Verizon Communications Inc (VZ) — Q3 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Thanks, Brad. Good morning and welcome to our third quarter earnings conference call. This is Brady Connor, and I am here with our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Hans Vestberg; and Matt Ellis, our Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, our earnings release, financial and operating information and the presentation slides are available on our Investor Relations website. A replay and transcript of this call will also be made available on our website. Before we get started, I'd like to draw your attention to our Safe Harbor statement on Slide 2. Information in this presentation contains statements about expected future events and financial results that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Discussion of factors that may affect future results is contained in Verizon's filings with the SEC, which are available on our website. This presentation contains non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the financial materials posted on our website. The quarterly growth rates disclosed in our presentation slides and during our formal remarks are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted as sequential. As a reminder we have entered the quiet period for spectrum auction 107. So, we will not be able to comment on our current midband spectrum holdings or strategies. Additionally, please remember to join us on November 11th for our Fall Sellside Meeting from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. We will be streaming this event live via BlueJeans for everyone that can attend virtually. You can find details on our Investor Relations website. Now let’s take a look at consolidated earnings for the third quarter. In the third quarter, we reported earnings of $1.05 per share on a GAAP basis. Reported results include a net pretax charge of approximately $1.1 billion related to a mark-to-market adjustment for our pension liabilities. Excluding the effect of this special item, adjusted earnings per share was $1.25 in the third quarter compared to $1.25 a year ago. Let’s now move to Slide 4 and take a closer look at our third quarter earnings profile. Consistent with the approach we have shown for several quarters, we have illustrated the ongoing impacts to earnings from the adoption of Accounting Standard ASC 606 for revenue recognition in 2018. We expect 2020 to be the final year that the adoption of this standard will have a material year-over-year impact on our income statement. We realized a lesser benefit from the adoption of ASC 606 during the third quarter, compared to the prior year primarily due to the deferral of commission expense. The reduction of the benefit realized creates a year-over-year headwind to both reported and adjusted earnings per share, which will continue throughout 2020. The impact was $0.02 for the quarter and $0.07 year-to-date. For full year 2020, we continue to expect the headwinds from the deferral of commission expense to be approximately $0.09. Matt will go through the COVID impacts that we’ve experienced across the business in more detail. Overall, we estimate that there was a $0.05 headwind included in the reported and adjusted EPS from COVID during the quarter. While adjusted EPS was flat in the third quarter including the impact of COVID and ASC 606, we continue to see underlying growth in our operations. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to Hans.

Thank you, Brady and thanks for everyone joining this third quarter earnings release from Verizon. I would like to start reflect over the current situation we have. Of course, I have mentioned several times multiple crises: the pandemic is continuing, the economic downturn and racial injustice. We, as a corporation, have continued with our three-pronged governance to see that we are managing this in the best way. Of course, our team is very focused on the crisis of the pandemic and having a team working on that. But the majority of my executive teams are working with business as usual to see that we continue to move this company forward. And finally, we are also working a lot with new opportunities that arise from this crisis to see that we are actually coming out as a stronger company and actually serving our customers in even better ways. I would like to say a couple of things on where we are in all this when it comes to our responsible business practices. Starting with COVID-19, we have all the time put our focus on our employees’ safety and health. That has been so important for us. In this third quarter, we have seen our retail stores coming back to full operations, of course with new procedures and processes. We have also seen our engineers being back in full force in the field to make installations. You are going to see that later on as we had a really great quarter when it comes to Fios installations. On the racial injustice, we just want to highlight one important thing. This quarter we published our 2020 Diversity Representation Report. We disclosed on different levels and different units where we stand on one of our core values which is Diversity and Inclusion. I want to highlight the work that our treasury department did in the third quarter; they issued the second $1 billion green bond, which was led by minority-owned underwriters, continuing our work with climate change and seeing that we do our contribution. And finally, we also decided in the quarter to provide our employees with paid time-off for employees to vote in these times which are unprecedented. Moving on to where we are, and I talked a lot about as we came into this quarter and this second half of 2020, that this was the year of execution and I cannot say anything else but that our team has been executing just fantastically. And if we talk about our network-as-a-Service, strengthening our network, starting with the 4G network, what can we say? The team continues to take all awards. I mean, the RootMetrics named us the best overall mobile network. On J.D. Power, we are awarded for the 25th consecutive time the best network quality. So the team is continuing to augment and improve our 4G network. At the same time, we entered in the CBRS auction and we gained some 34 megahertz covering 140 million of the population. All in all, that is going to help us to augment the capacity in the network especially on 4G. Another area which we are very proud of that the team has done in the quarter is, of course, the relentless execution of 5G networks and we launched the 5G nationwide last week and have said through the whole year that we are going to launch the network when it commercially makes sense. And it made sense last week when the iPhone 12 was launched in the market. So now we have a nationwide coverage of more than 200 million of the population of the United States, more than 1800 cities when it comes to our 5G nationwide based on DSS Technology. We also continue our expansion on the Ultra Wideband and we took a leapfrog with 19 more cities and we are now in 55 cities for mobility with 43 stadiums and seven airports. Just continue to augment our Ultra Wideband network which is just giving a huge new experience when it comes to the capabilities, speed, latency, and throughput. We also, in this quarter, launched some home cities when it comes to 5G Home or we added. So we have now eight 5G Home cities when it comes to fixed wireless access. And finally, one of the core assets for our network services is of course our fiber, and the fiber richness of our network is a core element in Verizon’s intelligent edge network. We are on plan for that in these times. It’s just great work what the team has done all the way from the 4G network to the 5G networks and the fiber they are executing tremendously on our commitment for the full year. All that network service strategy is based on us being able to monetize on top of that network. And a couple of very important events this quarter and a little bit after are of course setting us up for that monetization. Starting with the 5G adoption and the ecosystem that we are creating. We are of course extremely pleased with the launch of the 5G iPhone, the iPhone 12, that came out in four different models all with Ultra Wideband. That is of course setting precedence on how important Ultra Wideband is for unprecedented experience on 5G bringing out all the currencies or capabilities that were talked about before.

Thank you, Hans. And good morning, everyone. As we’ve now completed the second full quarter in a global pandemic, I am encouraged by the strength and resilience of the Verizon team, our business, and our customers. Our employees continue to deliver on our commitment to our customers and our communities in the face of uncertain and evolving conditions. This quarter highlights another example of our ability to execute and drive results with adjusted earnings per share of $1.25 which included an estimated net impact due to COVID of approximately $0.05. In the third quarter, consolidated operating revenues were $31.5 billion, down 4.1%. Revenue declines were primarily driven by significantly lower wireless equipment revenue, which was down approximately 20% due to lower customer activity and the timing of certain device launches. We are pleased our total wireless service revenue outperformed our expectations by returning to year-over-year growth in the third quarter driven by improvements in usage and fee revenues and step-ups to the premium tiers of unlimited. In addition, Verizon Media Group’s revenue trajectory improved significantly during the quarter driven by advertising, which returned to year-over-year growth in the third quarter. Adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter was $11.9 billion, down slightly from $12.0 billion in the prior year, driven entirely by headwinds from the deferral of commission expense. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 37.6% versus 36.6% in the third quarter of 2019 including headwinds of approximately 40 basis points from the commission expense deferral. Our business excellence program continues to drive significant benefits as a key component of Verizon’s resilience and agility. We have realized $8.3 billion of cumulative cash savings to date and remain on track to achieve our goal of $10 billion by the end of 2021. Even after we achieve our target, operational efficiencies will be an ongoing focus across the business to identify additional long-term transformation initiatives and deliver related cost savings. Let’s now turn to our segment results starting with Consumer Group. Our Consumer team continued reopening our retail stores throughout the quarter, while maintaining vigilance for the safety of both our employees and customers. We began the third quarter with nearly two-thirds of our retail stores open, although with limited hours and gradually reopened across our entire footprint with normal operating hours by Labor Day. Consumer foot traffic is not yet at pre-COVID levels as we have implemented social distancing practices such as Touchless Retail, appointment scheduling, and curbside pickup. We remain committed to providing our customers with the experience they expect while focusing on their safety. For the quarter, we added 17,000 postpaid customer accounts, compared to a loss of 26,000 in the prior year. We are pleased with the early traction we have seen from our new Mix & Match plans as the best-in-class value offering which now includes an expanded bundle from Disney in the top tiers of our unlimited plans. Our enhanced unlimited lineup is driving elevated step-ups and we now have approximately 60% of our customer accounts on unlimited plans with over a quarter of those on premium tiers. Customer retention remains very high and is a function of reduced customer activity levels across the industry as well as a testament to the Verizon network performance and ever-improving customer experience. Postpaid phone churn of 0.63% was an improvement of 16 basis points from a year ago. We continue to see strong customer collections based on the demand for our services and the quality of our customer base. Our Stay Connected payment plan that allows customers to pay off their service balance over six months has been well received, including Consumer and Business customers. We have approximately 1.2 million accounts on these payment plans with over 90% having made a payment and the majority with current balances. Based on our early activity, we expect involuntary churn in the fourth quarter to be modestly higher than typical levels but to remain better for the full year compared to 2019. We will continue to work with these customers to keep them connected during these tough economic times. While postpaid phone gross adds were down approximately 22%, primarily due to lower store traffic and changes in timing of phone launches, our low churn drove postpaid phone net adds of 142,000 for the quarter, as compared to 239,000 in the prior year. The retail postpaid upgrade rate remained low at 4.2% and contributed to the decline in wireless equipment revenue. In addition to the strength in postpaid wireless, prepaid net adds of 77,000 marks our best performance in several years. We look forward to the completion of the TracFone transaction to further enhance our position in this segment where we have been historically underrepresented. In Consumer Fios, internet net additions of 139,000 were up significantly both sequentially and year-over-year. Total Fios internet net adds across the company were 144,000, which is our highest total since the fourth quarter of 2014. The demand concerns of customers appreciation from our new Mix & Match offerings and the quality of our product when reliable internet service is more important than ever. Our Fios team did an excellent job working through the installation backlog from Q2 and we are nearing normal pipeline levels after limiting operations in Q2 for precautionary safety purposes.

Moving on to the Business side, we continue to do well on the wireless side both on the wireless gross adds and net adds. We have seen on the Business side the secular decline in wireline. We had good profitability in the quarter even though we continue to invest and we are not done with the investment we talked about in the fourth quarter last year that is so important for us to see that we are really supporting our customers when it comes to new digitalization and new offerings. But all in all, good work by our Business group. Finally, the Media Group had a sequential improvement. There were down 7% in growth in the quarter. They had very good improvements during the quarter when it comes to growth trajectory. They continue to add a lot of new opportunities, especially around own and operated where we have good growth in the monthly active users if that is in news or in finance, we clearly see that our content is really aspiring and doing well with our customers in those areas. And finally, our ad tech, especially the demand side platform is having quite a lot of new customers in these times which also shows the proof of all the transformation that we have done in the Media Group. So, looking at the financials, we had growth in our service revenue and wireless service revenue in the third quarter with 0.3%. We are clearly have been very focused on that one and it exceeded a little bit also what we said when we concluded the second quarter. We also had improvement and growth on our adjusted EBITDA margin with 100 basis points and that includes of course the COVID impact. So we clearly see that even though we have a decline due to hardware, we are managing our P&L in a good way in all our units. The cash flow continues to be strong. We have continued to have cash flow in the quarter even though we have the dividend and some outlays for some acquisitions of spectrum.

Finally, we are doing a positive update on the EPS guidance that Matt will talk about later on. So we feel good about going into the fourth quarter with a very solid third quarter when it comes to financial and execution and how we are dealing with the different crises that are happening around us here in the U.S. and in the rest of the world. So, I will then hand it over to Matt to go into more details on the financials. Thank you, Hans. And good morning, everyone. As we’ve now completed the second full quarter in a global pandemic, I am encouraged by the strength and resilience of the Verizon team, our business, and our customers. Our employees continue to deliver on our commitment to our customers and our communities in the face of uncertain and evolving conditions. This quarter highlights another example of our ability to execute and drive results with adjusted earnings per share of $1.25 which included an estimated net impact due to COVID of approximately $0.05. In the third quarter, consolidated operating revenues were $31.5 billion, down 4.1%. Revenue declines were primarily driven by significantly lower wireless equipment revenue, which was down approximately 20% due to lower customer activity and the timing of certain device launches. We are pleased our total wireless service revenue outperformed our expectations by returning to year-over-year growth in the third quarter driven by improvements in usage and fee revenues and step-ups to the premium tiers of unlimited. In addition, Verizon Media Group’s revenue trajectory improved significantly during the quarter driven by advertising, which returned to year-over-year growth in the third quarter. Adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter was $11.9 billion, down slightly from $12.0 billion in the prior year, driven entirely by headwinds from the deferral of commission expense. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 37.6% versus 36.6% in the third quarter of 2019 including headwinds of approximately 40 basis points from the commission expense deferral. Our business excellence program continues to drive significant benefits as a key component of Verizon’s resilience and agility. We have realized $8.3 billion of cumulative cash savings to date and remain on track to achieve our goal of $10 billion by the end of 2021. Even after we achieve our target, operational efficiencies will be an ongoing focus across the business to identify additional long-term transformation initiatives and deliver related cost savings. Let’s now turn to our segment results starting with Consumer Group.

Moving on to where we are, we have seen our retail stores coming back to full operations, of course with new procedures and processes. We have also seen our engineers being back in full force in the field to make installations. You are going to see that later on as we had a really great quarter when it comes to Fios installations. On the racial injustice, we just want to highlight one important thing. This quarter we published our 2020 Diversity Representation Report. We disclosed on different levels and different units where we stand on one of our core values which is Diversity and Inclusion. I want to highlight the work that our treasury department did in the third quarter; they issued the second $1 billion green bond, which was led by minority-owned underwriters. We continue our work with climate change and seeing that we do our contribution. Finally, we also decided in the quarter to provide our employees with paid time-off for employees to vote in these times which are unprecedented. So, it shows our clear commitment to support our workforce and the community. We are in a very strong position to continue the fourth quarter based on a solid third-quarter execution. In the quarter, we also announced our ambition to acquire TracFone, that is adding new opportunities for us in the value segment to support that part of customers. Finally, on the business-to-business applications, which is the growth on top of the 5G mobile edge compute we now have five Mobile Edge Compute centers as I said. We are committed to doing ten by year-end and we both have now Amazon and Microsoft as partners to build that. We are seeing great opportunities based on our investments in universal communication services, especially in health and education, and as you are going to hear from Matt later on, we have great growth in our public sector very much based on that.

Thank you, Hans. As we think about the end of the year, we expect total wireless service revenue to grow by at least 2% in the fourth quarter compared to the prior year. We previously guided to full-year adjusted EPS of negative 2% to positive 2% change from 2019. Given the three quarters of resilient earnings and the trends we see into the fourth quarter, we expect 2020 adjusted EPS to be accretive and are revising our guidance upward to 0% to 2% growth for the full year.

Yes. Thanks for taking the question. Can you give us some idea of what has to happen to hit the high-end or low-end of the fourth quarter earnings guide?

We feel really good about our position, and I think we are operating with positional strength. We feel really good about our offerings. We also feel good about the response so far, and we expect it to positively impact our operating performance.

Looking at the year-to-date EPS number, we are up a penny on a year-to-date basis, and so we feel confident with the momentum we have coming into the fourth quarter that we will ultimately have accretive EPS for the year as a whole.

Can you give us some color around what is driving the accelerating migration to the higher tiered unlimited plans?

This has been a journey where we are differentiating our customer experience, and we believe we are delivering strong value propositions to our customers.

How long is your investment horizon? How do you think about investing in terms of timeframe?

It really depends on the investment, but broadly, we are trying to monetize as quickly as possible and be efficient in our execution.

Thank you all for your participation today.