth, including our 2020 outlook, capital allocation and future operating performance, our expectation regarding the impacts of COVID-19, our expectations regarding the impacts of the AGR decision in India, and any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts. You should be aware that certain factors may affect us in the future and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. Such factors include the risk factors set forth in this morning's earnings press release, those set forth in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and in other filings we make with the SEC. We urge you to consider these factors and remind you that we undertake no obligation to update the information contained in this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. Now please turn to Slide four of our presentation, which highlights our financial results for the first quarter. During the quarter, our property revenue increased 10.5% to nearly $2 billion. Our adjusted EBITDA grew by 14.1% to $1.3 billion. And our consolidated AFFO and consolidated AFFO per share increased by roughly 5% to $907 million and $2.03, respectively. These consolidated AFFO metrics were impacted by a one-time cash interest charge of approximately $63 million associated with our purchase of MTN's minority stakes in each of our joint ventures in Ghana and Uganda during the quarter. Absent this one-time item, consolidated AFFO and consolidated AFFO per share would have grown by more than 12%. Finally, net income attributable to American Tower Corporation common stockholders increased by roughly 4.4% to $415 million or $0.93 per diluted common share. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, Igor, and good morning, everyone. I hope you are all staying safe and well. Typically, in our first quarter earnings call, we would talk exclusively about our U.S. business, and how it is positioned in the market. But given that there is nothing typical in the world in which we live today, I would like to first discuss how we are navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, including its historical impact on the global economy. Our number one priority continues to be the health and safety of our employees, their families, our tenants, suppliers, and surrounding communities. Most of our team members globally are working from home. To facilitate this, we bolstered our IT environment to support more remote work and established alternative business processes and solutions to overcome the need to have work accomplished from our office or at our established operational centers. We're practicing social distancing in a few instances where certain employees need to be in the office and have provided added equipment and supplies for those considered essential and needed to be out in our sites supporting our tenants. We're also in the process of establishing our overall guidelines and procedures for an eventual return to work in our offices across the globe. These guidelines will adhere to government directives and be supplemented by reasonable and practical criteria based on local situational needs and circumstances. The reopening process will be based on safety readiness levels and will not commence until I'm certain we have complete access to the necessary critical resources and supplies. I also want to emphasize that while immersed in all this activity and uncertainty, relative to just how long this crisis will last, we remain focused on continuing to meet the needs of our tenants. To that end, I want to note that to this point, the direct effects of the virus on our core business outside of translational FX impacts have been modest. While we're continually monitoring the COVID-19 impacts, our business model globally has demonstrated its resiliency and stability. Now more than ever, our infrastructure is incredibly critical to ensure our tenants are able to keep their customers connected. As a result, in many of our served markets, including the United States, we have received official priority designations that enable tower-related work to continue, largely uninterrupted. In a few locations, we have experienced some limitations and restrictions, particularly with respect to new builds and other discretionary tower work. In fact, in certain locations, new construction is currently prohibited. While these impacts have so far been modest, we do expect some slight delays in our new build pipeline and colocation activity in certain areas, but do believe these delays will be temporary. All in all, our business and operational focus will continue to be to prioritize actions, projects, and capital allocation initiatives that extend, deepen, and secure connectivity throughout our served markets. We are proud to help deliver meaningful connectivity to billions of people around the world at an important time like this and are focused on maintaining its continuity. This then brings me to the original topic I wanted to cover with you this morning, and that's our business here in the United States. In 2020, at the midpoint of our outlook, our U.S. business is expected to represent about 57% of our consolidated property revenues and around 2/3 of our consolidated property operating profit. The U.S. operation is the foundation of our consolidated business and will continue to be for many years to come. Mobile data usage growth of at least 30% per year has driven significant levels of colocations and amendments on our U.S. assets over the last decade. We expect that growth to continue for the foreseeable future. In fact, according to industry estimates, the average U.S. smartphone user consumed around nine gigabytes per month in 2019, which is up some 450% from just five years ago. By 2025, that same user is projected to consume over 45 gigabytes per month. To account for the strain that this usage growth will create on mobile networks, we believe that our tenants will continue to invest significant amounts of capital into our infrastructure. Over the last five years, this spending has averaged upwards of $30 billion per year. It's increased over the past 20 years as each new technology generation has been deployed, dating back to 2G. A significant portion of our tenants' network investments in future years is expected to be focused on 5G. I will take some time to cover our latest high-level thoughts around 5G and what that might mean for our business in a moment. But first, I'd like to spend a few minutes laying out the key characteristics and return profile of our U.S. business. Our U.S. portfolio, comprised of nearly 41,000 sites, has been created over the last 20-plus years through a number of M&A transactions, complemented by our internal new build program. We've consistently focused on sites with premier locations, significant capacity for lease-up, attractive land lease arrangements and modest requirements for ongoing maintenance CapEx. Perhaps the single biggest driver of value in these assets over the long-term has been the tenant lease contracts or master lease agreements that accompany them, which we have purposely designed to both deliver compelling value to the tenant and secure attractive economics for American Tower. Our requirement for exclusive franchise real estate locations in mission-critical areas has supported our ability to implement these contract structures to generate a consistent, recurring, growing base of cash flow. As you can see on Slide 6, that focus on tower and other franchise real estate assets has resulted in sustained attractive organic tenant billings growth for American Tower, averaging more than 6% over the past five years. The combination of strong colocation and amendment trends, annual contractual escalators, and consistently low churn in the U.S. have been key drivers of this growth, as we've capitalized on the deployment and densification of 4G networks across the country. We've translated this strong organic tenant billings growth into attractive NOI yields across our portfolio. For example, we're generating yields of 24% on sites we owned prior to 2005 and yields of 17% on sites added to the portfolio from 2005 to 2010. On assets added after 2010, including those from our GTP and Verizon transactions, NOI yields averaged around 6% as of the end of the first quarter. We believe there is significant upside in this vintage of sites as additional equipment is deployed, particularly given the expected acceleration of 5G rollouts over the next few years. Our U.S. tower leadership team has done a terrific job managing our base of assets in the U.S., having locked in more than $28 billion in contractually committed revenue as of the end of the first quarter. Margins in this business, including all of the M&A completed over the last several years, have continued to expand, with the property segment operating profit margin coming in at nearly 79% in Q1, accompanied by cash SG&A as a percentage of revenue of just 4.1%. Additionally, our U.S. business ROIC has continued to rise over the last 10 years, while we have nearly doubled our asset base. We now have around 3,000 tenants in the U.S., including a vertical segment focusing on nontraditional tenants. This segment, although still in relatively early stages of development, generated more than 15% of our non-MLA related U.S. business in the quarter. From an operational perspective, our U.S. team has been focused on automating tasks to reduce cycle times, implementing a fleet of drones to secure more accurate data on our sites and implementing several new innovative contract structures, providing process efficiencies for both ourselves and our tenants and reducing the need for site-specific evaluations. From a macro industry perspective, we see several trends unfolding. First, we believe the cloud is going to come closer to the edge. Second, 5G will be deployed using a number of different spectrum bands. And third, the variety of end-user devices and applications is expected to grow faster than we could possibly imagine. The overall increase in our tenants resulting value proposition, driven by continued 4G and new 5G network deployments on our infrastructure, will, we expect, continue to increase our NOI yields and returns on invested capital. While we expect to have 4G-related infrastructure on our sites for years to come, we believe ubiquitous 5G deployments are also on our doorstep. Importantly, we continue to believe that the majority of the sub-6 gigahertz spectrum deployments throughout the country will be on macro towers, and that mid-band spectrum will be critical for our tenants' 5G networks. We continue to expect mid-band deployments to accelerate beginning in the second half of this year as the new T-Mobile builds out more of its 2.5-gig spectrum. As I mentioned, we also expect spending on 4G networks to continue, given that the migration of the user base from 4G to 5G will take a number of years. Bottom line, we believe that as a result, a tremendous amount of incrementally more complex equipment should end up on our towers across the U.S. over the next five to 10 years. We're already seeing this trend from the major hyperscalers. What will also be interesting is how the hyperscale and cloud service providers will interact and position themselves with the carriers. So as a result, we continue to explore trials and partnerships with a variety of different players, including hyperscalers, cloud service providers, carriers, data center companies, and equipment suppliers to see how our infrastructure may plug into this new environment. At a high level, we continue to believe that as information generation and processing progressively moves to the network edge, there will be a greater need for lower latency through distributed storage and compute functionality in close proximity to both wireless and wireline end consumers. Edge compute offerings may eventually serve autonomous vehicle networks, interactive and immersive media delivery, cloud gaming and any number of other products and services where lower latency is a must and/or data needs to be closer to the consumer machine. While the potential for a scaled mobile edge solution is likely several years away, we are seeing initial positive indications of customer interest in our assets and are having numerous conversations with a number of parties that are likely to play a significant role in the edge going forward. One such example is with Microsoft through their Azure Edge Zones program, where we are now a named partner. As time goes on, we are hopeful that other partnerships will develop to help us accelerate the development of the edge data model. On the indoor connectivity side, we continue to explore ways to leverage carrier-grade Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G and CBRS spectrum to create converged networks. These targeted neutral host solutions can make sense in a broader array of venues than traditional DAS. In other words, drastically increasing the total addressable market. We are likely at least a few years away from potentially scaling CBRS-based neutral host systems but are already seeing positive indications of demand for fixed wireless access, private networks, and other solutions in these types of locations. As we look at these and other U.S.-based innovation opportunities, I want to underscore that our investment criteria and philosophy remains the same: we are looking for scalable, exclusive, multi-tenant franchise real estate digital infrastructure opportunities that potentially deliver consistent, sustainable, recurring growth with returns that rival those of our existing tower model. Taking these innovation initiatives together with our high-performing existing U.S. business, we are energized about the future. The secular trends driving demand for space on our franchise real estate assets continue to accelerate, and we believe we are optimally positioned to convert that demand into attractive total returns for our stockholders over the long-term. Further, our business has performed extremely well through a variety of economic and capital market cycles, and we are confident that American Tower will again stand and deliver through the current turmoil. With that, I turn the call over to Rod to go through our results for the quarter and our updated full year outlook.

Thanks, Tom, and good morning to everyone on the call. Thank you for joining. Before I dive into our first quarter results, I'd like to also take a moment and acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic that is affecting all of us. My thoughts and best wishes go out to our employees, tenants, vendors, and to each of you on the call this morning. I hope you all are safe and healthy through this difficult time. Let's now turn to our first quarter results. As you saw in today's press release, we began 2020 with a solid quarter, as mobile data consumption continued to grow across the globe. In fact, in many of our markets, particularly internationally, mobile data traffic has increased as a result of COVID-19, highlighting the importance of wireless services everywhere and the critical nature of our global portfolio of communications real estate. To start, I'd like to note a few of our first quarter achievements. Specifically, we met our expectations for organic tenant billings growth rates across the globe, led by Africa at 9.3%, Latin America at 7.5% and the U.S. at 5.6%. We grew our property revenue in tenant billings by more than 10%. We expanded our adjusted EBITDA margin by 230 basis points over the prior year. We made substantial progress integrating the more than 8,000 sites we acquired at the end of 2019 in Africa and Latin America. We've built approximately 1,000 new sites. We strengthened our balance sheet and now have $5.4 billion of liquidity pro forma for our new term loan from earlier this month. And we grew our common stock dividend by 20%. Before we discuss the details of our full year outlook, let's first spend a few minutes reviewing our financial and operational results for the first quarter. Please turn to Slide 8, and we will review our property revenue and organic tenant billings growth. For the quarter, you can see that our underlying growth remains solid throughout our markets. Due to strong demand for our assets across the globe and on an FX-neutral basis, we met our internal expectations for revenue. As Igor mentioned earlier, our first quarter consolidated property revenue of approximately $1,970,000,000 grew by $187 million or 10.5% over Q1 of last year. This included a headwind of roughly $48 million from unfavorable FX translations. Our U.S. segment represented 55% of both our consolidated property revenue and the corresponding growth, while our international segments accounted for the remaining 45%. As always has been the case, the critical components of our consolidated property revenue are those items that impact our recurring tenant billings revenue, including around $79 million in colocations and amendments, a similar level to prior quarters. Our consistent and reliable contractual escalators, which added $50 million, our day one incremental tenant billings resulting from our returns-based and disciplined capital investments, which contributed $72 million and includes M&A and new builds. These positive items were partially offset by lease non-renewals or churn, which reduced our tenant billings revenue by $49 million for the quarter. Looking at our major business segments; our U.S. property segment revenue totaled nearly $1.1 billion for the quarter and grew by $104 million or 10.5% over the prior year period. Our international property revenue of $883 million grew by $84 million or 10.5% over last year's levels. As expected, we saw solid demand from our major carrier tenants around the globe. This demand was driven by the carriers' need to continually invest in their networks in order to keep pace with the exploding growth in mobile data consumption. Moving to the right side of the slide, you will see that our consolidated organic tenant billings growth also met our expectations, coming in at 5.4% for the quarter. For our U.S. property segment, organic tenant billings growth was 5.6%, comprised of new business activity, which totaled 4.5%; pricing escalators, which totaled 3.3%; and churn of 2%; and a roughly 0.3% negative impact from other items, which partially offset the items I mentioned above. As expected, this growth rate reflects a deceleration from prior quarters. For our international segment, organic tenant billings growth was 5.1%, led by Africa at more than 9% and Latin America at 7.5%. Europe totaled just about 2%, while India came in with a decline of around 1%, which was in line with our expectations, given anticipated churn and market conditions. The component parts of our international organic tenant billings growth were new business activity, which totaled 7%; our mostly local inflation-based pricing escalators, which totaled 3.6%; and churn of 5.8%, largely attributable to previously anticipated cancellations in India. Turning to slide nine, you can see our first quarter consolidated adjusted EBITDA of nearly $1.3 billion grew by $157 million or 14.1% over the prior year period. Our adjusted EBITDA growth was negatively impacted by approximately $26 million or 2.3% for FX fluctuations as compared to Q1 of last year. Our U.S. property segment operating profit of $858 million grew by $105 million or nearly 14% over the year-ago period, while our international property segment operating profit of $448 million grew by $62 million or 16% over last year's level. As a result, our U.S. segment represented 66% of our property segment operating profit in the quarter and 63% of the corresponding growth, while international accounted for the remaining 34% and 37%, respectively. Moving to the right side of the slide, you can see our consolidated AFFO of $907 million grew by $45 million or 5.3% over the year-ago period. Our consolidated AFFO per share of $2.03 grew by $0.09 or 4.6% over last year's levels. It is important to consider that the consolidated AFFO results include the impact of a one-time cash interest expense charge totaling $63 million as a result of our purchase of MTN's stake in each of our joint ventures in Ghana and Uganda. Absent this non-recurring charge, our consolidated AFFO and AFFO per share growth would have been 12.6% and 12.4%, respectively. Moving to Slide 10, let's now take a look at our updated expectations for 2020. To start, I will address a few of the business issues that require careful consideration as we updated our full year outlook. First and foremost is the COVID-19 pandemic. Although its full year impact on the world is not yet known, to date, on a constant currency basis, we have experienced only modest impacts. In fact, in many of our international markets, markets that have little or no fixed line infrastructure, our tenants are actually seeing increases in mobile data consumption. As stated earlier, this highlights the world's growing reliance on wireless services and evidences the critical nature of our global portfolio of communications real estate. With that said, COVID-19 has caused global financial turmoil and material moves in many foreign exchange rates relative to the U.S. dollar. Of course, these FX moves are having a negative impact on our updated full year outlook. I'll discuss the detail of those impact shortly. And as always, we routinely review our hedging policies and often engage with the help of specialized external advisers in doing so. At this stage, we do not anticipate any significant changes in our approach to hedging, but as always, we continue to evaluate our options. Next, in the U.S., T-Mobile recently completed its merger with Sprint. As a result, we anticipate an acceleration of spending from the new T-Mobile to begin in the second half. In addition, we believe this industry shift may result in a sustained increase in wireless capital spending as 5G deployments ramp and Dish supported its network. Lastly, in India, the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the fees, penalties, and interest assessments associated with the previous ruling on the definition of adjusted gross revenues. Although the total liability has been reaffirmed, we don't yet know the pacing and duration of the required payments on the part of the carriers. Taking these updated considerations and our assessment of market conditions into account and based on the proven resilience of our global business, our total property revenue outlook on a constant currency basis is unchanged. However, foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations as compared to our prior outlook are expected to negatively impact reported property revenues for the full year by approximately $300 million. For organic tenant billings growth, we are reiterating our outlook across most of our geographic segments. However, for Africa, we now expect organic tenant billings growth of around 9% for the year, down from 11% in our initial outlook. Looking at Slide 11, you will see that we are also affirming our underlying expectations for adjusted EBITDA at the midpoint of our outlook outside of an FX translational impact of approximately $165 million. Lastly, we are reiterating our expectations for consolidated AFFO for the year on an FX-neutral basis. Although we are not surprised by how well our business has performed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we will continue to monitor events closely as the full impacts of this crisis develop. I would also note that there could eventually be some timing issues regarding new business commencements, new builds, or even accounts receivable collections. Flipping to Slide 12, I'd like to now briefly discuss our capital allocation plans for the year, which remain broadly consistent with our prior view. Our full year dividend declaration, subject to the approval of our Board, is expected to be approximately $2 billion. We also expect to deploy $1.2 billion towards our CapEx program, with 85% of that investment being discretionary. As a result of COVID-19 and the associated FX impacts, we expect a reduction of $50 million from our prior CapEx outlook. This includes a $30 million reduction in redevelopment CapEx, $5 million in lower maintenance CapEx, and $15 million in lower development capital spending. We also expect to explore additional opportunities to extend and ladder our debt maturities and reduce our overall cost of borrowings. As a result, we anticipate continuing our long track record of generating strong consolidated AFFO per share growth, while simultaneously growing our return on invested capital. Turning now to Slide 13, I will briefly summarize the strength of our investment-grade balance sheet and our current liquidity position, which we believe is unmatched in our sector. As of the end of the first quarter, we had more than $1.3 billion in cash and $2.9 billion available under our revolving credit facilities. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we completed an additional one year term loan of nearly $1.2 billion, increasing our liquidity on a pro forma basis to more than $5 billion. Our net leverage at the end of the quarter was 4.6 times, in line with our targeted range and consistent with our historical levels. Our weighted average cost of debt was around 3.1%, and our weighted average debt tenor was over five years. Regarding our debt maturities for 2020, subsequent to the end of the quarter, we announced the redemption of our $750 million, 2.8% unsecured notes, leaving us with just $350 million in remaining maturities this year. We believe we are in an extremely strong financial position amid the current market turmoil. We expect this to enable us to continue to be opportunistic with respect to investing and growth, including M&A opportunities on a global basis. If you would please turn to slide 14, I will conclude my comments with a brief summary. Despite the global pandemic, we had a good start to 2020 as we achieved solid organic tenant billings growth, expanded our margins and ROIC, and started integrating the portfolios acquired at the end of 2019 and increased our quarterly dividend by 20%. We further strengthened our investment-grade balance sheet, increasing our current liquidity to $5.4 billion and positioning ourselves to comfortably fund our 2020 capital deployment plan, while expanding our global power portfolio through opportunistic M&A. And finally, outside of the translational FX impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, our outlook remains largely unchanged, highlighting the critical nature of wireless services everywhere as mobile data consumption continues to grow.

Thanks, Rod, and good morning, everyone. To each of you on the call today, I wish you and yours a safe and healthy path through the COVID-19 pandemic. Our top priority in American Tower is the health and safety of our global workforce. Our dedicated employees and managers throughout the company are committed to keeping critical telecommunications infrastructure fully operational and functional in their communities. Our company is also contributing to those communities financially through our philanthropy and CSR programs and through the American Tower Foundation. This includes everything from working in Boston, Massachusetts with local and state support funds for citizens in need, to funding and donating PPE to health workers throughout the U.S., to helping with the government of India's COVID-19 recovery fund and many more. In addition, Commerce Secretary Ross and I have agreed to immediately pivot the entire near-term work effort of the U.S.-India CEO Forum, which we co-chair, toward COVID-19 relief and recovery efforts in the world's two largest democracies. We are fully engaged with the GOI and our Indian counterpart companies in this effort. As ATC's Executive Chairman, I have been offering guidance regarding our COVID-19 response, while also working closely with Tom to ensure a smooth and seamless management transition. As I move toward completing my nearly 20-year tenure at American Tower, I am tremendously confident in three key respects: Tom's ability to lead our highly capable executive team and the business into a successful and prosperous future, the continuing vibrancy of our Stand and Deliver strategy and its ability to deliver strong performance and returns to our investors, and that the ongoing demand drivers for mobile infrastructure will underpin strong growth for ATC for many years to come. Lastly, I would like to thank our investors and analysts, many of whom are on this call today, for your confidence in our team during the many years that I have been privileged to lead it. I fully expect that Tom will now lead the company along the trajectory of our Stand and Deliver strategy to even greater heights in the future. And now I'll turn it back over to Tom for some closing thoughts.

Hey, thanks, Jim. Before we move on to Q&A, I'd like to first recognize our Board Chairman, Jim Taiclet, for his incredible leadership, judgment and friendship over these last 20 years. Over that period, our business has grown from operating in just three markets, generating about $1 billion in revenue with 15 sites to where we are today. That, in and of itself, is amazing and a testament to his leadership, but it's the way he has guided us and built this culture that, in my mind, will forever be his legacy and my compass for where we go from here. So Jim, I'd like to say on behalf of all your investors and employees, we thank you. Okay. Operator, please, now, let's open the lines for some Q&A.

And congrats to Tom and Rod, well earned. And congrats, and thank you to Jim. It's obviously sad to see you go, but I do feel like this transition is natural and seamless, and I do think that it speaks volumes about the quality of the organization that you built and the legacy you leave behind. I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity to ask you one last question. When you and the Board were starting to design the company's expanded international strategy, you talked about a range of risks that the company was willing to take, a range of stresses that you thought you were designing your international operations to absorb. And while I'm certain you didn't anticipate this exact situation, I was hoping you can remind us of those risk parameters, the stress points that you designed the business for so we can assess for ourselves whether these changes are within scope or whether adjustments are going to need to be made.

Sure, Brett, and thanks for your kind comments. I'll start it off and maybe turn it back over to Tom to speak of the plan ahead. The range of risks that we anticipated was based on the fundamental risk we had at the time, which we were a single country, single-product company that had really large growth ambitions. To mitigate that very high concentration in the U.S. tower market, we went on a 15-year diversification plan. So we diversified among currencies, continents, countries, customers, markets, to create a portfolio that would mitigate risk and truly grow over time. That's the framework we built on since 2007. I think within that context, I could let Tom describe how he and perhaps Rod thinks that this can play out given the COVID-19. I reckon it’s still within our framework, frankly, Brett. But let me ask Tom to comment.

Thanks, Jim. And thanks, Brett, for the comments. What supports and underwrites our overall international strategy is that it's the same business model as we have in the United States. It's not a new set of products and services. This allows us to take the model we built in the United States in terms of how we look at infrastructure, how we actually look at the master lease agreements and to take that offshore into those large, emerging market economies to drive growth. We are large incumbents. Our customers are the largest telecommunications companies around the world. Operationally, when we look at the investments themselves, we're looking at them over a very long period of time, so we have a 10-year discounted cash flow to underwrite them with a risk-adjusted cost of capital. So we care for a lot of the risks you would normally see. They have escalators in them that are CPI based, utilizing local debt, reinvesting that cash back into the business. So we think that if we can do this in a diversified way, we will be able to enjoy the growth in these markets that are anywhere from three to five years behind the U.S. in terms of technology. So we think that's a sound, balanced approach to leverage the opportunity we see offshore.

And Tom, I'd like to just add one more point. We still get about 2/3 or more of the cash flow coming from the U.S. During that 15-year period, the international market also grew just as rapidly as the U.S. cash flow. So this isn't just about risk mitigation; it also turbocharged growth.

Jim, if I could just add a couple of comments regarding our ability to build new assets in these international markets. When we build new assets, those are our highest yielding investments and we've been able to build a lot of assets around the globe, more than 4,000 sites last year, and we expect to build even more than that this year.

Morning, guys. Well, the world certainly has changed in the last two months since your 4Q call. First, I'm glad to hear, and I hope your family, you and your employees stay safe in this crazy time. I'll add my comments to say, Jim, I remember that non-deal road show in San Francisco. Must be almost 20 years ago. The world was in chaos then too, so you guys have navigated very strongly. I also want to echo congrats to Tom and Rod as well. From a business standpoint, obviously, another thing that's changed is Sprint and T-Mobile merger has finally closed. How should we think about the timing of working with them in integrating networks? Do we think of MLAs? Do we think of holistic approaches? How long does it take to work through these complicated master lease agreements?

Yes, Rick, thank you for your comments. T-Mobile and Sprint have been working on network deployment plans for some time. With the deal closed, we're now able to sit down with them in a meaningful way to discuss various contractual structures. While we've seen some level of increase in the pipeline, we're awaiting the bulk of what we expect to come through as they ramp up their network deployments in the second half of the year. We expect significant conversations over the next 60 to 90 days regarding master lease agreements that will be mutually beneficial.

Great. And Jim, you mentioned your CEO panel committee in India and the U.S. jointly working together on the COVID-19 efforts. Any updated thoughts on when the pacing of the payments and the AGR issue in India might be resolved? Seeing COVID-19 has kind of put things on the back burner. I know we get a lot of questions about the timing for when carriers will know the pacing of payments.

Ric, just as an update, the process has largely been put on hold due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. Everything is status quo at this point. We anticipate further hearings in the second half of the year to discuss the payment timetable, but everything is on hold for now.

Makes sense. Again, I'll close with thoughts and hopes that everybody's family and employees make it through this crazy time. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Ric.

Thanks, Ric, and you too.

Ric, thanks for your support over these last 20 years and your deep understanding of our company. To underline what Tom said about India, the telecommunications and digital infrastructure industry is one of the significant work streams of this group. We have great talent on both sides between American Tower and our counterparts in India. We've made great progress on telecom, and AGR resolution will ultimately be included in how that industry strengthens in both countries as a result of the pandemic.

Thank you, morning. I also want to extend my congratulations and thanks to Jim, as well as congratulations to Tom and Rod on their new roles. Taking a step back, how do you think about expanding the addressable market for revenue? Can you further quantify the long-term opportunities to expand revenue?

We did set internal revenue goals, and we've talked about them externally that within a 10-year period, we would generate approximately an incremental $1.5 billion from innovation-related events and activities. This is based on a neutral multi-tenant connectivity platform that includes exclusive real estate and passive infrastructure. We're developing in-building capabilities and leveraging CBRS spectrum to capture more opportunities in the market. We're also exploring our edge-based computing opportunities, and our Colo Atl asset in our U.S. portfolio will help interconnect our offering to the cloud. Overall, we believe there’s a lot of potential in our existing asset base for new business opportunities.

I just want to add that the strength and resilience of our underlying business really does help support our ability to innovate. Our strong adjusted EBITDA margins and growth translate well into the budget for innovation.

Yes, Michael. That’s a great point. We haven't seen the need for additional assets but recognize that additional investment opportunities will arise as the demand for services increases. We're keeping a watchful eye on industry trends.

Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to inquire about the M&A landscape. In dislocating periods, have you seen better valuations on some international portfolios? Can you elaborate on your experience in prior periods of market turmoil?

We are always looking at M&A opportunities. Whether COVID-19 is impacting valuations remains to be seen. We'll rely on our disciplined approach and monitor opportunities for growth. At this point in time, we are well positioned to strike when the right opportunities arise.

Let me add my congratulations to everyone. I guess my question is about the vision going forward. What will Tom Bartlett's American Tower look like in five years? What is your strategic goal?

Thanks, David. We've developed an excellent strategic blueprint known as our Stand and Deliver strategy, which emphasizes industry leadership, focused innovation, enhancing efficiency, and growth. As we execute this blueprint, I do not see any significant changes from how we have operated; we'll adjust as needed but will keep pushing as we've always done. We're positioned to leverage opportunities from our international portfolio to expand our U.S. business effectively and will continue to focus on areas for growth, profitability, and shareholder value.

When we embarked on our international strategy, it gave us the opportunity to expand our U.S. business as we can now apply this innovation program across our portfolios. Tom and the team have blue skies ahead as they continue to leverage strategic growth.

Thank you very much. Good morning. Can you provide some insight into the current market environment for mobile edge compute? How is your Colo business performing, and do you think you need to add additional assets more broadly across the country?

Our overall edge computing initiatives can be viewed in two pieces. First, we are distributing compute and have seen successes with putting cages out at our sites for smaller enterprises. The second element is focusing on mobile edge computing with hyperscalers and the opportunity for lower latency needs at the edge. We believe we have valuable assets that can play a part in that solution. We're still in the early stages, and it'll take time to figure out how to scale effectively but initial interest looks promising.

Thank you, everyone, for being with us this morning. We know we ran a bit late today but appreciate your engagement. Please continue to stay safe and keep your family secure. We look forward to catching up with you soon. Thank you again.