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American Tower Corp

Exchange: NYSESector: Real EstateIndustry: REIT - Specialty

American Tower, one of the largest global REITs, is a leading independent owner, operator and developer of multitenant communications real estate with a portfolio of over 149,000 communications sites and a highly interconnected footprint of U.S. data center facilities.

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Trading 12% above its estimated fair value of $155.83.

Current Price

$176.14

+1.39%

GoodMoat Value

$155.83

11.5% overvalued
Profile
Valuation (TTM)
Market Cap$82.46B
P/E32.60
EV$125.99B
P/B22.58
Shares Out468.15M
P/Sales7.75
Revenue$10.64B
EV/EBITDA19.83

American Tower Corp (AMT) — Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Apr 4, 20268 speakers5,646 words20 segments

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. Welcome to the American Tower First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. This call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Adam Smith, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and FP&A. Please go ahead, sir.

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Adam SmithSenior Vice President of Investor Relations and FP&A

Good morning, and thank you for joining American Tower's First Quarter 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. I'm joined on the call today by Steve Vondran, our President and CEO; and Rod Smith, our Executive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer. Following our prepared remarks, we will open up the call for your questions. Before we begin, I'll remind you that our comments 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 2024 outlook, capital allocation and future operating performance; our expectations for the closing of the sale of our India business and the expected impacts of such sale on our business; our collections expectations 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 most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other risks described in documents we subsequently file from time to time 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. With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve.

SV
Steven VondranPresident and CEO

Thanks, Adam, and thanks to everyone for joining today. As you can see in the results we reported this morning, mobile network upgrades and digital transformation trends are driving compelling demand across our tower and data center platforms. 5G rollouts are contributing to an acceleration in our U.S. application pipeline and another sequential step up in colocation and amendment growth in Europe. Solid demand in Africa continues to drive elevating business growth, and retail demand resulted in another quarter of strong sales performance at CoreSite, which you'll hear more about later on. Before handing the call over to Rod, I'm going to spend a few minutes discussing the key factors that have driven performance in our U.S. and Canada tower business and underpin the evaluation and execution of our global expansion strategy. In particular, we believe that our focus on asset quality, operational excellence and contract structures, all through the prism of long-term value creation, have been the most critical factors in determining our ability to monetize growth in mobile data consumption and our ability to drive leading performance on our assets over multiple network investment cycles. Over the last 25 years, we've developed a scaled nationwide portfolio of approximately 43,000 sites across the U.S. and Canada. This portfolio has been methodically constructed, primarily through the acquisition of high-quality carrier design and constructive tower portfolios, of which nationwide networks have been built and expanded upon through each successive generation and have further benefited from the transition to neutral-host operation. We've complemented the acquisition of these target assets with select high-quality independent tower provider portfolios, smaller tuck-in portfolios and build-to-suit sites, which taken together represent meaningful scale. Our ability to be highly selective in the assets that we've aggressively pursued for acquisition and development, the assets we've chosen not to pursue and the standards we've used to underwrite our growth are the result of robust internal analysis and due diligence capabilities that rely on data insights that we've accumulated through our history as a tower operator. These insights have reinforced our understanding of asset location, competition considerations and structural dynamics that come together to create the potential for differentiated value creation. For example, our focus on high-quality assets in premier locations has resulted in a portfolio that's geographically skewed towards suburban and rural environments and transport corridors where the vast majority of Americans live and travel, as well as towers that are structurally designed for co-tenancy, which we believe has enabled us to generate leading new business growth on our assets. Similarly, by focusing our assets on significant structural capacity, we believe we can reduce overall operating and redevelopment costs, allowing for profit and return maximization at the asset level at industry best speed to market for carrier deployments on our towers. We are seeing these factors come together to result in significant value creation on our assets. Notably, cash operating profit margins for our U.S. and Canada Property segment have expanded by over 420 basis points since 2016, the year following our Verizon transaction in the U.S. As we continue to focus on driving more new business and efficiency at the asset level, we see a path to further increasing the profitability of our U.S. and Canada business going forward. Turning to our operating model, through our focus on efficiency and delivering exceptional value for customers, we've invested in technology and then built up capabilities that we believe enhance the service we provide our customers as a value of our product offering. For example, through our application services automation programs, we've continuously reduced cycle times, further supporting critical speed-to-market advantages for our customers, which translates into accelerated revenue realization for our business. Elsewhere in our Services segment, we've combined investments in data quality and governance with the development of internal data platforms to improve our overall service offerings and asset integrity. Over time, customer feedback shows that these investments have resulted in a consistent upward trajectory in customer satisfaction, achieved by providing a differentiated customer experience of high asset integrity. In our land management operations, we're also taking an approach that's focused on our customers' needs and expanding the profitability of our sites. Through our Tower Asset Protection Program, we performed thousands of transactions a year that improved the ground rights and eased site access conditions, a critical factor for our customers. And over the last decade, we've deployed significant capital at attractive rates of return and admitted thousands of contracts to protect our assets and mitigate growth in land rent, supporting margin performance. Finally, as we've said publicly many times, contract terms and structure are critical to realizing the full value of the assets we only manage. And our approach has been centered around creating long-term value for American Tower and our carrier customers, even when it can potentially come at the expense of short-term wins. Perhaps the most important capability we've built internally over the last two decades is knowing our assets and understanding their value. As a result, we've been able to achieve outstanding growth and create significant shareholder value at our traditional MLA agreement, while also developing innovative structures such as the comprehensive MLA. Under these agreements, we're able to secure guaranteed growth over a multi-year period in a way that maximizes the value of our assets while providing a degree of insulation from quarter-to-quarter ebbs and flows in wireless network spending. Critically, we've seen that these contracts represented a compelling value proposition for our carrier customers by lowering their total cost of ownership when compared to self-performance, by providing a framework to leverage our skill for their networks that translates to budgetary operational visibility and by creating administrative efficiencies that yield lower transaction costs on sell-side deployments. Taking all this together, we've seen this focus on the right assets, high-quality contracts with operational excellence facilitate increasing monetization and growth in mobile data consumption and corresponding carriers' CapEx increases over time. Over the course of the 4G investment cycle between 2010 and 2018, average mobile data consumption for smartphones increased from less than 100 megabytes per month to 7 gigabytes per month. And over that period, carriers were deploying approximately $29 billion annually on average, up from approximately $23 billion during 3G. As we have moved into the 5G investment cycle, from early 2019 till today, we've once again seen mobile data consumption for smartphones grow to almost 30 gigabytes per month in 2024. We've seen early 5G subscribers consuming roughly two times the mobile data compared to the average 4G subscriber. And we see average annual carrier CapEx step up to approximately $36 billion a year. This CapEx investment translated to approximately $230 million in year-over-year colocation and amendment growth delivered last year, much of which was attributed to 5G activity as well as an expectation for growth on a per-site basis in 2024 that significantly exceeds the average seen during the 4G deployment cycle. That brings us to today, where we continue to see all of our key customers actively working on network upgrades and rollouts and the 5G cycle playing out in line with the broader expectations underwritten our long-term guidance. On our last call, we indicated that we expected a year-over-year increase in contributions for our Services segment due in part to early indications of an uptick in our application pipeline as well as conversations that our teams were having with our customers on the ground. The activity we saw in Q1 reinforces that expectation. Specifically, contributions in our Services segment for the quarter came in ahead of our internal expectations. And on the application side, Q1 volume was over 70% higher than what we saw in Q4 of last year. In fact, March represented the highest volume level over the trailing 12 months. It was supported by broad-based step-ups across our major U.S. customers. Now while there's only some level of risk associated with our expectations in the Services segment, I'm pleased to say that what we've seen thus far supports the 2024 guidance we provided in February, including approximately $195 million the expected services revenue contributions; approximately 4.7% organic tenant billings growth at $180 million to $190 million in year-over-year colocation and amendment growth, one of our strongest years to date. So as we move forward, we believe our U.S. tower portfolio is uniquely positioned to continue driving compelling growth as 5G expected increases in mobile data consumption and associated carrier investments driving increasing demand for our assets over time. Importantly, by leveraging that same expertise to develop our leading global portfolio, we're well positioned to monetize similar trends across our global footprint while delivering a differentiated experience and value proposition to our customers. Further, we believe the factors that we're taking in through today, as well as the global focus on increasing efficiency in our cost structure provide a path to continue converting topline growth at a rate that expands already attractive cash operating profit margins and creates incremental shareholder value. With that, I'll turn it over to Rod to discuss Q1 performance and our updated outlook. Rod?

RS
Rodney SmithExecutive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer

Thanks, Steve. Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. We are off to a solid start to 2024 with Q1 performance exceeding our initial expectations across many of our key metrics. These results, together with the positive trends highlighted by Steve, the various initiatives we have in place to drive profitability and margin expansion and our optionality and discipline and selectively deploying capital towards projects yielding the most attractive risk-adjusted rates of return, give us confidence in our ability to drive strong, sustained growth, quality of earnings and shareholder returns for 2024 and beyond. Before I dive into the results and our revised 2024 outlook, I'll touch on a few highlights from the quarter. First, the strong recurring fundamentals that underpin our business are again highlighted in our Q1 performance with consolidated organic tenant billings growth of 5.4% and another exceptional leasing quarter at CoreSite, including its highest quarter of retail new business signed since Q4 of 2020. Furthermore, we continue to demonstrate cost discipline resulting in strong year-over-year cash adjusted EBITDA margin expansion, which I will touch on in a moment. Next, in India, the collection trends we saw in Q4 of 2023 continued into Q1, allowing us to reverse approximately $29 million of previously reserved revenue. Separately, while we continue to anticipate a second half 2024 closing on our sale of ATC India to Brookfield, we have already made progress in accelerating certain payments included in the potential $2.5 billion total proceeds associated with the transaction, including the repatriation of approximately $100 million net of withholdings tax back to the U.S. earlier this month. Additionally, we are making progress towards monetizing our optionally convertible debentures issued by VIL ahead of the anticipated closing of our India transaction. Executing the intended purpose of the debentures in serving as a liquid asset to backstop outstanding receivable balances, we expect to use the anticipated proceeds from the India sale to pay down existing indebtedness. We will continue to keep our shareholders informed as incremental progress is made towards the closing of our transaction. Finally, we successfully accessed the debt capital markets last month, issuing $1.3 billion in senior unsecured notes at a weighted average cost of 5.3%, with proceeds used to pay down floating rate debt. Turning to first quarter property revenue and organic tenant billings growth on Slide 6, consolidated property revenue growth was 3.3% or over 4.5% excluding noncash straight-line revenue while absorbing roughly 100 basis points of FX headwinds. U.S. and Canada property revenue growth was approximately 1.8% or over 4% excluding straight line, which includes over 1% impact from Sprint churn. International revenue growth was approximately 3.7% or roughly 6% excluding the impacts of currency fluctuations, which includes a benefit associated with the improved collections in India, partially offset by the timing of the sale of our Mexico fiber business at the end of Q1 in 2023 and a reduction in Latin America termination fees as compared to the prior year. Finally, revenue in our Data Centers business increased by 10.6%, continuing the outperformance versus our initial underwriting plan as strong demand for hybrid and multi-cloud IT architecture continues and the backlog of record new business signed over the last 2 years begins to commence in a meaningful way. Moving to the right side of the slide, consolidated organic tenant billings growth was 5.4%, supported by strong demand across our global footprint. In our U.S. and Canada segment, organic tenant billings growth was 4.6% and over 5.5% absent Sprint-related churn. As expected, growth in the quarter was slightly below our full-year guidance of 4.7%. As we lap modestly elevated churn that commenced in Q2 of 2023, we would expect Q2 and Q3 growth rates to each accelerate to roughly 5% before a step down in Q4 as we commence the final tranche of contracted Sprint churn, all supportive of our 2024 outlook expectation. Our International segment drove 6.5% in organic tenant billings growth, reflecting an expected step down from the Q4 2023 rate of 7.7%, as we see moderation in CPI-linked escalators. Meanwhile, contributions from colocation and amendments remain strong with another sequential acceleration in Europe and a continuation of elevated contribution rates of around 8% in Africa. Turning to Slide 7. Adjusted EBITDA grew 5.2% or nearly 8% excluding the impacts of noncash straight line while absorbing 90 basis points in FX headwinds. Cash-adjusted EBITDA margins improved approximately 240 basis points year-over-year to 64.9%, taking certain expense timing in India reserve benefits and further supported by our ongoing cost management focus. In fact, cash SG&A, excluding bad debt, declined approximately 5% year-over-year in Q1 and was down roughly 7% from our Q1 2022 levels. Additionally, gross margin from our U.S. services business came in just over $16 million, a decline of roughly 50% year-over-year, though representing an acceleration of nearly 70% of our Q4 2023 levels. This performance, together with the broad-based application pipeline buildup discussed by Steve in his prepared remarks, gives us confidence in our expectation for accelerating activity continuing through the duration of the year and is supportive of our full-year U.S. services outlook. Moving to the right side of the slide, attributable AFFO and attributable AFFO per share grew by 10% and 9.8%, respectively, supported by high conversion of cash adjusted EBITDA growth to attributable AFFO. Now shifting to our revised full-year outlook. As I mentioned, we are pleased with the results to date and the sustainable demand trends underpinning our performance. However, given the close proximity to our previously released guidance, we have kept core full-year assumptions largely unchanged. With that in mind, our revised outlook includes several notable updates. First, we have taken the strong collections activity in India through the first quarter, which, as I mentioned earlier, resulted in approximately $29 million in revenue reserve reversals compared to approximately $16 million in revenue reserves assumed for Q1 in our prior outlook, resulting in a net benefit to plan of $45 million for property revenue, adjusted EBITDA and attributable AFFO. Reserve assumptions for April through December remain unchanged, resulting in a net reserve for the year of $20 million compared to the prior year outlook assumption of $65 million. Next, we have revised our FX assumptions for the year, resulting in a modest headwind compared to our prior outlook. Finally, while our net interest assumptions remain relatively unchanged, we have increased our interest expense due to elevated rates, which was partially offset by modest interest expense reductions through a reduced debt balance attributed to the accelerated India proceeds I mentioned earlier and further offset by higher interest income. With that, let's dive into the numbers. Turning to Slide 8. We are increasing our expectations for property revenue by approximately $30 million compared to the prior outlook, driven by $45 million of upside related to the positive collections in India during the first quarter, partially offset by $15 million associated with negative FX impacts. We are reiterating our prior outlook expectations for organic tenant billings growth across all regions, including approximately 4.7% in the U.S. and Canada, 11% to 12% in Africa, 5% to 6% in Europe and 2% in both Latin America and APAC, collectively driving approximately 5% for international and 5% on a consolidated basis. We will continue to assess our first quarter momentum as we work through the year. Turning to Slide 9. We are increasing our adjusted EBITDA outlook by $40 million as compared to the prior outlook, driven by the flow-through of the revised revenue reserve assumptions in India, partially offset by $5 million of FX headwinds. Moving to Slide 10. We are similarly raising our expectations for AFFO attributable to common stockholders by $40 million at the midpoint and approximately $0.09 on a per share basis, moving the midpoint to $10.42, supported by the revised Indian reserve assumption benefits, partially offset by FX. As I mentioned, although we are raising expectations for interest expense, it is offset on a net basis by a similar increase in interest income. Turning to Slide 11. We are reiterating our capital allocation plans for 2024, which is focused on selectively funding projects we expect to drive the most attractive risk-adjusted rates of return, sustained growth and quality of earnings, executing on an accelerated pathway to balance sheet strength and financial flexibility and delivering an attractive total shareholder return profile as discussed on our Q4 2023 earnings call. This includes maintaining a relatively flat annual common dividend declaration of $6.48 per share or approximately $3 billion in 2024, with an expectation to resume growth again in 2025, all subject to Board approval. Moving to the right side of the slide, our disciplined approach to capital allocation, together with recurring topline growth and its high conversion to profitability through cost management, all support the progress we've made to achieving our goal of 5x net leverage by the end of the year. While our Q1 net leverage already stands at 5x, it is important to note that the metric for this quarter benefits from the Indian reserve reversals previously mentioned, and we'd expect to be above 5x in Q2. These efforts, combined with our successful capital markets execution year-to-date, have further reinforced our investment-grade balance sheet as a strategic asset, which will remain a key focus moving forward. Turning to Slide 12. In summary, we are off to a great start to 2024. Our visibility into a solid foundation of recurring contracted growth across our global business combined with an accelerating pipeline supporting our expectations for future activity, a keen focus on cost discipline and margin expansion and a continued demonstration of strategically deploying capital while enhancing balance sheet strength gives us a high degree of confidence in our ability to drive strong, sustained growth over the long term for our shareholders while being a best-in-class operator for our stakeholders globally. With that, operator, we can open the line for questions.

Operator

Your first question comes from the line of Matt Niknam from Deutsche Bank.

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Matthew NiknamAnalyst

Congrats on the quarter. Just two questions if I could. First, on the U.S., maybe if you can get a little bit more color on the acceleration in activity you saw in the quarter and maybe what that implies for services and new leasing expectations going forward. I'm more curious whether this was broad-based across the big three and maybe even DISH or more limited in nature. And then secondly, on Data Centers, I think you talked about your highest quarter of signed retail leasing since Q4 of '20, any color you can share in terms of what's driving the uptick in new business? And it seems to imply there isn't much in the way of macro headwinds or caution that some of your peers have talked about. But again, just curious if there are any signs of macro caution there.

SV
Steven VondranPresident and CEO

Sure. Thanks for the question. In the U.S., again, we're seeing an acceleration in Q1 relative to Q4. Our application pipeline coming in, in Q1 was about 70% higher than Q4. Our services gross margin came in at about $16 million in the quarter, which was higher than we had expected. So what we're seeing is an acceleration in activity that really underpins the guidance that we gave last quarter. Just to reiterate what that is, on our services, we're expecting our services about $195 million in revenue, about $100 million in gross margin. While that services is inherently hard to predict sometimes, the activity we're seeing in Q1 along with the conversations we're having with the boots-on-the-ground teams from our customers give us confidence that we're going to hit that services guide for the year. We’ll continue to watch it and see how that cadence goes throughout the rest of the year. But everything we're seeing in Q1 gives us some optimism there. When it comes to our property revenue growth from that, again, I'll remind you that a lot of our revenue assumptions are underpinned by our comprehensive MLAs. So at this point, the acceleration that we're seeing in growth does not change our guidance in terms of what we're expecting to see in the U.S. Again, I'll reiterate that we're expecting to see organic tenant billings growth of approximately 4.7% in the U.S. That will be a little bit different quarter by quarter. In Q1, it was 4.6%. I expect that to go up a little bit in the middle of the year and then the final tranche of Sprint churn that hits in October will weigh that down a bit in Q4. Overall, we're encouraged by that. In terms of what we're seeing, it is fairly broad-based. I don't want to get into individual customer activity levels, but we are seeing some broad-based activity pick up in the U.S. with all of our major customers, and again, we're encouraged that that's going to continue for the rest of the year. Regarding CoreSite, yes, we have two years of record sales and we have a healthy pipeline this year. We've got a tough comp compared to last year, so I don't know that we'll achieve another record year of sales, but we’re hoping. We did have a very strong quarter on retail this year, and that was exciting to see. In terms of the headwinds for that business, we're optimistic about what we're seeing. Again, the growth in CoreSite right now is driven by enterprises moving to hybrid cloud IT infrastructure. There's a long tail event that we see out there. There are still many companies with their own data centers, and there are those who went cloud-native or have moved everything to the cloud, and they're looking for a different cost structure, moving toward this hybrid environment. That's still the biggest driver we have, and we see a very, very long tail of that activity out there. We are seeing an uptick in activity from AI. In particular, the inferencing portion of AI models is perfectly suited for CoreSite. These large learning models are done in the big hyperscale data centers, but when interfacing with the users to provide that data to them and also get inputs from them, you need a distribution channel. CoreSite is perfectly suited to provide that distribution. We are seeing activity there. In terms of industry headwinds, we're not seeing a falloff in our funnel today. We're watching it like everyone else. Some of the demand and supply issues actually drive pricing up, so where we have markets that are constrained, the supply drives pricing up. We have more megawatts under construction today than we ever had before at CoreSite, so we are planning for that demand cycle to continue. Our pre-leasing percentage of what we have under construction is about 35%. That's down a tick from last quarter since we've placed some things in service, but we're still seeing healthy demand for pre-leasing, and we'll continue to explore that as well. We're still seeing growth in interconnect, though there's been some discussion about grooming of cross connects, something that we constantly see with customers as they're trying to optimize their cost structure. Overall, I think we're optimistic about the demand for CoreSite, the pipeline that we’re seeing, hoping for another record year of sales, but that's a tough comp. My sales team might be cringing hearing me say that, but we feel good about it. We're not seeing headwinds today. But we will be cautiously watching if we see demand slow down.

RS
Rodney SmithExecutive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer

Matt, this is Rod. If I could just add briefly here one or two comments. As Steve said, we've had record levels of new business in the past, which is leading to higher revenue growth now as we're delivering that new business we've signed up over the last couple of years. In the quarter, we had a north of 10% revenue growth rate. The last couple of years of new business have also led to a high level of backlog. We're up to close to $60 million in terms of backlog, which includes signed deals that we haven't commenced into revenue yet. That's up from a run rate of $40 million or $45 million in the last couple of years. So the new business we sign up translates into backlog and then revenue growth. Given the activity level we've seen and the high backlog we have today, that positions CoreSite very well for high growth levels over the next couple of years.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Rollins from Citi.

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Michael RollinsAnalyst

Just following up on your comments regarding the pickup in domestic activity in the first quarter. Do you see this as a rising tide for the tower category? Or do you see American Tower taking share from your competitors? And then secondly, you referenced, I think, in one of the slides and some of your comments that the activity is supporting your long-term guide for the domestic business. Could you recap for us where you see the longer-term average annual organic tenant billings growth and how these changes in activity levels may influence those outcomes?

SV
Steven VondranPresident and CEO

Sure. Thanks for the question. What we're seeing in the U.S. is clearly one-quarter results. The conversations we’re having give us optimism that our guidance for the year is accurate in terms of our customers starting to ramp up. I don't have a lot of visibility into what my competitors are seeing. I can't provide an opinion on whether what we're seeing is materially different from them. But when I reflect on what our customers need to do to complete their mid-band 5G rollouts, there's much work to be done. What we are seeing is the same cycle we saw in 4G, the same in 3G—initial push, a slowdown while optimizing their network and then another push. Where I think we've differentiated ourselves is that our MLAs provide an easy button for customers, giving speed to market and cost predictability, which I think enhances our market share over time. As for our longer-term guidance for the U.S., we expect at least a 5% organic tenant billings growth on average for the period between 2023 and 2027, and that would be 6% excluding the Sprint churn. In 2023, our number was 5.3%, and we're projecting 4.7% this year while absorbing over 100 basis points of Sprint churn each year. We see the current activity levels very supportive of that long-term guide. We feel optimistic about the cycle of 5G, the carrier activity, and how 5G is performing in terms of delivering megabytes or gigabytes of data much cheaper than they could produce it any other way.

MR
Michael RollinsAnalyst

Any shift in the mix between amendments and densification within the domestic activity?

SV
Steven VondranPresident and CEO

A little bit. The carriers build in phases. The first push is always a coverage network, leading to overlays on existing sites. They then slow down for optimization, part of which involves infill for better quality service where they might have coverage gaps or are not providing optimal service, which implies more co-locations. We're seeing demand for that as well. It's broad-based across the carriers. I remind you that we have comprehensive MLAs in place with some customers that smooth out the cycles of activity levels. We disclosed that one of our major customers rolled off their comprehensive MLAs this quarter, creating more seasonality in that portion of the business than for those that are in comprehensive MLAs.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Simon Flannery from Morgan Stanley.

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Simon FlanneryAnalyst

Great. Steve, thanks for the comments on the portfolio review. Maybe you could just review the M&A market more broadly. Are there things that you might be looking at doing either buying or selling beyond the India situation? And how you think about that? And then any other updates on the deal timing in India?

SV
Steven VondranPresident and CEO

Sure. I'll start with India. No updates at this point. It's hard to predict when that approval will come through, but we still expect during the second half of the year. In terms of broader M&A, our team is actively looking at what's for sale as part of our standard practice. There’s nothing compelling that would take us off our capital allocation priorities laid out earlier this year. Our first priority of capital allocation is paying our dividend, followed by focusing on deleveraging to get down to our target of 5x net leverage. We’re not seeing anything in M&A that’s strategically important at the right price to change our priorities at this point. Regarding our portfolio, we are not conducting a strategic review specifically; however, we do have non-strategic businesses that are not at scale. If the right buyer at the right price approached us, we would consider that. We will look to drive sales and gain efficiency before deciding to exit any markets.

RS
Rodney SmithExecutive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer

Simon, this is Rod. To give all listeners a couple of numbers and a reminder, as Steve said, the timing for India is still expected to be in the second half of this year. In our announcement when we signed the deal with Brookfield to sell 100% of our India business, total proceeds could be up to $2.5 billion, including about $2 billion as the purchase price, which includes intercompany debt and term loan. The intercompany debt is around $0.5 billion, and the term loan is about $120 million. We're generating significant working capital and receivables there, and there’s also a ticking fee component involved. We're moving towards realizing some of these proceeds. For context, we’ve already removed about $100 million from India back to the U.S. due to positive collection trends. We converted and liquidated a portion of the $200 million OCD in the market, realizing over $200 million. This is working well.

JA
Jonathan AtkinAnalyst

Question about MLAs. To what extent do you use them internationally? I know a lot of it is paid by the drink, but maybe just update us on holistic MLAs and how extensively they're used internationally.

SV
Steven VondranPresident and CEO

We have various contract structures internationally that might depend on the acquisition or build-to-suit size. There’s more variation than in the U.S. We have a few holistic type deals internationally, but we do try to utilize those contract structures. This could be an opportunity for us over time, but it takes time to educate customers on those benefits. We're not doing a strategic review specifically, hence not targeting specific exits at this time. We're focusing on how to drive greater sales and efficiencies in our market to improve margins.

RS
Rodney SmithExecutive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer

I want to remind everyone that we previously announced we’d be closing on our India deal during the second half of this year. Everything is going to plan concerning the Brookfield deal. After the announcement, we confirmed that the proceeds we expect from the deal would total approximately $2.5 billion, including $2 billion representing the purchase price, intercompany debt and a working capital component. Overall, we are pleased with how this transaction is progressing and will keep everyone updated as final approval is confirmed.