SBA Communications Corp at Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference
Mar 07, 2016 AM EST
SBAC.OQ - SBA Communications Corp
SBA Communications Corp at Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference
Mar 07, 2016 / 08:25PM GMT
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Corporate Participants
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* Brendan Cavanagh
SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO
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Conference Call Participants
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* Ric Prentiss
Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst
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Presentation
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [1]
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Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to day one for me at least. Very pleased that SBAC is here. Brendan Cavanagh, CFO of the Company, to give us a quick update on SBAC; who they are, how they fit in the tower industry, and what's been going on with them lately. As those of you in the room probably know, the telecom team does like to do the modified fireside chat format. So, we'll keep the prepared remarks fairly brief, but just enough to help generalists understand the Company and then we'll move into a fireside chat format. I'll ask some more detailed probing questions and then we'll take some questions from the audience at the end and then we'll go down to the breakout session. So with that, Brendan, thanks for coming.
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [2]
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Thank you, Ric. Good afternoon, everyone. I will keep this brief so I'll move through the slides fairly quickly because I know Ric likes to spend time talking too. So we'll do that and then if there's anything that I moved through too quickly, we can always follow up afterward. So, just to kind of give you the quick overview on who SBA is. We are a wireless tower company. We are the third largest of the three public tower companies here in the US. Our primary business is the tower leasing business. This is basically a landlord/tenant business that's really more of a real estate business than it is a wireless technology business, but we do serve the wireless carriers as our primary customers. So we own the tower sites that sit out there and they put their equipment on those towers, they pay us monthly rents.
And whenever they need to make a change to those locations as they update for new technologies and so forth, we will enter into an amendment to the existing lease agreements and modify their rental payments through that process. The value in these assets is created primarily through their exclusivity, which is mainly generated through zoning restrictions that typically end up limiting competition for towers. You can't just in the United States pop a tower up anywhere you'd like. Obviously there's a very strict zoning process you go through with local communities and through that process, it limits the ability to put up new assets and therefore helps us to have very exclusive assets and a strong position from which to partner with our customers for the delivery of their services.
In addition, we are in the site development or services business. We do provide site acquisition and construction services to the same customers. It gives us sort of a strategic advantage of knowing what their plans are a little bit earlier in the cycle and being able to help them with that process. It is a fairly small percentage of our business though. The site leasing business represents about 96% of our EBITDA. We have added materially to our portfolio over the years. Today we have over 25,000 towers located in nine different countries. Just under 16,000 of those sites are located here in the United States. Although it is roughly 60% of the tower count, it does represent 85% of our leasing revenue. So, you can see that the vast majority of the more mature sites remain here in the United States.
And we have recently over the last so many years started to expand into these international markets which are less mature, but have superior potential growth opportunities down the road. Most of our towers were either built by us or built by other parties like us as opposed to carriers who were doing it with the sole purpose of having multiple users on the same site. And the big difference there in having that be the driver as opposed to a tower that the carriers built is that it requires less CapEx to keep the sites maintained and they're also situated in locations where you would expect to have multiple users interested in that same piece of property. And as a result, that's how we drive the most value is having multiple users on the same site. The biggest driver for the future is the expected increase in mobile data usage both in North America and Latin America.
This bar chart on this slide represents Cisco's most recent projections about where mobile data traffic goes in both North America and Latin America. You can see that the growth rates are 50% and 42% on an annual basis over the next five years. So, it's pretty substantial. Even if they're only half right, that's going to put significant pressure on the existing networks that are out there and it's going to require meaningful investment from the carriers in order to handle that kind of traffic and that's where we fit in because we are able to monetize those investments in their network as they upgrade the sites that they're on of ours, would have to add additional equipment, use up additional capacity at those towers. Just as kind of a snapshot for those of you that aren't as familiar with our business.
20 years ago you could have towers that were 10 miles apart and would do an adequate job of covering what was how they just basically blast out as much capability as you could from the highest point on any given tower. And over the years as we've moved more towards data use and less from the typical telephony use, you've seen the towers come closer together, networks become denser. Today most towers are macro sites are about a mile apart from each other and through that process we've been able to add tenants where we historically might have thought we wouldn't have been able to add them to a particular site because they're trying to do end fill and we've also seen a lot of upgrades within the existing portfolio. Spectrum deployment is the big driver right now. There are several deployments going on; 700 megahertz, AWS-1, WCS, we're seeing PCS being refarmed.
But in addition, there's other opportunities down the road. You have AWS-3 spectrum that was auctioned off a year ago, kind of drove a record amount of proceeds for the government in that auction. The carriers spent significant dollars on that spectrum because they know the importance of trying to keep up with the data demand that we just discussed a couple of moments ago. As that gets deployed, we expect that that will drive additional spending to change out or upgrade equipment at the existing sites. In addition, you have the government is looking to build out a nationwide public safety network called FirstNet that will be funded with the proceeds from last year's auction, which does give us another opportunity to add either a new tenant or in there partnering with an existing tenant to add equipment to existing sites and drive additional revenue growth through that function.
And right now we're reaching the point where there's about to be another spectrum auction, some of the former broadcast spectrum as well. So, the future looks bright. The tower model is basically highly visible, very steady recurring revenue business, low churn. Again, the zoning barriers create tremendous exclusivity. It is a very high margin business. SBA despite being the smallest of the three tower companies has the highest tower cash flow margins and the highest EBITDA margins in the industry. Our EBITDA margins are about 69% and that comes through the great scalability. As we add incremental tenants, the costs really don't go up as you add a new tenant to the site and so your margins can expand greatly as you add additional revenue with no incremental cost. And the most important thing is that we generate a lot of cash flow.
As of the fourth quarter, our annualized AFFO per share was $5.72. We expect to generate close to $750 million next year in free cash flow, all of which can be redeployed into the business either in the form of new assets or stock repurchases. I think I have one more slide here, which I just mentioned. So the goals are to invest in the business as much as possible, portfolio growth primarily; but to the extent we don't see quality opportunities, we're more than happy to repurchase our stock which we did last year. We did repurchase about 3.5% of our outstanding shares since May of last year. And both of those add significant value in terms of producing high levels of AFFO per share. And with that, maybe Ric we'll get together. That's as fast as I can go.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [3]
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That was great. We think of your business and the two kind of segments you're really in, the US side and the LatAm side. Starting on the US side. 2016 is seen as a year where it's going to build through the year a back-end loaded year for better growth rates. You've given fourth quarter 2016 over fourth quarter 2015 guidance, 2015 seems a bit more front-end loaded. So, can you talk to us a little bit about why the difference and what's going to bring leasing back?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [4]
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Actually 2015 really wasn't that front-end loaded. It was I would say flatter during 2015. This year we are expecting to see some level of increase as we move through the year. So, the expectation is that it will be driven by the carriers and in particular maybe AT&T starting to refocus on investing in their network, deploying some of this additional spectrum. In particular I mentioned AWS-3 a moment ago, that auction which was very successful last year generated a lot of proceeds. In order for the carriers to monetize that investment that they made, they need to start deploying that spectrum and we would expect to start to see that pick up in the second half of 2016 possibly into next year. The timing is not exact yet, but that will probably be one of the drivers of why we would see increased activity this year.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [5]
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And at times, it seems like we're kind of dissecting it tightly. But it feels like the industry whether it's 5%, 6%, 7%, or 8% growth; it's kind of in that band. Is there anything that would cause it to go above 8%, is there anything that would cause it really to drop below 5%?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [6]
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Certainly from a go above standpoint if you go back just a few years ago, we were actually well above those levels and we're talking primarily domestic here just to be clear in terms of the growth rates. We were at levels of 13% a couple of years ago and that was really being driven by peak levels of spending particularly by AT&T that were kind of at levels we've never seen before in our history. So, certainly you could see a pickup in the growth rates if the carriers went back even close to those levels of spending that they were at historically. But more practically if you kind of expect sort of a steady stream, I think that 6% to 8% range is probably reasonable to where we would normally be. It's hard to imagine it being much less than that because we have fixed escalators across most of our leases and those are typically in the 3%, 3.5% range. So, you have that portion of it already sort of baked in. The only way for it to really be less than you said 5% I think, it's hard imagine it being less than that, but it would have to be some exogenous churn event I think such as we had frankly last year with the iDen legacy lease of the old Nextel network. But we don't see anything of that scale happening again.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [7]
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And there's a relationship between you and the carriers. You're providing a critical service, they originally bought the towers so a lot of towers were built by the carriers. How are the relationships these days between the tower companies and the carriers and where are the pressure points?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [8]
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I'd say the relationship is good, fine. We've always had a pretty good relationship with our customers. We've consistently done business the same way throughout our history. We haven't done any master agreements or anything like that that's caused any sort of wholesale negotiations. For the most part we negotiate every individual lease or individual amendment on a specific basis. So if they have a particular need at a specific location, we will negotiate for that particular location what we think is the appropriate price. It's typically based on what equipment they are adding to the site as well as certain factors around the site itself maybe where it's located.
If it's a particularly exclusive type of location, it may demand a little bit higher rent and if it's less exclusive, it would demand a lower rent. But this has been a consistent way of operating with the carriers for many years and I think they know what to expect. We're always very reasonable with them and there really haven't been any discussions about any changes to that. Having said that, of course they want to have the best deal possible. They always do. They want to have the lowest price and the best terms as you would imagine in anything, but that's no different than it's ever been in our history.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [9]
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When you think about the long-term contract nature here, what is your typical remaining duration since you don't have the MLAs and what are you seeing as far as any non-renewals, it seems like used to be almost automatic?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [10]
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It still really is automatic. The only non-renewals we see are usually a vestige of some consolidation that took place with smaller carriers. So, that might be T-Mobile and Metro sites where they were both located or AT&T and Cricket, those kinds of things. Even frankly we still have some older Alltel or even AT&T and Cingular, believe it or not we still have some of that. So most times when you see churn, it's really related to that. It's never really related to we've been operating at this site and we don't need it anymore and we're operating here by ourselves. That's a albeit very, very rare occurrence. So, we haven't seen any of that and I would say the growth has been pretty consistent with what we've seen historically.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [11]
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I know it's awkward to talk about specific customers so I won't do that. But has there been any customers out there that have not been renewing their leases as they've been coming up?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [12]
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No, there's been none of that.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [13]
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If we switch gears a little bit to Latin America. obviously Brazil has been a very difficult macroenvironment. Talk to us a little bit about what's happening with the tower leasing, what's happening with escalators down there?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [14]
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In Brazil we're actually having a pretty good year in terms of organic growth on a currency neutral basis. If you just measure the activity levels, it's actually been I would say a little bit above expectations. We're seeing decent backlogs, we're seeing interest in our sites from the carriers down there. But we have primarily beaten a lot of our organic growth numbers in large part because the escalators have been very, very high. In Brazil the escalators, unlike here in the US where they're fixed, they are tied to inflation down there so a CPI type of escalator. And inflation has been running very, very high in Brazil and as a result, we've had higher than normal escalators so that's helped kind of produce outsized growth down there. I will say though the reality is that the macroeconomic environment and the political environment in Brazil is not great over the last couple of years.
Certainly that does affect our customers because it affects their customers and their ability and willingness to spend on their networks is without a doubt impacted by that. But even notwithstanding that, we are seeing pretty meaningful contributions and that's really a function of the fact that there are significant network needs in Brazil. The networks down there are well behind where they are here in the US and given that that sort of catch up that they have to play where they're five years behind, we expect to see meaningful investment for years to come. The sites are certainly less mature in terms of the number of tenants per tower relative to what we have here in the US and as a result, we should see superior growth in Brazil relative to the US for the next so many years.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [15]
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And I think your guidance assumes kind of low-teens right now?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [16]
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It does, it's about 13% organic growth and that is of course without FX just to be clear. That's really been the main headwind in Brazil is that the currency has meaningfully moved against us over the last couple of years. That will at some point right itself, but it's been the biggest challenge that we've had in Brazil. Although the last week finally it's moved in our direction, which is nice for a change.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [17]
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It's nice to see a bit of a tailwind. When you look at cash revenue because it's of course very important to take up a straight line. If we look at cash revenue and tenant revenue get rid of the passthrough stuff as well, it looks like Brazil ballparked 6%, 7% of your cash tenant revenue so it's not as big as maybe some people anticipate.
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [18]
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One of effects of the FX rate moving against you is that becomes less meaningful over time, but yes.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [19]
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There has been discussion also in Brazil about will there be consolidation, can there be consolidation that's wrapped up in the concession. Maybe just share a little thoughts about what is happening down there?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [20]
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There is a somewhat common belief that there will be some consolidation. Basically there are actually more than four carriers down there, but there's four carriers that predominantly cover the country and split up the vast majority of the subscribers. There is some thought that two of them might merge, in particular the ones that you hear mentioned are Oi and TIM possibly combining. It's been a regular topic of the press that cover these sorts of things down there. And so I do think that there is a very reasonable argument to be made that the market would be better served by having three carriers. Some people would argue that the United States should maybe have three is opposed to four and if that's the case then in a country that's two-thirds the population, you would say how could four be the right number there. And I think that having three healthy carriers down there would actually loosen up some of the spending and you'd have a little bit more of a competitive dynamic where they were all financially healthier and could invest in their networks and long term that would be I think very positive for us actually.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [21]
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Now you've had the slide up there talking about portfolio growth, investing in your business. When you think about areas where you could do that, US there's probably still some of that touch that you're doing, internationally what are the countries and what makes certain countries attractive?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [22]
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I think ideally we'd like to invest in our portfolio in both locations, both internationally and domestically. Taking domestic first, there are opportunities to do smaller tower deals still today. We have seen unfortunately a shift where the pricing for a lot of those deals has been rather high. In a lot of cases, we're seeing deals that are eight times higher in terms of the tower cash flow multiple than where the public tower companies trade and when you get that kind of disconnect, it's hard to rationalize investing in those assets when a lot of times a very similar tower existing asset. When we have the alternative of buying back our own stock is essentially buying ourselves at a much cheaper price particularly with how our stock had traded off over the last couple months.
So we're perhaps doing a little bit less of those deals, but the opportunities definitely exist and we are interested certainly as a first priority in investing in our portfolio all things being equal. But when the economics are just so disparate, then we will look at stock buybacks. And then internationally in addition to the markets that we're already in, we would have interest in potentially investing in other countries that met certain return thresholds and that we felt would be good contributors to our growth rates going forward. We're primarily focused on the western hemisphere and in particular there are markets that we like that are some of the Pacific Coast countries in South America that may be attractive if we find the right entry points and so we continue to evaluate some of those markets. But that's probably where our primary focus will be for the coming year or so.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [23]
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Ecuador, you got into Ecuador. What kind of returns? How does it really compare and contrast Ecuador versus the US or Brazil?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [24]
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It's a little hard to say because we only got in there in September and we only have 135 or so towers down there. So, we don't have much history in terms of leasing activity. They only have about 1.1 tenant per tower. Most of them are brand new sites so many of them are only a year or even less than a year old in many cases. So in terms of actual operating activity, I can't really give you a very specific answer because it hasn't happened yet. But we do like a number of things about that market. For one, all the contracts of the tenants are denominated in US dollars which is certainly good given some of our issues with the Brazilian exchange rate. So, we like that. We have several large multinational customers down there; Telefonica, America Movil, as well as CNT which is a government carrier. Most of our towers are anchored by Telefonica. So, we feel very good about the opportunity because it's a market that is well behind in terms of its wireless expansion. So, we think it's going to be a very positive investment for us much like Central America markets that we invested in five, six years ago that had turned out to be tremendous returns on investment.
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Questions and Answers
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [1]
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Let's go ahead and see if there's some questions from the audience. I've got a bunch more too, but I want to give you all a chance if you've got one that you're interested in asking?
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Unidentified Audience Member [2]
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(inaudible - microphone inaccessible).
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [3]
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So the question is touch on DAS and small cells and what carriers are doing to extend their networking with SBA, thoughts on that and how they might participate?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [4]
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The carriers certainly are using multiple ways to deploy their networks. There has been some move at least by one of the carriers anyway towards more small cell deployments. I think it will continue to be a part of what they do. But what we found is that most of those small cell type of deployments are targeted towards urban markets, urban areas and in terms of displacement, they are largely displacing if anything rooftop type of installations. They are not really tower markets in many of those locations. So in terms of a direct impact on our macro tower business, we haven't really seen much; but it is a place where they certainly are spending money.
And as it relates to SBA's interest in it, we have a small group that is focused largely on in-building type of DAS or small cell solutions with the primary focus on our existing portfolio not only of towers, but also we have 5,000 sites that we manage. Most of them are buildings throughout the country and we found that some of those are very exclusive type assets that would be well suited towards that type of investment. But as it relates to the outdoor fiber-based DAS model, for us it's just not something that we are interested in because we think the other alternatives that we have will actually produce greater returns. It's a good business, but not as good as the tower business.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [5]
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Another question? Yes, please.
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Unidentified Audience Member [6]
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(inaudible - microphone inaccessible).
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [7]
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The question is how does zoning differ between the international markets and the US and what does it mean for the business?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [8]
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There's nowhere that it's as good as the US that's without a doubt and that's why this is the most valuable tower market in the world without question. So, there are limitations in some of those places. We found that each country is a little bit different. You can't just kind of bucket them all together, some are more restrictive than others. For instance in Costa Rica where we are, you've got a heavy focus on eco-tourism, that kind of thing; it is a lot more restrictive than you might find in certain other places. And so, there are varying levels of exclusivity I guess that's created through that.
In Brazil there are zoning laws, there are restrictions; but not nearly what there is here in the US. So, it does have an impact when you're evaluating what your returns might be on an investment you make in assets as to how easy is it for somebody to put a competing site nearby. It does affect your pricing when you're looking at those opportunities much more than maybe it does here in the US. You have to in some cases be a little bit more flexible on pricing, but a lot of times the returns can be made because the costs are much less in terms of building towers in these markets and as a result, you don't necessarily need to get the same level of rents in order to meet your return threshold. But yes, it's a good question the difference.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [9]
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I do want to come back to one of the other slides. We get a lot of questions when people hear the word refarming. Can you describe a little about refarming, what it means in general and what it means to your Company?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [10]
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It's nothing to do with farming actually. Refarming has actually been great for us because what they're doing is they're taking existing spectrum that's deployed at a particular site and they're reusing it, if you will, for a different technology and it's requiring additional equipment, different equipment as they move through these various technology upgrades and generations of technology at our existing sites. What it really means to us that its most simple form is that they're having to add new and different equipment or having to change equipment that's at the sites. And because our agreements are structured as being very equipment specific, in fact every individual lease agreement has a very detailed specific equipment exhibit that's attached to it, any variance from that will require an amendment to that lease agreement. What that amendment is and how much we charge for that will vary greatly depending on what they need to do, but the conversation has to take place and so anytime they're refarming spectrum, it does allow for that opportunity for us to have that discussion and potentially monetize that change.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [11]
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So when people think about 2G, we're talking about 4G a lot, but there is still 2G out there. As the 2G networks get turned off, it's not that revenue goes down, spectrum gets reused and usually more equipment gets put up.
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [12]
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And even to the extent that all they did was remove equipment, there is no reduction in the rent for removing equipment, it doesn't go down. It's not connected to each individual piece of equipment, it's one rent rate for a list if you will of equipment. If you take something out of the list, it doesn't change the rent. But if you want to make a change and add something, it potentially does change the rent depending on what they want to do and that really rests with us to negotiate what that might be.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [13]
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Yes, last question there.
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Unidentified Audience Member [14]
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(inaudible - microphone inaccessible).
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [15]
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Impact of 5G on the business?
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [16]
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I'll answer it this way. It means faster denser networks. There's no question about that, which will be a positive for us because as every technology evolution has kind of created, it's created changes in the needs for equipment at sites like ours. So we do expect it to be positive, but there's certainly a lot of uncertainty about that still. I mean what exactly is 5G and how is that defined, different people have different themes on that. I think over the next few years we'll start to see that crystallize more. But at a macro level view on it, it should be very positive for us.
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Ric Prentiss, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. - Analyst [17]
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Great, thanks. And we'll take it down to the breakout session. Appreciate everybody's attention.
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Brendan Cavanagh, SBA Communications Corporation - EVP & CFO [18]
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Thank you so much.
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