T-Mobile at Citi’s 2025 Conference: Network and Growth Focus

On Thursday, 04 September 2025, T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS) participated in Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. The discussion, led by COO Srini Gopalan, highlighted T-Mobile’s strategic priorities and growth opportunities. Gopalan emphasized the company’s superior network quality and its commitment to delivering both value and exceptional customer experiences. While optimistic about future prospects, Gopalan acknowledged challenges in market perception and the need for continued innovation.

Key Takeaways

• T-Mobile is focused on bridging the gap between network reality and market perception, aiming to provide the best network and value.
• The company is expanding its presence in the broadband market through fixed wireless access (FWA) and fiber broadband.
• T-Mobile is integrating UScellular’s spectrum to enhance network capabilities and accelerate synergy realization.
• The company maintains a strong focus on digital customer engagement through platforms like T-Life.
• T-Mobile sees significant growth opportunities in the enterprise and government sectors.

Financial Results

• Postpaid Phone Net Adds: Maintained guidance despite challenges in subscriber retention.
• Free Cash Flow: The industry experienced a 50% growth since 2022.
• UScellular Synergies: Increased expected synergies from $1 billion to $1.2 billion, with a reduced timeframe of two years.
• Capital Allocation: Comfortable with a leverage ratio of 2.5.
• Revenue Per Account (RPA): Focus on account growth, with RPA driven by rate card enhancements and plan optimization.
• Fiber Broadband: On track to achieve 100,000 net adds in the second half of the year.

Operational Updates

• Network Leadership: T-Mobile claims to have the best network in the US, supported by extensive tower infrastructure and a 5G standalone core network.
• Digital Progress: T-Life has been downloaded by 75 million customers, indicating strong digital engagement.
• UScellular Integration: Acquiring 47 MHz of spectrum and additional towers to enhance network quality.
• Fixed Wireless Access (FWA): Serving 7.3 million customers with improved data speeds.
• Customer Experience: Aiming to reduce inbound customer care calls by 75% through AI and digital improvements.

Future Outlook

• Network Perception: Continued efforts to align market perception with network reality.
• Enterprise and Government: Identified as significant growth areas.
• Fiber Expansion: Exploring opportunities to lead in fiber deployment, leveraging T-Mobile’s brand and partnerships.
• Multi-Year Guidance: Confidence in achieving long-term goals set at Capital Markets Day.
• FWA Model: Committed to a fallow capacity model for efficient use of network resources.

Q&A Highlights

• Convergence/Bundling: T-Mobile views the US as a highly bundled market, particularly with family plans.
• Spectrum Strategy: Focused on meeting coverage and capacity needs through strategic spectrum acquisition.
• Upgrade Cycles: Neutral stance, benefiting from both up and down cycles.
• Competitive Landscape: Emphasizing customer lifetime value and competitiveness.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a more detailed understanding of T-Mobile’s strategic insights and future plans.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference:

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Hey, welcome back to Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference. For those of you I haven’t met, I’m Mike Rawlins, and I cover communication services and infrastructure for Citi. Disclosures are available at the back of the room, and if you don’t have access or would like another copy, please email me at michael.rawlins@citi.com. We’re also pleased to welcome Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer of T-Mobile US Inc. Srini, thank you so much for joining us today.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Thank you for having me.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: It’s great to have you here. Maybe thinking back, since you’ve joined the executive management team from the board, if you can give us a sense of what you’ve been focused on for T-Mobile.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Sure. Look, I’ve known this team for years now, right? It’s incredible what we as a company have built. The center of this is kind of this totally restless hunger to smash through customer problems, which is the heart of the T-Mobile US Inc. story. It’s been spectacular over the last 12, 13 years, right? As we stand here right now, right, there’s even more opportunity. The future, as I look at it, is even brighter than the storied history of T-Mobile US Inc. That’s a strange thing to say given everything we’ve achieved, right? The heart of my belief in that comes from the fact that over the storied history of T-Mobile US Inc., if we’re honest about it, we’ve kind of played this game with one, maybe two hands tied behind our back, right? For most of this journey, we’ve been number four of four as a network.

Our IT and digital capabilities, well, you should talk to our frontline about them, right? We’ve delivered everything we have despite those two things. Here we are today as the best network in the US. That opens out all kinds of possibilities. Similarly, on the digital front, we’ve made enormous progress. 75 million customers have downloaded T-Life, right? We’re at a place where I look at this and go, we’ve got an incredible culture, this whole DNA of working back from how we smash customer problems. We’ve got a history of not just saying it, but making it happen. Now we’ve got the best network and incredible digital skills. Bringing all of that together and driving forward is what gets me really excited about the future.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: You are touching on this, that there’s more growth opportunity in front of you. What do you think the market is underappreciating about the opportunities of what T-Mobile can pursue to extend that momentum of revenue growth, expanding margins, and the free cash flow conversion?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Because the heart of it for me is the gap between network reality and network perception. Right? We’re clearly, by any of the tests, any of the metrics, the best network in the country today. Millions of Americans in the 4G era made a choice to choose based on the best network, and we weren’t the best network then. We think something like 70 million AT&T and Verizon customers made a choice to pay a premium for having the best network. Now that we have the best network, the reality is we’ve destroyed that false trade-off, which is the heart of being an Un-carrier. Those trade-offs shouldn’t exist. You shouldn’t have to choose between network and value, and now you don’t. Even as we’ve gotten here, and we’ve seen the results of that, our SMRA shares have gone from 13% to 20%. That’s still 20%.

There’s a lot of runway still left. We look at the switcher pool, and only 20% of switchers think we have the best network. The gap between perception and reality is huge. What we’ve seen is that gap has closed for our existing customers, which is great because word of mouth, they’re beginning to talk to friends and family about who the best network is, but still hasn’t changed meaningfully enough for prospects. It’s not just kind of consumer prospects. When we look at enterprise and government, we’re at 10%, 20% share there at most, depending on the subsegment we look at. Huge opportunity for growth there. The good news there is these folks take their network seriously. It’s not just about perception. It’s also them going out and testing it.

When they go test it, like New York City did, they chose us for their first responders, which is kind of the most critical force. I could talk for a while about this, but that’s the thing that gets me most excited, the difference between where we are from a reality and perception perspective. That, of course, means commitment to market here and focus on the network, but it also means making the broader switching process easier. The reality is a lot of people probably already know that trade-off between value and network is something they don’t need to make any longer. There’s inertia. We’re looking at this through multiple lenses. How do we get the entire company motivated around this being the best network?

When you talk to people in the frontline, they’ll tell you stories of how 15 years ago, when we weren’t the best network, they loved selling the brand, but they’d always be worried. Now they’re not. Now they know when they recommend that brand, we deliver on it. This is kind of a multipronged focus on bridging that gap because that’s where I see the payoff being highest.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: It feels like this is something that, as a company, T-Mobile has been thinking about for some time. Is there a kind of timing or steps that investors should be mindful of when they might see the next incremental legs of progress for T-Mobile on this?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: We launched our first big network campaign, and we made our big announcement once the results came in of the largest crowdsource test, right? One of the reasons we’ve been thoughtful about timing about this is, one, we wanted to be absolutely sure that that was a claim that we could stand by, partly with consumers, but also with our frontline, right? The second piece is we wanted to be in a place where we could say this not just today, but for the next two years, and in two years from now, we could say we’re still two years ahead. Why do we think we’re at that point? Ultimately, a mobile network is fairly straightforward, right? It’s how many towers do you have, what spectrum do you have, and how good is your core network? We have more towers.

We have more and better quality spectrum because we have the lowest spectrum in each band. Core network, we rolled out our 5G standalone in 2020. I mean, our competitors are talking about completing their rollout in 2025. You put all of that together, and we felt really good that we are the sustainable network leader. It’s time we screamed about it. It’s time we were proud about it. Most importantly, it’s time that we liberated consumers from this false trade-off that they were having to deal with.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Maybe a couple more on strategy. T-Mobile has a different philosophy, it seems, on converged services, different from your competitors that are pushing the narrative on convergence and bundling. How does T-Mobile look at this differently?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Okay, so where do I start here? All right. I’ve spent the last eight years working in so-called converged markets prior to coming here. Right? First off, I think convergence is just a fancy name for bundling. It just sounds better. Right? Ultimately, what you’re talking about is bundling wireless along with wireline services. The reality is 85% of America has had that option for the last five years. Right? Let’s look at what’s happened in the last five years. There’s clearly been one brand which has been the lead in share-taking and by any metric you measure growth. Right? Why do we think that’s so? Often the question I get asked is, why is bundling, most people still call it convergence, why is what’s happened in Europe not going to happen in the U.S.? Right? Three perspectives on that. Number one, it hasn’t happened in Europe.

It’s happened in some markets, but let’s take two of the largest markets, Germany and the UK. The level of bundling of wireless along with wireline is not very different from what we’re seeing here. Right? We’re not saying this is a zero-one. We’re saying at the margin, some segments will do this. Secondly, when you think of it as bundling, the U.S. is the most bundled wireless market in the world because of family plans. Each of our accounts has an average of three phone lines. Right? That creates stickiness by itself. It is the most bundled market in the world. Right? Will some people choose to bundle wireline along with it? Yeah, sure. Is that structurally going to change this market? We’re not compelled by that argument. Probably lastly, a lot of the economic strength of bundling wireless with wireline in Europe came from the differential in churn.

Wireline churn, Europe 70-80 bps. Wireless churn, 100. Right? The U.S. is actually the other way around. Right? Wireless churn, 90 bps. Wireline, 130 even on fiber. Right? This idea of somehow we’re going to get this disproportional churn benefit is unclear to me, and therefore the economic firepower. I get why some of our competitors will talk about convergence. Look, I’ve been in an incumbent. If you’re overbuilding copper with fiber and it costs a lot of CapEx and what you get is the incremental RPA, you’ve got to find another angle.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: When you look at the fiber footprint today, it’s approaching maybe 10% of the U.S. in terms of passing opportunities. I think that’s like by 2030. What are the circumstances under which you try to make that significantly larger, whether you do it on a direct basis, build or own assets or partner, or resell? Do you look to try to find a resell partner to try to get more access to it?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Let’s pull back for a minute, right? I don’t feel the need to be in broadband to defend my wireless space. I really like the U.S. broadband market because it plays to our DNA. Our DNA is pick big consumer pain points, ideally have an incumbent who’s overpriced, trying to defend their backbook, and go in and smash through that. I could have described the broadband market in many ways, given cable and DSL as the heart of that market. We like that market structurally. We’re going to go at it, and we have been going at it hard through two routes, FWA and fiber. FWA, we’ve talked about 12 million customers. Just to be clear, if I was talking in fiber terms, I’d probably triple that number because that would be, I could claim 35 to 40 million homes passed.

Fiber separately, we see as an equity and value accretive opportunity, especially when we can get a few things right. When we’re first to fiber or near first to fiber, when we can use our brand and distribution to drive higher penetration, and we’re also incredibly humble when we enter these new businesses. We’re not going to be the world’s expert at kind of trenching and laying out fiber. We found great partners like Metronet and Lumos, who are the best builders in this business. Metronet is the largest scale pure play fiber builder, and partners like EQT and KKR, who understand this business incredibly well. That’s why we’ve gone into the JV structure with these folks. It also helps from a capital efficiency perspective. Now, will we wholesale? We’re actually already reselling. The core of our business will scale using the JVs.

Do I have a target number in mind in terms of homes passed? That’s not how we think about this business. I believe we’re already at substantial scale, 12 to 15 plus the 12 million FWA customers. Are we looking at other opportunities? Yeah. If they kind of pass through this whole lens of first to fiber, near first to fiber, a business where we can put our brand and distribution to use, and good partners.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Very helpful. Maybe digging into the mobility business, you put out a release earlier today. You maintained the postpaid phone net add guidance, but you’re absorbing a business that’s losing phone subs. Talk us through what’s happening in this business and helping the organic side of the outlook.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: I’m painting the big picture first, right? I think, you know, there’s a secular trend, which is we’re winning switches. Why do we have that secular trend? Because, and I’ve worked in a few telco markets, in many ways, we’re a unicorn. Right? We’re combining best network and best value. It’s something I have never seen at the scale. Right? What we’re seeing is a secular movement of switches towards us. Our win share in switching has gone up through time. In that context, we’re seeing some of those same trends play out as we think about Q3. You saw our Q2. Q3 has been strong.

We’re in a place where we’re really positive about the overall secular trend, but also our immediate performance, which is what gives us the confidence to kind of reiterate our guidance despite absorbing a business which, I think, last quarter had 112 bps churn, lost 40 to 50,000. That tells you that our underlying business is performing really, really strongly.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Within that context, last quarter, you delivered a very efficient quarter with better phone net adds on lower churn than what was expected. When you look at the performance this quarter, what are you seeing from the switcher pool? Does the upside more of a function of gross adds or churn? Just maybe a little context of what you’re seeing out of the marketplace.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: A couple of things, right? I think, one, we have seen over the year a very active switcher pool. We love that, right? Because there are more jump calls, and when you’ve got the best network at best value, you like more switching behavior happening. I still say, despite all of that, 99% of Americans don’t switch in the month, right? There’s a question of what is your fair share, right? If you’ve got best network and best value, what is your fair share, right? We like the switching activity. We’ve done really well from the switching activity. As I said, on nets, we’re really happy with progress, so much so that we’ve reiterated our guidance after having absorbed the impact of UScellular.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Turning to RPA, RPA was also strong in the second quarter and, you know, first half of the year. What are you seeing in terms of the drivers to the RPA and how you look at the sustainability of expanding the RPA?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Can I just start with I dislike RPU generally as a, I can see the uses, but it’s not my favorite KPI because it does weird stuff, right? If I add a line, which is CLV accretive, but at lower than the first line RPU, I have RPU dilution. The way we think about this business is RPA because our fundamental metric is account growth. Everything else ends up being a derivative of it. That’s true quality growth that we’re seeing. I’ll try and answer the RPA question rather than the RPU question. From an RPA perspective, how do we think about this philosophically? You think of three drivers and therefore sustainability-wise. Think of three drivers to RPA growth. Number one, kind of selling up the rate cut. We talked about this in our Q2 call. We’re seeing real strength in that.

We’re seeing twice the number, twice the % of premium plans on our new acquisitions as we do in our base when we add our top two tiers, experience more and experience beyond. That is therefore going to drive accretion to RPU. Sorry, to RPA. Second, as we expand our relationship beyond the smartphone, as we add FWA, as we add things like, you know, watches, things like tablets, et cetera, et cetera, that relationship grows. Obviously, as we penetrate deeper into the household with more lines, that relationship becomes more valuable. The third piece, which is kind of rate plan optimization. We did that last year at points in time. We’re extremely careful about doing that. We test our way into it. We’ll do it for selected legacy plans. It will be a portion of our RPA growth. We’d like one and two to be greater than three.

That’s kind of why we think our growth is sustainable. Part of that is also the zeal with which we want to guard our best value position because best value and best network is unbeatable as a combination. I would thankfully, we don’t have some of the incumbent issues you have with frontbook and backbook. If you’re an incumbent, you have this issue of your frontbook being cheaper than your backbook. You need to fund that acquisition cost. You jack up backbook prices. It becomes even worse because churn starts kicking in. We don’t have that issue. Therefore, we can think about pricing much more from a what is consistent with creating a win-win with customers, and therefore sustainable.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: When we think about this, the third piece, the pricing, of course, focus, as you mentioned, is number one, number two in terms of that list of three. On the repricing side, what was interesting is over the last few months, you have these new premium plans that add the taxes and fees to that. There’s other value that you put into the plans. How are those resonating? Is that a tailwind that might be underappreciated as a contributor to service revenue growth over the next 12 months?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Look, as we think about kind of moving people or people selecting up the rate card, obviously, the way we think of this is the bundle as a whole more compelling. I’ve shared some of those numbers. It clearly is, right? That is working. It’s always interesting to me that different people find different things interesting. I meet people who are like, I love the Wi-Fi on planes, right? My daughter loves having Netflix On Us, right? Some people love the international roaming. T-Satellite, with our work with Starlink, is now a big part of that. All of those come together, right? It’s difficult to kind of pass it out. All of that comes together to create a compelling package. We make decisions on things like taxes inclusive versus not when we look at the package as a whole. In terms of is that working, you can see the results.

It clearly is.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: What are you expecting in terms of upgrades as we’re going into the seasonal device upgrade cycle?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Look, I’m not being glib. We like upgrades up and we like upgrades down. Upgrades up just means more jump calls. Upgrades up means there’s more switching behavior. Upgrades down mean it flows through to the bottom line and our already extremely strong cash conversion. It allows us to reinvest elsewhere on growth. We like it both ways.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: In terms of the competitive landscape, anything else that you’re seeing incrementally in terms of changes from the cable converged promos or some of the acquisition offers that are in the market?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Look, I think, just zooming out for a minute, right? We can talk a lot about, you know, it’s competitive, it’s dynamic, et cetera, et cetera. Let’s look at this industry since 2022, right? In the last three years, we’ve seen a 50% growth in free cash flow. Customers have benefited from three to four times more speed and three to four times more data. What they’re paying in real terms has come down. This is a fabulous neighborhood. We like winning in a fabulous neighborhood. There’s always going to be, you know, shifts in the shape of competition, sometimes rate plan focused, sometimes device focused. The key thing for us is CLV, right? Even as we’ve gotten more into device promos, our CLVs are really strong. We’re feeling good about this on the whole.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Is there another frontier for T-Mobile where you feel like you’re underpenetrated and you have a real opportunity to win?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: I think the next frontier, I think there are several other frontiers, but the next one and the next hill we’re focused on taking is network, right? That’s because of this whole gap between perception and reality, the spin-off benefit of what that means in terms of really winning share in the network-sensitive segments, not just in enterprise, but also in cities like New York where we have high shares. We have a huge opportunity with network seekers.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: On the SMRA side of the equation, with the acquisition and integration of UScellular, can you talk about accelerating the timetable for synergies and opportunity and how that kind of fits into the overall SMRA strategy?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Yeah, look, UScellular has benefited enormously. Our integration with them has benefited enormously from the work we did with Sprint. We love the opportunity with UScellular because, I mean, we’re getting something like 47 MHz of spectrum across 37 million POPs, plus thousands of incremental towers, which takes this whole best value and best network to a different place in communities. I was at Oklahoma City, and they are unbelievably excited by UScellular because for a long time, they’ve kind of competed on value, but they’ve been waiting for this day when they can stand up and say, "In my city, T-Mobile is the best." That is now going to become a reality.

As we talk about large parts of the country and landmarks where historically we’ve been not the best network and we’re becoming the best network today, whether with UScellular or without, that’s just really exciting from an energy and momentum that it brings. On the specifics, like I said, we’ve learned a huge amount from Sprint, which is why we’ve been not just able to increase the synergy amount from $1 billion to $1.2 billion, but also excitingly change our timeframe from three to four years to two years. Good news all around.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: You mentioned the network, which leads me to think about spectrum. I’m curious about your interest to acquire additional spectrum, and specifically, if you could share some perspectives on whether or not T-Mobile has taken a look at the EchoStar spectrum position recently. If it has bands that would benefit T-Mobile and your customers.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Start with kind of our overall capital allocation and how we think about spectrum. Capital allocation, we start with what our leverage ratio is. We’re comfortable with it being at 2.5 right now. We then work back to say, what are all the investments that we want to make in the business? That includes spectrum. That bottoms out into shareholder remuneration. Now, specifically on spectrum, let’s take a couple of examples on the EchoStar spectrum that was transacted recently. 345, clearly we had no interest in. We’ve got the kind of Goldilocks spectrum in mid-band. We’ve got 184 megahertz of spectrum nationwide on 2.5. 2.5 gives you 70% more coverage than C-band, which other people have spent $85 billion for. 345 is encumbered in certain areas. We sold our 345 spectrum. We know in the context of having 2.5, it kind of didn’t make sense for us.

600, now we’re the natural home for 600 spectrum. This gives our view on the whole EchoStar transaction and gives you a sense of how seriously, responsibly, and rigorously we take this whole capital allocation thing. We went about approaching it exactly like the way we make most decisions on spectrum. Spectrum is useful for coverage or capacity. 600, most of the markets where EchoStar has spectrum, we have more than enough spectrum from a coverage perspective. More spectrum then adds to capacity. The question then is there’s two ways of adding capacity given multiplexing. You can just add more sites or you go pay for the spectrum. We horserace what it would cost to build sites versus the cost of the spectrum. It didn’t make sense for us to pay the price. That’s the rigor with which we approach each of these decisions.

Just to be clear, when we think about these things, we don’t kind of add in things like fixed wireless access because we’re committed to a fallow capacity model on fixed wireless access. We’ve talked about that at length in the past.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: of fixed wireless access, you’ve kept up momentum in terms of quarterly net adds in that business. What’s been driving the momentum, in terms of broadening coverage versus deepening penetration in existing markets?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Look, FWA is just a fabulous story. Just put this in perspective. Two years ago, we had 3.7 million customers. Today, we have 7.3 million. Each of our customers uses 25% more data today than two years ago, and our speeds have gone up by 40 to 50%. Today, the average customer uses 561 gigs. Our speeds have gone up 40 to 50%. Our mobile, our wireless business, the network has improved substantially as evidenced by all the stuff we’ve been winning. We love that model. If you look at what’s been driving our growth, it is a superior product. Our NPS is 30 points higher than cable, where both products are available. It’s just a fabulous product, easy to use. It’s why we still have a waitlist of greater than a million customers. That, again, goes back to how rigorously we manage this process.

When we say it’s fallow capacity, it is fallow capacity. We’ve also seen strong growth in business, which we like because if you think of, you know, a mobile network runs 24 hours, it’s pumping out gigs all the time. You build that network from a wireless perspective really for your peak between 7:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. A business FWA has a very different peak from consumer wireless. That’s clearly utilization of fallow capacity. It’s another kind of demonstration of our commitment to that model. It’s a great product, new segments, all of the above. There’s still a lot of hunger out there for the product.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Momentum is still going.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Absolutely.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: On the fiber broadband side, a newer business for you guys, you put out some goals, I think, for the second half of the year. How’s that performing?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: We said 100,000 nets. We’re well on track. We like that business. We like the fact that it’s still really early days, right? Outside of kind of sharing the latest daily sales spreadsheet, it’s hard to talk about any sustained trend on that. We feel very good about the 100,000. I think importantly for me, strategically, the direction of travel was we can bring some real value to this category. I said when we think about new businesses, it’s smashing pain points. Are we in a unique position? What I like about it is the brand, the distribution, a lot of the hypotheses behind that are continuing to, we have even more conviction in those than when we started.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: As you look at the multi-year guidance that you have, are you identifying any incremental opportunities, whether it’s for growth or for efficiencies and margin?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: I’m not going to do an update on our multi-year guide. We laid out a story at Capital Markets Day in terms of the thesis, which was a combination of kind of network, the huge steps we’re taking on digital, the big underserved segments, the big segments where we’re underrepresented. What I can say is as we sit here today, I think our conviction and our kind of our sense of the doability of that plan and all of that has only grown. You know this team. We’ve got a track record. We go out there, commit, and then make sure we nail it. Right? That’s what you should expect from us.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: What I also remember about the analyst meeting is, you know, you talked about the T-Life application opportunity and the opportunity to just create more of a digital healthy experience for customers. You now have, you mentioned 75 million?

On the T-Life.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: 75 million customers downloaded.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: What’s your progress towards this goal of reducing that inbound customer care calls by 75% and leveraging AI to improve the customer experience?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: I am going to sound like a stuck record here, but look, we never started any of those conversations back from cost. Right? We started those conversations with there’s a fundamental pain point in this industry, yet another ridiculous trade-off. You can walk into a store and kind of get great service and empathy, but if you want to do it by yourself, right, there’s a robotic press want to do this, or there’s a really clunky website, right, which just is a trade-off you don’t need to have. You can have great service in store. We’d love you to have kind of an expert in your pocket wherever you go. Right? The experience you get is identical. We’ve made some really strong progress towards that because our approach hasn’t been about taking out cost.

It’s been about that will come, that will naturally flow as a result of us taking out the pain points, restructuring our process, right, and doing things like helping our agents deal with these calls better. We’re really happy with the progress we’re making, and we’ve got clear milestones, getting capability ready, driving customer adoption. The changes started to happen. I think we shared the last time that, you know, one of our biggest transactions, which is upgrades in store, we’re seeing now more than two-thirds of our upgrades are being done on T-Life. The progress is really strong.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: The engagement, you know, outside of the store, after people leave and then just are there, you know, managing their service experience, how are you seeing engagement on the app? Of course, you’ve got T-Mobile Tuesdays on there.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Let me give you a reflection of how strong the engagement with T-Life is. When we ran the Wingstop offer, they ran out of chicken countrywide. The same thing happened with Domino’s on Dough. The engagement on T-Life is incredibly strong. There are some weeks where we’re more downloaded than TikTok on the app store. The engagement is super strong. When we talk about AI, it is now an integral part of the app. We’re really pleased with our partnership with OpenAI and everything that we’re doing together. AI is now an intrinsic part of every part of our business. Our customer-driven coverage has strong elements of AI. Our app is infused with AI, with this thing we call Intense CX.

When you call our service center, our experts actually get a whisper in their ear with something called Expert Assist, which says this customer is probably calling about this, or they get a screen. That sort of stuff just means our ability to take pain away from the process and remove this contradiction or this false trade-off between in-person great, everything else really hard and clunky. We’ll keep pushing you towards that everything else, even if it’s really hard and clunky. That’s just not customer-friendly.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: When you reflect back on your experience on the board and now in the management team, how is your view of capital allocation evolving, including the mix of what you’re doing with the dividend versus buybacks?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Look, I outlined our broad principle of how we allocate capital. Within those broad principles, we’re incredibly flexible. I think the difference between the board and management is when I was part of the board, I thought we had an incredibly rigorous discussion on capital allocation. As part of the management, I realize I’m scratching the surface of this because the quality and debate and how seriously we take our investors’ money and the fact that we’re making big capital allocation decisions on their behalf. A good example of that is walking away when spectrum is too expensive. We take that stuff incredibly seriously, and the level of passion and debate about that is unbelievable.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Is there anything else you want our group to just keep in mind as they think about T-Mobile US Inc.?

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Look, like I said, I’ve been in multiple telco markets. I have not come across a unicorn like T-Mobile where we’ve got all of the ingredients: best network, best value, best experience, and an incredible culture. All of that put together, to me, means much as the last 10 to 12 years have been incredibly successful, the best awaits us.

Mike Rawlins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Thank you for joining us today.

Srini Gopalan, Chief Operating Officer, T-Mobile US Inc.: Thank you. Thank you.

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