T-Mobile at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) participated in the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. Peter Asvoldic, the company’s EVP and CFO, highlighted T-Mobile’s record-breaking performance in 2024 and outlined ambitious growth strategies for 2025. While the company anticipates increased service revenue and expansion into new markets, it faces challenges in a competitive landscape.

Key Takeaways

• T-Mobile experienced unprecedented growth in 2024, with record customer additions.
• The company raised its 2025 service revenue growth forecast from 4% to 5%.
• Strategic focus includes expanding into smaller markets, rural areas, and business sectors.
• T-Mobile is advancing its fixed wireless and fiber strategies through partnerships.
• The company aims to enhance advertising revenue through recent acquisitions.

Financial Results

• 2024 Achievements: T-Mobile achieved its greatest growth year, with record customer and financial metrics.
• Service Revenue Growth: The forecast for 2025 has increased to 5%.
• Postpaid Net Additions: Issued the highest-ever guidance for postpaid net additions.
• Wholesale and Other Revenue: Anticipates $650 million in Q1 2025, influenced by changes in ACP and partnerships with DISH and Verizon.
• Tax and ARPA Expectations: Expects an income tax rate of 24% to 26% for 2025 and anticipates 3% ARPA growth.
• Advertising Revenue: Projects $250 million in service revenue from advertising, following acquisitions of BoltBliss and Vistar.

Operational Updates

• Market Penetration: Increased household share in top 100 markets and leads in smaller and rural areas.
• Fixed Wireless Access: Subscriber base reached 6.4 million, with a goal of 12 million by 2028.
• Direct to Device: Partnership with SpaceX’s STARLINK, with a commercial launch set for July 1.
• Business Sector: 2024 was a record year for revenue and growth in T-Mobile for Business.

Future Outlook

• Service Revenue Growth: Aims for 5% growth in 2025, driven by postpaid services.
• Fixed Wireless Goals: Targeting 12 million subscribers by 2028.
• Fiber Expansion: Awaiting joint venture closures to expand fiber offerings.
• Business Market Growth: Committed to double-digit service revenue CAGR.
• Advertising Ambitions: Plans to leverage data for improved consumer experiences and addressability.

Q&A Highlights

• Convergence: T-Mobile’s penetration in fiber markets is higher than in non-fiber markets.
• Spectrum Management: Prioritizes mobile customer needs with a "fallow capacity" model.
• Fiber JVs: Maintains partnerships with experienced teams to leverage funding.
• Business Market Strategy: Focuses on solving CIO problems to secure business growth.
• Capital Allocation: Balances leverage targets, core business investment, strategic M&A, and shareholder returns.

In conclusion, T-Mobile remains confident in its growth trajectory, leveraging unique advantages and strategic market penetration. Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed analysis.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: All right. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And we are really excited to welcome back to the conference T Mobile EVP and CFO, Peter Asvoldic.

How do you Thank you

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: so much. Great to be here. Do you want me to do my obligatory statements too?

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Do those, yes. Oh, yes. There you go.

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: The test will be later. So I guess it’s up there, so we’re good to go. All right.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Good? We’re covered? Okay, great. Great. Well, thanks for coming, Peter.

Great to see you.

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Thank you for having us.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: So actually, in San Francisco back in September, I think it was the last time I saw you, you laid out sort of a long term growth plan for the company. Why don’t we start off with that outlook, whether anything has changed since September that you want to highlight? But really, what gives you guys the confidence that you can kind of grow at those levels in an industry that’s competitive and maturing?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. That was a very exciting time for us to lay out that new multiyear plan with Capital Markets Day. And honestly, what happened is we closed the year even stronger than we anticipated. The momentum continues with T Mobile. I think you saw the Q4 results by many, many measures.

2024 was the greatest growth year in T Mobile’s history and that long and storied history, 2024 was it. In fact, we had the most customers join T Mobile in 2024 and of course, a lot of financial metrics. We hit a lot of new record highs. And so what really happened since September in the strength of Q4 and how we deliver 2024 really gave us the confidence to actually increase some of the expectations for 2025. And one of those being service revenue, where at the time of Capital Markets Day, we anticipated another year of strong 4% service revenue growth, and we increased that to 5% service revenue growth.

And commensurate with that, with the momentum we saw, we also issued our highest ever beginning of the year total postpaid net additions guidance. So that’s really been the beginning of it. The reason why to believe and what’s really driving that is the same things that have been underpinning the growth story for multiple years now. It starts with I know we say this rather simply, but the best value, the best network and the best experiences create a structural advantage for T Mobile that we’ve been taking advantage of. And you couple those things with uniquely underpenetrated market segments, whether that’s in smaller markets, rural areas, T Mobile for business, now top 100, which is a new growth driver that we didn’t anticipate four years ago when we started this merger, but have seen great momentum there on the back of network strength.

And of course, what we’ve done with new businesses like fixed broadband, that’s a business that went from nothing to 6,400,000 subscribers at the end of twenty twenty four and is a fabulous contributor. So those same underpinnings are the tailwinds that will drive this business growth for many years to come and why we’re comfortable in this environment. And by the way, maybe I’ll take a pause because I don’t believe it’s a maturing industry. There really is on a lot of fronts, the industry as a whole is growing TAM. With the advent of certainly our leadership from a technology and network perspective, you’re seeing replacement products for Wi Fi, you’re seeing whole new categories come to fruition.

So beyond that all important, very important postpaid phone metric we all look at, there’s a lot of other growth potential in the industry as well that gets us very excited. And so that’s why I kind of take exception for the maturing industry. We’ve increased service revenue guidance, so

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: probably not. Fair enough, fair enough. Let’s talk about 2025. So you’ve got guidance for 5% service revenue growth, $5,500,000 postpaid net adds. Anything you’d like to update us on today about the year ahead?

Or any comment about how Q1 is sort of shaping up particularly competitively?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. Again, we issued this guide at the January. We’re very confident in the guidance, both from the highest ever beginning of the year postpaid net additions guidance and a subset of that being postpaid phone, but also that all important increase in service revenue. And so a lot of times I get questions around, well, can you break down that 5% for me and maybe I can do that and how I think about Q1 and the individual metrics of it. Prepaid service revenue, I’d anticipate very similar patterns to what we’ve seen the last couple of years in terms of Q4 to Q1.

So it continues to be a very strong contributor to our business, but similar patterns in terms of sequential change Q4 to Q1, I would expect. Wholesale and service revenue is one we’ve talked about for a while and we’ve talked about 2025 really being the trough and the long anticipated trough, both with ACP going away, but also with the DISH MVNO revenue and TracFone as Verizon integrates TracFone. Underpinning those things, there is a great growth story with things like Google and other smaller providers. So we see 2025 kind of being the trough as we explained to Capital Markets Day and growth thereafter. So Q1 there is probably $650,000,000 ish for that kind of line item of wholesale and other service revenue, which encompasses a few things.

And so that means in the guide of a 5% service revenue, it’s that all important postpaid service revenue metric that continues to be a really strong growth driver for us. And that’s both volume as well as rate related. Outside of that, probably the only Q1 shaping thing I always like to do is income taxes, we’re very comfortable from a 24% to 26% range for the year. It looks like 26% for Q1 and typically you see some variability there. But everything else is intact, so we couldn’t be more excited, honestly, around the guide.

Again, issuing this at the January, issuing the highest ever beginning of the year postpaid net additions guide, all buoyed by those structural advantages and underpenetrated markets.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: That’s very helpful. Thank you. It’s interesting that we’ve had all of your competitors essentially present already and we’re kind of wrapping up our telecom side of the conference with T Mobile. We talked a lot about convergence, which I know you guys get asked about all the time. It’s been talked about by AT and T and Verizon and Comcast and Charter as sort of a key growth driver for them.

What’s your perspective on how much convergence matters in the marketplace and whether it does or does not impact T Mobile’s ability to kind of continue to lead the industry in growth?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. Our view is rooted in the reality of The U. S. Market. And the first reality for everyone to know is for over the last five years, eighty five percent of people have had the ability to bundle if they wanted to.

They could select wireless service from their wireline provider and that hasn’t played out. If we look at some of the subsets, you’ve seen obviously our results in those five year periods as well. But if you double click down in there and look at, for example, competitors’ fiber markets, our share of households and our penetration in competitors’ fiber markets is actually higher than in non fiber markets. And similarly, if you look at the multiyear growth arc for us, we’ve grown our penetration at a very similar rate in those fiber markets as well as non fiber markets. So it hasn’t impacted the growth because frankly, the convergence story and thesis has been here for five years.

In The U. S. In particular, it is really the wireless sale that we found to be the most considered purchase. And of course, you hear competitors talking about, well, the bundle lowers churn, every bundled product lowers churn. I mean, we see that whether you’re talking about, for example, a family plan.

That’s really been the convergence that’s happened in The U. S. As you’ve gotten families together with a leader in that, whether it’s other products, could be fixed wireless, could be tablets. Frankly, the more you bundle, the better you see from a churn perspective. But given what we’ve experienced for the last five years, the growth we’ve delivered and what we’re seeing in those underlying markets, it’s been here.

There’s no issue with that. That said, in and of itself, fiber can be a great business from a convergence perspective, but just a great business, which is why you’ve seen us dive into some of the JV arrangements that are still pending, but we’re very excited about.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Yes. I definitely want to talk about the fiber stuff and the JVs in a minute. But let’s talk about the big business, the wireless business and your growth opportunities there. So starting with top 100, as you mentioned earlier. If we were to look at the markets where T Mobile is number one today, are there similar characteristics across those markets that might inform sort of the degree of difficulty or opportunity to take the markets that you’re number two or number three up to number one?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. There really isn’t something distinct that would mean what we have to approach that differently than we have. And in fact, if you disaggregate the top 100 and we’ve kind of talked about them in three separate cohorts, right, where we’re number one, where we’re number two, number three, in a lot of cases, actually the number three is bear remarkable resemblance to smaller markets in rural areas. So the way we’ve gotten to be number one in that cohort of number one is first network. I mean, we were historically much more network centric in dense urban environments.

That was how you grew and value leadership. What we’ve seen and why we see top 100 as a growth driver now is as we continue to have this leadership perspective from a network point of view. And as consumer equities catch up at the reality of what the network actually is in our two year leadership and we continue to build in a very strategic way using our consumer or customer driven coverage model, which we can talk about as well, making sure that every dollar of investment in the network goes in the places where it benefits customers the most, creates the most value for them. So it’s all about just applying the same formula that made us number one in the number one markets to number two and three, and in fact, the same way we do in smaller markets in rural areas. And in Q4, we grew our share of households in all three of those categories of top 100.

So it’s absolutely working. It’s going to continue to be a tailwind for us and not just the way we’ve approached Top 100 before, but because you have people who we call network seekers. They are the cohort of customers who value network quality above all else are willing to pay a premium. And those are ones we’re seeing come to T Mobile as the reality of the network leadership starts and continues to grow in consumers’ minds. Our network equities continue to grow.

Our competitors continue to decline. And that’s something once again that will continue to be a tailwind and grow for

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: us in the future. So similar playbook it sounds like?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes, very similar playbook, absolutely.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: How about in the small and medium rural areas? I think that those are places you’re newer and you’re still growing. In some markets you’re sub-twenty percent share. Can you talk about the characteristics of those markets that allow you to grow over time? And does the fact that they’re just less dense, maybe it takes longer or the less efficient projects from a capital point of view.

How would you talk about that?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Definitely not less efficient. It’s the same story of let’s bring the network to a place. We chose the way we categorize this. So that smaller markets in rural areas is actually everything outside of the top 100 for us, 40% of The U. S.

Population. So it’s a large cohort of customers, including quite large cities from the one hundred and first on down. And so we approach it similarly. You build the network to get it to in the past, we’ve talked about how do you get the parity and then how do you grow network to leadership position in each one of these marketplaces. And then you bring the distribution and that’s what’s really continued the growth.

And again, if I look at Q4 there, we continue to be the industry switcher leader in smaller markets and rural areas and a lot of runway to your point about where we were coming from and the growth that we see. Certainly in the future, as you see more of our digital aspirations come to life that we’ve laid out at Capital Markets Day, smaller markets in rural areas is certainly a place where it can create efficiencies, but just as much in top 100 markets.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Yes. You guys added over 1,000,000 postpaid accounts last year across consumer and business. When we came out bullish on your stock late last year, we probably got the most pushback on our T Mobile recommendation. And a lot of it was because of concerns over the industry, which I know you already expressed your view on describing it as maturing. But what’s your answer to sort of the concern out there that well over 100% penetration with AT and T and Verizon getting better, cable obviously trying to fight back, other concerns like immigration?

What do you tell people about your ability to keep growing? But also, is there an industry assumption underneath that three year plan that you laid out last September?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. Of course, we look at scenarios around the industry, but I try not to predict the actual pinpoint industry level postpaid phone net additions guide for a number of reasons. There’s a lot of apples to oranges. You have to think about some of those categories like cable, you call that actually don’t disclose the postpaid phone number. It’s one number lumped in together with other connected devices in the postpaid space.

You’ve got other competitors maybe including other things in postpaid phone. So it’s not apples to apples. What I really think about is how do we continue to take these advantages that we have of the best value, the best network, the best experiences with these underpenetrated market segments we just talked about and continue to drive growth. And the most important element and what we look at is what’s happening with switchers. That can take away some of the noise of what’s in a postpaid phone number or not.

What’s happening with accounts? And that’s a place where, as you mentioned, we just delivered 1,100,000 postpaid net account additions for 2024, a tremendously strong indicator. And while postpaid phone nets at an industry level have kind of gone down since 2021, they’re still very healthy and growing. Generally switchers, the number of switchers has gone up. So kind of again, take away the noise of what you’re looking at there, focus in on what is happening with account switchers and then what we’re doing there from an ARPA perspective.

And we continue to be very confident in the numbers we put out and the guidance we put out and our ability to predict our own company switching and nets, that’s what we’re hyper focused on. And again, we have unique advantages that continue to have tailwinds for many years to come. Yes.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: We also have a track record

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: of delivering what’s going on. Well, it’s tremendously important for us as a management team to do what we say. We believe in a particularly a lot of the long investors and new investors, management trust has to be earned. And so yes, our track record is very strong there. Our philosophy hasn’t changed in how we approach guidance, which maybe gives you a little bit of confidence around what we just said with the highest ever beginning of the year postpaid phone net additions, but it’s tremendously important for us.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Maybe one more just and then we’ll shift to fixed wireless. So back to the three year plan and the service revenue growth outlook. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about account growth, ARPA growth, the drivers of the multi year service revenue growth guidance?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. It’s I mean, there’s a lot of elements to the service revenue growth. But when you’re thinking about postpaid, that all important high value postpaid category, it’s a function of both. That’s why we continue to aspire to be the switcher leader and the net account and the net postpaid phone leader in this industry from a volume perspective, while simultaneously growing ARPA. And we’ve done that very successfully.

You saw 2024 in Q4 results we issued, which was also an increase to Capital Markets Day. We said for 2025, we anticipate ARPA growth to now be 3%. And so to us, it’s that equation. And really when you look at what we’ve delivered, we think this is exactly the right way to approach it. Because when you look at the P and you look at the Q and how it comes together for us, whether you look at total service revenue at the company level, whether you look at postpaid service revenue, we’re delivering on both of those metrics at a rate that’s over two times our nearest competitor and much more than two times the next one down out of the three of us.

So it’s the formula that works, all fueled again by what I said around this best value, best network, best experience and the underpenetrated market segment. So that’s exactly how we’re going to focus on it going forward and that’s what yields outsized results.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Great. Let’s shift gears to fixed wireless. Not only a success story for T Mobile, but at least by our math, it was nearly 40% of your wireless service revenue growth last year. This is a big business and an important part of the growth story. How do you size the opportunity in terms of

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: longer term subscriber, market share, monetization, etcetera? Well, yes, it’s been a great contributor. And what a great way to smartly utilize fallow capacity and monetize it with the network that we’re building. We’ve delivered now as of the end of twenty twenty four, little over 6,000,000 subscribers. I think what we laid out at our Capital Markets Day is that we have a path to 12,000,000 subscribers by the end of twenty twenty eight, well on track there.

We’re very confident in that figure. And of course, that is a great contributor as well to ARPA, the relationships, stickiness as well as overall postpaid service revenue growth. So yes, we’re very bullish on the business. And you need to step back and look at what’s really developed there. Sometimes the question is, well, is that a durable product?

Well, look at one, the growth that the product has enjoyed. Two, if you just look since the beginning, which we didn’t launch this too long ago to the end of the year, the average speeds for fixed wireless and our customer base have increased threefold. Customer satisfaction is very high with this product and it’s simple. It comes with the T Mobile experience, which is why customers love it and why it’s a durable product.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Yes. You mentioned the fallow spectrum strategy, which you guys have been consistent on describing in that way. How do you think about growth in bandwidth consumption in this cohort? It’s a growing group of customers and then consumption per customer is growing. Is there any risk that you end up sort of running out of the phallus spectrum and if some application comes out, we’ve talked a lot about AI at this conference that really were to inflect consumption up.

Does that put any of your guidance at risk? Do you think about that at all?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. No, it’s probably important just to do a quick primer on what the fallow capacity model for us is, which is we take the entire country and we divide it into hex bins because hex bins sound cool. And they’re generally 165 meters, they’re smaller and dense urban environments. And we look at for each of those hex bins based on the capacity that we’ve created and based on our anticipation of continued share taking in the mobile space and based on how we anticipate continued data consumption increases in that mobile space. So it’s mobile first, that’s the highest value customer.

And by the way, we’ve been remarkably accurate in those predictions around data and data growth. You put all of that projected forward and say based on all of those criteria, which of these hex bins will you not fill the available capacity in based on mobile phone use, mobile phone growth? And that’s where we qualify and sell fixed wireless. And that’s why it’s we are protecting the mobile phone base and the mobile connectivity base at all costs. That gives us enough capacity.

Obviously, that capacity is more than 12,000,000 subscribers because you have to you’re only going to penetrate at a certain level. That’s how we get comfortable with this. And that’s why that’s why it’s so important to do it with this fallow capacity model because you’re protecting against exactly that.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Of course, yes. I think you guys market to about 70,000,000 to 80,000,000 households or have available from a fixed wireless point

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: of view. Can you talk a

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: little bit about how you manage your spectrum and the network to sort of provision to that level? And whether over the long term, you think you can expand or want to expand that further?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. Again, the way we do it is exactly the spallocapacity model I just described. And yes, while you can look at the households that we’ve laid out there, number supportable households is a subset of that number and then of course subscribers is a subset of supportable households. So it’s continuing to be very precise from a marketing perspective, even more precise over the coming years as we have better data, better digital marketing capabilities. And we should talk about our announcements this morning of Bliss and Vistar because that’s an exciting space for us as well.

But that’s how we manage it. And when you look at the customer base, you asked about usage from that perspective, but this continues to be it’s about two thirds from the top 100 markets. The majority of them come from cable. The majority of these customers are prime. They’re looking for a great product at a great value.

The majority of these are our own customers, but it’s also been a great way to introduce T Mobile to new customers and then cross sell them into the mobile later. So yes, it’s a fabulous product and very bullish.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Let’s talk about fiber, right? So T Fiber, we’re waiting for these JVs to close hopefully sooner rather than later. Can you just talk about the opportunity with T fiber? And I don’t know if you’re willing to talk about it, but how the go to market may contrast or compare to what we’ve been seeing from you in fixed wireless?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Well, I think it will be one. Obviously, there’s some aspects of go to market with fiber that are perhaps slightly different. You canvas the neighborhood as you’re going to build it, do all the smart things to generate excitement before you’re actually digging the ditch and tearing up people’s yards make them excited about it. But it’s also all of the factors that not only did we learn from the fixed broadband product, but also from the mobility side of the house. We’re very convinced with the broad customer relationships that we have.

Frankly, the demand we’ve seen for fixed broadband and because we do it in the spallow capacity model, we have a waitlist of over 1,000,000 customers that aren’t in the hex bins or we’ve already fulfilled that. And so there’s a lot of belief and why the thesis is, we’re going to be able to generate stronger returns than a pure financial investor because we have the mechanisms to acquire customers at a lower cost, service customers in the way that we do through waitlist, through the brand, through our existing relationships. And that’s what makes it so powerful for us.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Why do a JV structure? Why is that the right way to approach this from your perspective? And I think there are some provisions long term that maybe can start consolidating them. How do you think about those options longer term?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes, a couple of reasons. One, we wanted to maintain partnerships with the individuals that are great at this. And that’s both the management teams at MetroNet and Lumos, but also EQT and KKR who are fabulously experienced in the fiber space. So keep that team that is delivering on tremendous build intact. Secondly, make sure and by the way, they wanted to stay in.

So that’s part of it. They’re equally excited about what that company could be. The other is you can lever it in an appropriate level and continue to fund the bill that the paces that they’re going at while we take care of the consumer retail side of it. So that’s yes, there’s provisions longer term that would allow us at our option if we choose to, to consolidate them. But this is to us absolutely the right structure at this point.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: I believe that you guys are the exclusive retail partner for these JVs. Once you go to market with T Fiber, I think there’s other versions of these JVs without exclusivity for the retailer. Why does that make sense? Are there economics you’re either you’re giving up by being the exclusive distributor? Just talk about that thought process.

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. I mean, we have wholesale partners that are not JVs where we might not be exclusive, some we are. In this case, we are exclusive for the consumer FTTH side of it because we’re not giving up economics. Remember, we’re 50% owners in the InfraCo itself. So we share in those economics.

But it made a lot of sense so that we can bear the fruit in an exclusive way all of these brand assets, customer relationships, etcetera, to drive better penetration, faster penetration and lower acquisition and servicing

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: costs. Is there a scenario where you look to go meaningfully beyond the 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 homes that you guys have sketched out for us through these partners?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Well, I think what we said and we hold true to what we said at year end is we’re very happy with the hand that we have. Again, from the position that we have in wireless and our belief based on the actual fact pattern around convergence and that thesis in The U. S. So it’s a high bar. Of course, we’ll look at other opportunities, but it would probably have to be very similar to what these companies have bought.

We’ve been very diligent before we announce these. It has to be a mechanism for us to generate very attractive IRRs like we have been able to do with these two JVs. So we’ll continue to look, but I don’t see a need from a convergence perspective to go much bigger because again of how that played out.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Right, right. Okay. All right. Let’s talk about the business market and opportunity for you guys. A big focus area, particularly since the merger.

Can you talk a little bit about the size of that business today and sort of the growth opportunity that you guys see?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. Well, we don’t separately report it, but it is has been and continues to be on a fabulous growth trajectory. 2024 was not only the highest revenue year for B2B, but also the highest growth year from outperforming everybody else from a business PhoneNet’s perspective. And it’s not just one category. If you look at enterprise 2024 was their highest growth year.

SMB, their year was the highest growth year. Advanced network services under which we encompass all of the cool new technology leading features such as slicing, etcetera, they’re seeing a lot of momentum. And the latest one, of course, being what happened with T priority in the city of New York and how our unique capabilities and our couple year head start on this just took the preeminent first responder agency for whom FirstNet was built back in the day. And they looked at the capabilities of what today’s technology at T Mobile can deliver and selected us. So that’s another exciting avenue and growth.

And they’re on their way as we committed to a Capital Markets Day to double digit service revenue CAGR in the business space. So fabulous, they’re doing great work. It’s great momentum, very happy.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: In the enterprise space specifically, are there any kind of holes in the product or service portfolio that if you were to fill those really unlock and accelerate that particular segment?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Well, similarly to just this FirstNet example, it is continued leadership in terms of capabilities. Because years ago, T Mobile was the procurement stocking horse. That’s what we were for businesses. But with capabilities, you can go in and solve CIO’s challenges. That’s when they’ll bring along the postpaid phone business.

And of course, for example, in 2025, we’ll continue to deliver better self-service capabilities to be enterprise grade and more and more so and deliver what they expect, which continues to unlock new things. But fundamentally, it is we are solving CIO problems in business. That’s why we’re earning the corner office discussions and that’s why we’re earning the business. And that’s driven by the capability set that we have that others cannot bring to bear.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Okay. Let’s talk direct to device. You had the Super Bowl ad that at least from this audience was probably the most interesting. And we’ve got a lot of calls asking about your relationship with STARLINK and how those partnerships works.

Can you talk a little bit about how you two are working together to bring direct to device to consumers this year?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. Well, first off, it’s a long term exclusive relationship. And at this point in time, we’re now over 500 satellites in the air. And we partnered with SpaceX because obviously they have a unique differentiated capability to not only develop satellites, but also deliver payload into space. I mean, they’ve delivered more last year than everybody else combined.

And when I think about the next D2C satellite co, I believe they have around five satellites and we have now so 100 times the satellites. So it’s a very exciting moment because the proposition, especially in The U. S. Is those 500,000 square miles where there is no terrestrial coverage and the economics don’t make sense to bring terrestrial coverage. Can you supplement that with D2C?

And for us, the product begins with text thing and then later will bring more voice and data. And it’s just such an exciting thing, whether it’s peace of mind, whether it’s true lifesaving, which we saw in both the hurricanes, the L. A. Wildfires as we’d open this up and even within the beta itself now, we’ve seen it. So peace of mind or whether it’s for those people that just they go into those 500,000 square miles.

My brother and his family are avid kind of mountain climbers and they pay lots of money to have a GPS text thing. And he’s like, when can I get this, right? So to me, it’s just another way for T Mobile to demonstrate to customers that we have the best value, we connect you everywhere and stimulate not only switching, but an ability to continue to self select up the rate plans. Very fabulously excited about this.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: I’ll take the shot. Any chance you’d share with us sort of the unit economics for this relationship or how the costs work? Is it a wholesale fee or

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: a rate? Yes. Well, it’s definitely the arrangement is confidential on both sides of it. But again, obviously value accretive. And like I said, it’s just another differentiator for us.

So very excited, stay tuned. We’re in beta, broad based beta obviously and then the product commercially launches on July 1.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Yes, yes. Okay. I thought I’d take a shot. All right. Let’s talk about advertising.

Made some I guess some news this morning with a small acquisition Bliss. Talk about T Ads, which is not a small business for you guys. I’m guessing pretty high margin. What is the ad inventory that T Mobile brings to the market? And what are your long term ambitions

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: in this business? Well, first, yes, thank you. We made an announcement around the closing of BookBliss and Vistar and issued, by the way, some guidance increases there. So in addition to what we did at year end, we’re adding $250,000,000 of service revenue, $75,000,000 of EBITDA and $50,000,000 of free cash flow for 2025. Now because of the timing of that, obviously, that’s mainly beyond Q1, so it’s not a Q1 event, just a little bit in there.

But the ambition is to grow it much more significantly. And the reality of why we’re in the advertising space and why we believe in this is because, one, we are one of the largest advertisers in the country. We acutely understand the pain point that advertisers feel. And there’s a few categories I would put it into. One, especially with mobile ad IDs and cookies going away, it becomes more and more difficult outside of the walled gardens definitely to target appropriately.

So addressability, targetability. Second is there’s a lot of ecosystem that takes a lot of money out of advertising. We all know this, right? You put you as T Mobile or other big advertisers or small advertisers put a dollar in here. The actual working media spend is quite a bit lower.

So that creates an opportunity for us. We have in a very customer centric privacy compliant way data that can help address this, both from as mobile ad IDs and cookies go away. How do we serve to consumers and the benefit of consumers? You’re consumers right now and I bet you, you go into digital and you get ads and you say, that’s not me. Why in the world am I getting targeted with the sets?

So consumers are frustrated with the ads. We can benefit consumers with better addressability that helps advertisers. And Vistar as another element of this, when you think about out of home, out of home is growing and Vistar, which is digital out of home, is a growing subset within there. One of the challenges with digital out of home or out of home in particular is again addressability and measurement. And hence why the CPMs are low.

So not only with a deal like Vistar, which is a great business running on its own, can we generate with Bliss and Vistar synergies for our own internal advertising and being one of the largest advertisers? Again, we see their acute pain, but also establish a business with that data, with our acute knowledge to make addressability better, to make consumers’ lives better

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: in terms of this and also to make money. So if we were to look at your advertising revenues, is it both selling T Mobile’s own inventory, whether it’s in store or digital and also third parties? Is you guys going to get into the services?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: It’s going to be both. I mean, yes, we have a lot of inventory, whether it’s our own retail media network in our stores, whether it’s we have over 70,000 screens and rideshare devices that we own. There’s, of course, T Ads. And but just the amount of consumer interaction we have on Tea Life, sorry, not Tea Ads, Tea Life, everything is tea. Even my socks are tea and golf.

But as year end, as we said, we had over 50,000,000 downloads on the Tea Life app, which is not only the central vehicle to our digitalization goals, but enables better consumer experiences, personalized experiences, including in the advertising space. So yes, there’s a lot of our owned media that we can monetize and we’ve been doing this for a while and have seen the benefit. There’s third party inventory that we can help with and it’s all predicated on addressability. So I’m very excited about the business.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: That’s great, Peter. Maybe just to wrap up, we’ll talk about free cash flow and capital allocation. You guys laid out a pretty clear framework last September. But talk about how you think about allocating that marginal dollar between the menu that you’ve laid out, buybacks, acquisitions, deleveraging, other investments. So how do you guys prioritize and make those decisions on a real time basis?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: Yes. It always starts to us with the umbrella of dynamically where do we want leverage to be. And we laid out 2.5. We’re still confident in 2.5%. So it starts with what do you want to do from a leverage perspective.

And then it goes into what’s the highest value creation in terms of investing further into the core business? Are there opportunities there to address it? Whether it’s smart M and A like you’ve seen us play and we have a lot of great highly value accretive M and A in 2025 that we anticipate closing. U. S.

Cellular, the JVs, we just saw Vistar and Bliss close today. So that’s another mechanism. And then of course, there’s if you have no capability there and you feel confident from a leverage and you feel confident from a growth perspective as we laid out, then there’s return to shareholders. And there’s a lot of factors that go into that in terms of what’s the dividend to share buyback mix, where’s the share price sitting, but we’re very confident in what would be laid out there.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Great. Well, Peter, anything you’d like to wrap up with as we hit the zero on the clock?

Peter Asvoldic, EVP and CFO, T Mobile: No. I mean, thank you for the time. It continues to be, for us, a very exciting time here. Some of you have seen Srini here as joining us as COO to help us bring that tremendous expertise around digitalization during this transformative time with a customer centric lens. And we’re going to continue to take these structural advantages we have best value, best network, best experience, take the underpenetrated market segments and continue to deliver what we said and have a great growth runway.

So very excited.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer, Morgan Stanley: Great. Well, thank you for coming. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody.

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