T-Mobile at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Growth and Innovation

Published 10/09/2025, 22:42
© Reuters

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS) showcased its strategic prowess at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. The company demonstrated remarkable growth, driven by its "Uncarrier" strategy, while acknowledging challenges in a competitive landscape. CEO Mike Sievert and "Srini" discussed T-Mobile’s record-breaking Q2 results, emphasizing network leadership and customer value.

Key Takeaways

  • T-Mobile achieved record Q2 results, leading in postpaid net additions and service revenue growth.
  • The company is investing in underpenetrated segments, including smaller markets and rural areas.
  • T-Mobile’s acquisition of UScellular aims to enhance network and distribution capabilities.
  • The company plans significant growth in fixed wireless access and fiber investments.
  • T-Mobile remains confident in its growth trajectory and competitive positioning.

Financial Results

  • Record Q2 results in postpaid and postpaid phone net additions.
  • Service revenue growth outpaced competitors by three times.
  • Cash flow represented 26% of service revenue dollars, leading the industry.
  • Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA) increased by 5% in Q2.

Operational Updates

  • T-Mobile has led in postpaid and broadband net additions for 13 consecutive quarters.
  • The UScellular acquisition is expected to bolster network and customer base.
  • Growth in smaller markets and rural areas is twice the market share, with a 20% increase.
  • The T-Life app has achieved 75 million downloads.

Future Outlook

  • T-Mobile aims to reach 12 million fixed wireless access subscribers by 2028.
  • Plans to pass 12 to 15 million fiber homes by the end of the decade.
  • The company anticipates higher penetration rates in fiber due to its strong brand and distribution.
  • Over 1 million customers are on the waitlist for fixed wireless services.

Q&A Highlights

  • The UScellular acquisition is simpler than Sprint, with no CDMA device issues.
  • T-Mobile gains 47 megahertz of spectrum for 37 million POPs from UScellular.
  • The company’s strength in the SMB segment complements cable providers.

For more details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: Lumos, you guys are on your way to a fiber footprint totaling 12 to 15 million homes. Could you just tie that all together for us and talk about how that fits into your overall strategy?

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Absolutely. If you think about all the things that you mentioned, there’s a wide variety of things that we’re focused on. The common theme here is growth. You know, T-Mobile is the growth leader in this industry and intends to remain that way. The priorities you see us pursuing, looking backward and looking forward, are all about three big priorities: near-term growth, medium-term growth, long-term growth, a creative, profitable, industry-leading growth. If you think about just parsing that, the near-term picture is just looking fantastic for us. You know, as you know, we just finished Q2, just all-time record quarter on almost every metric. You know, postpaid net additions, postpaid phone net additions for a Q2, service revenue growth kind of three times our benchmark competitors or more.

Competitors who are getting credit for growing, some that you’ve met with this week, getting some credit for growing, three times that rate from T-Mobile. Of course, translating all that to cash flow of 26% of service revenue dollars, by far and away the industry leading number by a long shot. We’re the only company that has been able to lead in two separate categories like wireless and broadband. You know, 13 quarters in a row, the leader in postpaid or postpaid phone net additions and broadband net additions. It really shows you that the strategy of this company is firing on all cylinders in the near term. The things that you see us doing are making thoughtful investments like we did years ago that have driven the present success to make sure that that continues. If you think about the core business, that’s where our focus is.

I mean, we are pursuing big underpenetrated segments where T-Mobile has a permission to profitably grow and the wherewithal and know-how and embedded investments that allow us to do that. You think about network seekers, you know, in the top 100 markets. Far from defending our castle in the top 100 markets, top 50 markets even, double click into it, we’re the market leader and yet we’re outgrowing everyone. You think about that for a minute. Why? Because tens of millions of people chose their network years ago in the 4G era thinking it was the best. Now there’s a new best network and they’re making that switch. Huge underpenetrated opportunity for us, network seekers in the top 100 markets.

Smaller markets in rural areas, that 40% of the country that’s not the top 100 cities, you know, we’re growing in many of those places at twice our market share, you know, up 20% or so. Twice that rate in many of the smaller markets in rural areas is our win share and on average just a little less than double. That’s a huge opportunity. You see us making investments in our network, augmenting it, rolling out capabilities and of course, UScellular, which further augments both the network picture, the distribution picture, the customer base in those areas. Business, you know, enterprise and government, this is a huge opportunity for us. Q2, all-time records. We led, we had the quad factor. We led the industry in Q2 relative to our competitors in postpaid net additions, postpaid phone net additions, broadband net additions, and churn.

Really great present success, but we’re really underpenetrated. Huge opportunities for us. All the adjacencies you’ve seen us investing in that we’re investing in because we’ve got strength and we see an ability to take our know-how and capabilities and outperform financially versus a typical financial investor in areas such as fiber. It’s all about planting the seeds for the future while realizing present success with all-time record results. A lot of those circumstances that drove just that blockbuster Q2, we’ve seen just roll right into Q3 as well. We’re seeing a great performance in the marketplace as we indicated in our earnings release, as well as some recent update to guidance that show that Q3 is just, you know, on track to be another, we can say now with two months down, another great quarter for T-Mobile US Inc.

Unidentified speaker: It’s a fantastic overview. Srini, turning to you, you know, you have a wealth of industry experience and knowledge and global experience at that. Could you just talk a little bit about how you view T-Mobile in the context of your unique global perspective?

Srini, T-Mobile: Sure. Thanks, Mike. This is going to sound strange in the context of all the performance we’ve delivered to date, right? Just the whole Uncarrier story and everything that’s happened to date. I’m convinced that the best lies ahead. Through all of the markets I’ve been through, the reason for that conviction is when I look back at the storied history of the Uncarrier, we competed on the back of value. We competed on the back of an incredible culture. We competed on the back of real hunger to win. We also competed with kind of two hands tied behind our back. We were number four of four networks for the vast majority of this. To Mike’s earlier point, the size of the opportunity with network seekers is mind-blowing.

We think there’s at least 70 million customers who chose Verizon or AT&T for being the best network and paid a premium for it. That entire opportunity is open to us. The thing that gets me most excited as we look forward to the future is in all of the telco markets I’ve been in, I’ve never really seen a unicorn like we are. This position of best network and best value, both at the same point in time, for me is kind of the core of the Uncarrier story. Being able to smash through false trade-offs that you present customers with. I’m really excited about where we are and the fact that we’ve gotten here and still have so much opportunity in front of us just with the network seeker piece.

The other part of the story for me is for most of our story’s history, our IT and digital capabilities haven’t been best in class. Now you look at that today, 75 million downloads of T-Life, right? More than two-thirds of our upgrades done with T-Life. Why does that whole area fascinate me and where does my belief that there’s a lot of growth there come from? If you look at what we do to customers in our industry today, in many ways, the processes and the technology are 20 years old. What we’re able to do with digital and AI to take away those pain points, to make the whole process of, let’s say, switching easier. There’s a lot more people who’d want to switch to T-Mobile. We just need to make it easy for them to do that.

What the tech does and what the digital journey does for us is best value, best network, best experience. That is the true unicorn. As I look forward, that’s the stuff that really excites me and why.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Srini, you reminded me that, you know, this IT thing, this digital thing, it’s, I’ve been doing this for 35 years. I can tell you that I have never been in a position like I am right now for the first time ever, where you can kind of look at yourself in the mirror and say, I got 99 problems, but IT ain’t one of them. You know what I mean? Like that, like, you know, how many people, how many CEOs, you know, kind of, kind of have the privilege of coming to work saying, you know what, I think we might be the global leaders here. We have quietly built this capability to enable a dramatic digital transformation around data, AI, digital over the last few years. Not so quietly, we rolled it out pretty loudly at our investor day last year. We’re making enormous progress.

I think, you know, for Srini and I to be sitting here with all of this present success, which is just outsized all-time records at T-Mobile US Inc. and say our best days are actually the ones that are ahead. That’s probably the principal reason.

Unidentified speaker: Right. There’s still a network perception gap because consumers haven’t fully recognized all the network investments and improvements you guys have made. Digital should take a lot of friction out of this.

Srini, T-Mobile: It’s not just consumers, right? It’s also large businesses. It’s government. That phenomenon is there everywhere.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Mike, we get a lot of questions around succession planning. You know, you’ve been in the industry for 35 years. You’ve overseen the company for, you know, more than the last five, including the very successful integration of Sprint, which has led to and supported a lot of the industry market share gains. When you think about, you know, leadership and the next leg of growth at T-Mobile US Inc., what are some of the things that are top of mind for you?

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Yeah, I mean, are you getting, you’re getting that succession planning and all that, such a polite way of putting it. Yeah, you know, there’ve been lots of discussion and, you know, I mean, thanks for asking me about it. I take it as a compliment that our company is so transparent about these things that you feel comfortable talking about it. I feel comfortable talking about it. I think that’s a lesson other companies should take note of. We have been, I think, very transparent all year that Srini, for example, came here as part of our succession planning process. I’m going to come back to that. I think also I’ve been, my approach as CEO all along and my predecessor’s approach has been to showcase this bench the entire time.

Have you ever noticed how every one of our earnings, we take, we bring the whole management team to conferences like this. It’s not just the two of us. We have Mike Katz, our President, here with us as well. We bring the team, you know, who lead this company because I never want investors to have any worry that the secret sauce of this Uncarrier outperformance is at risk. You know, it’s held by this team. We finish each other’s sentences. We’re unconfused about what’s important. Yet we challenge each other all the time. We do a lot of that right in front of our owners so they can see how we think and operate.

That way, you know, for me, when I brought Srini in and announced, you know, he was joining us at the beginning of this year, that was a culmination of a, you know, kind of a years-long effort. We’ve been friends and coworkers for many years. I made it very clear that that was as a part of a succession planning process. I think that’s a lesson other companies should take. You know, I benefited, I followed an iconic leader, you know, years ago, six years ago when the company announced I would be CEO. I was stepping into the shoes of somebody who was very famous and effective. Wall Street looked at it and said, yeah, that makes sense. Good on you guys. We all moved on. That is what great succession planning looks like. I think John showed a great, a great path for that.

I’m trying to do the same thing. Now we’re not here to, you know, make any predictions for you about exactly how and when it’ll all unfold or, you know, where we’ll land. That’s been my philosophy the whole time. Srini and I kind of run this company together. He’s got 90% of the employees of this company. You can see, you know, the results that we’re delivering over the last couple of quarters. If there’s any question about whether or not this guy gets the Uncarrier.

Unidentified speaker: Great, thank you for that. Yeah, let’s talk about the consumer wireless business. I mean, it’s been a tremendous amount of focus for the market. I think a lot of people have observed a higher level of competitive intensity, at least at the beginning of the year, purportedly. We’ve seen strong gross ads, but also strong or higher churn. Could you just unpack for us what’s actually happening in consumer wireless right now?

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Maybe we’ll both jump in. I’ll start. I mean, look, we’re really comfortable with the nature of competition right now. That may be different from what you’re hearing from others. I can’t speak for them. It may feel hotter in the kitchen for them. We’re really comfortable. Our Q2 results were during a time of competition that’s just like what we’re seeing now. You saw our outsized performance then. Not a lot has changed since then. One of the things that I want to underscore is that the value we’re creating from customer acquisition is right in line with our historical norms. That might surprise some people because they’re like, man, you’re paying a lot for those gross ads. I’m like, right, but the gross ads are more valuable as well. You see that Q2, our ARPAs rose by 5%. I mean, that’s a lot.

The overall customer lifetime values are in line with historical norms while we’re delivering outsized growth and simultaneously delivering cash production from service revenue dollars that lead the industry by a long mile. We’re really comfortable with it. There’s a reason for that. Customers kind of find their way to the truth. As Srini talked about a minute ago, we’ve got the best value. Customers can switch to T-Mobile and save 20% and get treated by a company that doesn’t seem to resent them. When you factor in all the benefits and privileges of being a member at T-Mobile, and increasingly they’re waking up to the fact that we’ve got the best network, was never true before, has been true for two or three years. Finally now this year, you see at scale, people starting to kind of figure that out. That just gives lots of tailwinds.

Srini, T-Mobile: That’s the point Mike Sievert was making, right? We can get lost in the froth.

Unidentified speaker: Sure.

Srini, T-Mobile: Right? What promotion is someone running? What’s the latest iPhone offer, et cetera, et cetera. The reality is there’s a broader underlying secular trend, which is us winning more share. You know, when you have the best network, best experience, and best value, what is the fair share? All you’re seeing is that secular trend play out. Right now, on top of that, there’s froth. We manage that froth with kind of real rigor, making sure that our CLVs grow and the rest of it. A testament to this fact is when we did the UScellular announcement, right, we actually, our underlying nets, we took them up because we kind of integrated UScellular. If you just look at their Q2, 112 basis points churn, negative 40,000 nets. Despite that, we stayed with our original guide, which means the underlying business is actually performing even stronger.

While we manage kind of the promotion cycle and everything around it very rigorously, it doesn’t escape us that there’s an underlying secular trend of people being tired of the trade-offs that they have to face between network and value and moving to a place where that trade-off doesn’t exist.

Unidentified speaker: Right. One thing that’s going well is that switching is a little more vibrant in the market this year. If you look at Q2, churn was up across the market a little bit. Not the kind of thing you want to see up a lot, but when it’s up on the margin, our sequential and year over year churn comps were the best in the industry. Our relative performance versus our norms was the best there was in Q2. They were all a little bit elevated versus year ago levels. What that means is more people are switching. When you’re winning a disproportionate share of the switching and doing it economically, as we just explained we’re doing, that’s great for us. You see that flowing through to our financials and the improvements to the guide that we’ve been making.

We always are a little thoughtful about guide and maybe it trails what we’re seeing. You can hope that things sort of continue to unfold in a really good manner. Hopefully you’re getting that sense from us today. We’re very comfortable with where things are.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Right. If you’re a net share gainer, you should be happy about jump balls.

Srini, T-Mobile: Yes. Yeah, yeah. More jump balls is a good thing.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, you know, this week, Apple announced its new iPhone. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that. You know, what’s been driving some of this higher switcher pool, higher upgrade activity? Is some of it related to tariffs and the pull forward of smartphone upgrade demand into the first half of the year? What are the implications of the new iPhone launch? You know, what are your observations around the promotion supporting the iPhone 17?

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Personally, I’ve been waiting for this week with bated breath. The reason for that is that I have a cracked screen. I just can’t wait for, you know, I don’t want to buy the old one. Srini, you were actually there yesterday. Maybe you can talk about your observations.

Srini, T-Mobile: Look, I think big picture first, right?

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Sure.

Srini, T-Mobile: Whether this is a super cycle or not, there’s lots of speculation about. The reality is we like it both ways. If there is a super cycle, great, there’s more churn, there’s more movement, and that’s good for us. If there isn’t, that flows through EBITDA, that gives us more cash to invest in the short term. We like it both ways. That’s one of the joys of being the unicorn. Specifically on this iPhone, what we love about it is so much of the capabilities of that iPhone depend on you having a nationwide 5GSA network. That allows us to do multiple carrier aggregation, which ends up meaning that the iPhone on T-Mobile is up to 35% faster, quicker than it is anywhere else.

That’s because of the thoughtful approach we’ve taken to rolling out 5GSA because we had that back in 2020. There are other people completing their rollout of 5GSA end of this year. That network lead, the better the device, the more the network lead plays out. As always, we’re committed to our value position, which is why when you look at the promotions, we’re competitive there. We’ll make sure that value stays with us.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Yep. I think we’re going to see a decent amount of jump balls, you know, with this cycle. People have had their 5G phones for a while now. You know, you saw those penetration numbers, not just from us, but from our competitors as well three years ago. It seems like time on that front. I think people are kind of excited about these camera capabilities. The physical form factor is a little different. This is going to sound crazy, but it kind of matters that if you’re going to spend all that money on a phone, if you whip it out and throw it on the table, your friends can notice it looks a little different than last year’s, looks likely.

All these things kind of add up, whether it’s the capabilities, the network connectivity and power, the processing power, the unbelievable improvements in both durability and camera capabilities, and many other innovations, not to mention the air, which blew everybody’s mind. We’ll see what happens. Is it a super cycle? It doesn’t matter to us. We don’t know. We’re not good at predicting that. We do think that there’ll be a lot of jump balls this fall, and we think it’s happening at a time when we are firing on all cylinders.

Srini, T-Mobile: The cosmic orange. That’s the one you want.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Yeah, the cosmic orange. I like that actually.

Srini, T-Mobile: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Srini, I was wondering if I could ask about the UScellular acquisition. What should investors be mindful of as you think about the integration of that and how that compares to Sprint?

Srini, T-Mobile: The UScellular acquisition is a lot simpler than Sprint.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Sure.

Srini, T-Mobile: Right. You don’t have the CDMA device issue and the rest of it. For us, it’s a really exciting, huge opportunity because you come to this piece of best network, best value. Right now, we’re getting 47 megahertz of spectrum for 37 million POP. This is our chance. I was at Oklahoma City with our team there. They’re unbelievably excited because they can go out and claim best network in another part of America. When you think about our SMRA markets, UScellular plays directly into that. We’re really, really excited by taking the story out further. That’s why you saw we moved up from $1 billion to $1.2 billion, and three to four years became two years.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Right.

Srini, T-Mobile: A lot of that is because of everything we learned during Sprint. Things like the MOC, how we integrate networks, the MOSIN and the reverse MOSIN, as well as the streaming billing migration, which is unique. I’ve never seen it in another telco, which allows us to integrate assets like this really quickly and get the bigger synergies quicker.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Right.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Mike, the business market has been a key focus of yours over the last several years. To your point, you still remain underpenetrated. Could you talk a little bit about the opportunity there and also maybe make some remarks about the MVNO that you have with the cable providers and why that makes sense for you?

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Absolutely. You know, I was going to resist the urge to repeat my comments about the all-time record performance in Q2, but I won’t. The business, and the reason is I want people to understand the business is just firing on all cylinders. We are realizing industry-leading and record for ourselves success on things like net additions, postpaid net additions, phone net additions, churn, even broadband net additions. It’s really going well. The value creation, the CLVs are right where we want them. At the same time, and I talked about this very briefly, I think in our earnings report, one of the dynamics is that the growth and success is a little bit barbell shaped. You see our best success has come historically from the very small businesses where the go-to-market kind of emulates consumer.

They’re largely served through our consumer-like channels, retail and others, and enterprise and government where it’s a more finite market, meaning literally there’s a few thousand people you have to convince to compete effectively in that market. We are competing highly effectively in enterprise and government. In between is this vastness of sort of SMB where we’re doing fine, but there’s lots of upside. It just felt super complimentary to us because that’s where their strength is. That’s where their go-to-market strength, their brand strength, their business strength is in kind of SMB. It allows us to have what we hope will ultimately be highly effective go-to-market approaches for all of the major segments.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Srini, on broadband, the company has a target for $12 million fixed wireless access subscribers by 2028, $12 to $15 million fiber homes passed by the end of the decade. How does broadband fit into the broader strategy? The company’s been emphasizing convergence a little bit less than some of its peers. We’d just love your thoughts on all that.

Srini, T-Mobile: Let me start with convergence, right? I just like the word because it’s just a really fancy term for bundling, right. Ultimately, what we call convergence is a very specific bundle of wireless being attached to wireline, right. Now our thesis on convergence is different from some of our competitors, and there are good reasons for that, right. Before I get to the thesis, you’ve just got to look at the numbers first.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Sure.

Srini, T-Mobile: Right. For the last five years, 85% of America has had the option of bundling wireless into their wireline. As Mike said, yet our growth continues, not just continues, but accelerates. We had our best Q2 ever, overall postpaid and postpaid phone. That just tells you that there’s always going to be a segment that wants to do that bundle, but that’s at the margins. Our position of the unicorn more than outweighs all of those effects. It’s in the run rate and in the run rate we’re accelerating. You come to the hypothesis on, a lot of investors ask me this question, which is why is, will, will the U.S. become like Europe?

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Sure.

Srini, T-Mobile: Right. Before we get into that, a lot of the European problems have to do with excess capacity and mobility rather than convergence or bundling of wireless with wireline. I think there’s three big differences. Number one, it’s a myth to believe that bundling wireless along with wireline is the largest purchase form in Europe. In big markets like Germany or the UK, the levels of bundling wireless along with wireline are not fundamentally different from the U.S. Second, I’d argue the U.S. is the most bundled wireless market in the world because of family plans. The typical account has three postpaid phones attached to it.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Yeah, and device plans.

Srini, T-Mobile: You have two bundles, an EIP bundle and a family bundle. Thirdly, one of the big drivers to this whole bundling of wireless with wireline in Europe was that wireline churn was 70 bps. Wireless churn was 110 bps. What you were trying to do is bring them together. Right. Now the reverse is true of the United States. You’re looking at, even with fiber, 130 bps of churn, and wireless, even the recent quarters, 90 bps. You look at all of that and go, this form of bundling is going to exist at the margin. There are other forms of bundling which are going to be much bigger scale. I also understand why some, if you’re overbuilding existing copper with fiber and you need to kind of justify that, I’ve been there in Germany. It’s really hard to justify it purely based on the incremental ARPU of that move.

You’ve got to talk up a bunch of other stuff to make economic sense of that move.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Why do we point out all these things? It’s not to explain that we’re not ambitious in this space. Far from it. We’ll come back to that. We’re the growth leaders in this industry, broadband. We’re very ambitious in this space. It’s the why. It’s to make sure no one’s confused about why we’re doing it. We don’t believe that our leadership in broadband, which we expect to persist for quite some time, is for any reason other than that it’s a great business. Correct. It is not to defend our wireless business. We don’t believe it’s necessary to defend our wireless business for all the reasons that Srini just very well articulated.

This is a business we just think we can deliver a fantastic product and delight customers, which is our mission, and derive a return that outpaces purely disinterested financial investors by virtue of our capabilities, know-how, and embedded investments. You see that in our results. We’re the only company that’s ever led and have been leading for 13 quarters in growth in both broadband overall and wireless overall. I think one of the reasons you see that is that fixed wireless, which is our largest segment, although we’re very interested in fiber and you see us making some cool moves in fiber, fixed wireless is here to stay. It is nowhere near its terminal penetration. We have lots of room to run. One of the things that people need to keep in mind is that the technology is not standing still.

If you want to drag right and predict the terminal penetration of fixed wireless, don’t drag right today’s wireless capabilities. Make sure you factor what’s coming with 5G advanced and 6G and beyond.

Srini, T-Mobile: One of the things we love about the broadband market is this team loves going off the markets where you have a large incumbent with an inflated backbook and an inferior product. Taking that on with both FWA and fiber gives us lots of runway. It kind of plays into what we’re very, very good at doing.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Right. When you think about the 12 to 15 million fiber homes passed goal, what’s the right terminal penetration? How are you thinking about the balancing of subscribers and, you know, revenues?

Srini, T-Mobile: If you look at the way we’ve thought about fiber, there’s a set of strengths that we bring. Those are our brand, distribution, just our capability to think about how we price the stuff rather than getting into creating win-wins for customers and us, and great distribution with a great brand. Those will all naturally drive us, we believe, to higher penetration. However, as ever, we’re prudent about the way we think about our IRRs and how none of our IRR calcs are based on anything other than a typical terminal penetration across the market. We really like those JVs because while we bring these strengths, we also have humility. We understand we’re not the best guys to be digging fiber, to be doing the truck roll. We have partners like Metronet and KKR and EQT who know this business really well.

We believe that brings together the best of both worlds.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Yeah. I’d love to expand on Mike’s comments earlier around making sure we acknowledge that there’s going to be technological innovation in fixed wireless access as we think about capacity. Could you just talk a little bit more about the supply-demand dynamics within fixed wireless? You know, is this something that you’ll have to invest directly in? What do the returns look like for that?

Srini, T-Mobile: Sure. Yeah.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Jump in.

Srini, T-Mobile: Look, we’ve historically talked about this as, firstly, if you think of the fixed wireless product, it blows my mind what we’ve achieved. We’ve gone from 3.2, just in two years, we’ve gone from 3.7 million customers to 7.3 million customers. Each customer now uses 25% more data, a staggering 561 gigs. Despite all that, our average download speed has gone up by 50%. When you talk about an ultra-capacity network and a network that’s kind of got a lot of room to go, that just dimensions it. Our center of gravity has been the fallow capacity model, which is we first make sure we prudently project our growth in mobile at a hex spin, kind of 165 meters by 165 meters level, and look at what capacity is left over and use that to drive fixed wireless access.

That’s the way we still think about this from a return on capital. That’s the most efficient way. Are we exploring other models? Yes. There may be other people who, given their spectrum holdings, need to go to less efficient models earlier, or we’ll see how that plays out. Right now, we think there’s a lot of room to run on our fallow capacity model, and that’s what we’re pushing hard on.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Great.

Srini, T-Mobile: If you look at our waitlist now, we’ve got over $1 million customers on the waitlist, which tells you the power of the product. We have NPS, which is like 30 points higher than cable.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Yeah. Srini, just going on to capital allocation, you guys obviously have the M&A deals. You’re investing in the network. You’re investing in fiber. You’ve got buybacks and dividends. How are you balancing, you know, accelerating fiber passings versus everything else?

Srini, T-Mobile: Look, this is one of the things that we really debate, work through. We’re conscious that we’re kind of deploying your money. We take great pride, but also great caution, and due diligence before we do that. Our foundational principle is we start with our leverage, versus EBITDA. We think 2.5x is the right number. It’s been at that number. Given the environment today, we still think it’s the right number. We then have the operating free cash flow. Our first priority is to look at the attractive business opportunities. Right. Those could be spectrum. We look at that very rigorously. Those could be fiber investments, and then shareholder remuneration for us as the consequence of having made those trade-offs. Once we’ve looked at everything that we think is really truly accretive to the business. Right. That’s the same approach we followed for a long time.

That’s what we’ll continue doing.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Great. Mike, maybe in the last couple of minutes that we have here, I was wondering if you could just tie it all together for us and talk a little bit about your near-term to mid-term strategic priorities, things that investors should take away from this conversation today.

Unidentified speaker: We can pick right up on this capital allocation because we’re at this moment. It’s just, we’ve worked so hard to get here to where, you know, you’ve got a business that’s present success, is firing on all cylinders. The cash production from it is enormous. We’ve outlooked what that looks like over the next several years. It’s tremendously exciting. That just gives us fantastic optionality. The first piece is to remember that the core of the business that we are running is extremely successful and highly profitable and just filled with opportunities. We talked about them at the beginning of the session. There are just so many places where we have room to run with a strategy that’s highly proven and very profitable.

As you think about our investments, as Srini is saying, you know, we first chase all those because our core business is a fantastic business and we’re nowhere near the end of the runway for all the great accretive growth opportunities. Second, it’s all these adjacencies. We’re very excited about fiber. We’ve shown our hand and we prefer the growing part of fiber. You know, we prefer pure play. We have simple business models. We want to be a disruptor, an innovator, a fast-moving company, and there’s more opportunity there. We want to be thoughtful about that. Then other adjacencies and finally shareholder return. At this leverage of 2.5x, remember that’s on a rapidly rising EBITDA.

It’s 2.5x of a rapid, 2.5x rather of a rapidly rising EBITDA, which means that even while holding leverage flat, the nominal amount of dollars available to us are rising rapidly because that’s an envelope that’s growing, but so are cash flows. That’s a very good place to be. I bring it back to where Srini started it in our session, which is as we sit here today and look at the next several years, despite the historic success, which is off the charts, the two of us have never been more excited about what’s ahead.

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile: Mike, Srini, it’s been such a pleasure and privilege to have you on stage here with us. Thank you so much.

Srini, T-Mobile: Thank you.

Unidentified speaker: Cheers.

Srini, T-Mobile: Thank you, sir.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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