Gold prices edge higher on raised Fed rate cut hopes
On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Uniti Group (NASDAQ:UNIT) participated in the Nareit REITweek: 2025 Investor Conference. The company’s leadership discussed significant growth opportunities, particularly in the hyperscaler market, and addressed challenges related to a merger and structural changes. While optimism prevailed, concerns about stock performance and technical hurdles were also acknowledged.
Key Takeaways
- Hyperscaler market projected to grow from $15-20 billion to $40-50 billion in coming years.
- Transition from REIT to C-Corp introduces both opportunities and challenges.
- Merger with Windstream expected to create synergies, particularly in hyperscaler deals.
- Focus on tier-two and tier-three markets due to power constraints in larger cities.
- Optimistic outlook despite current stock price concerns linked to merger and de-REITing.
Financial Results
- Hyperscaler Total Addressable Market (TAM) evolved from minimal to $15-20 billion, with expectations to reach $40-50 billion.
- Wireless carrier spending remains at $30 billion historically.
- Initial yield on greenfield builds around 7%; current yields on hyperscaler deals nearing 20%.
- Kinetic build cost approximately $650 per home, significantly lower than the industry average.
- Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) transaction interest rate below 6.5%, compared to 10.5% for existing secured debt.
Operational Updates
- Strategic focus on tier-two and tier-three markets to mitigate power grid constraints.
- Kinetic aims to pass 3.5 million homes by 2029, with 2 million homes to have fiber by year-end.
- Integration of Windstream’s wholesale fiber business and focus on anchor customer model.
- Current network includes 5 million connected endpoints.
Future Outlook
- Anticipated growth in wireless segment and large enterprises as future customer segments.
- Continued ARPU growth for Kinetic and potential for further ABS capacity.
- Expectation of increased demand for fiber due to AI advancements.
- Post-merger synergies with Windstream anticipated to enhance hyperscaler deals.
Q&A Highlights
- Stock price concerns linked to merger, de-REITing process, and technical overhangs.
- Confidence in the intrinsic value of the business despite market not fully recognizing it yet.
- Dilution concerns addressed, with optimism for post-merger performance.
Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed account of the conference call.
Full transcript - Nareit REITweek: 2025 Investor Conference:
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Alright. Let’s get started. Good morning. Welcome to the Wednesday morning session of NAREIT REIT week twenty twenty five.
My name is Greg Williams. I cover cable, wireless and telco as well as fiber at TD Cowen. I’m joined in this session by the President and CEO of Unity, Kenny Gunderman. Kenny, thanks for joining us.
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Greg, good morning. It’s good to be here.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Maybe we could just start with finishing off the quarter in bookings. With all the Gen AI hype, there might have been some big expectations on big hyperscaler deals. You did a million in bookings a few quarters in the past, though you have informed us in the past that there’s lumpiness in these deals. Help us with what the bookings could look like in the foreseeable future. Will we see million quarter bookings again and help us with this the hyperscaler environment, know, whether it’s going to training data centers like what you’re basically selling?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Sure. And for I’m I’m mindful that we’re at NAREIT and usually there’s a few folks in the room who don’t know the Unity story as well as others. We’re one of the largest independent fiber providers in the country, so almost 200,000 route miles of fiber around the country. Very uniquely positioned to benefit from both the fiber to the home theme, which I’m sure Greg will get to in a minute, and the hyperscaler theme. So I’m always interested to see where the first question comes from, whether it’s fiber to the home or hyperscalers.
And so glad to dig into that one first, Greg. We had a really strong quarter, strong demand, strong bookings, but I totally understand the question. The hyperscaler demand has really come from a very small de minimis number just a couple of years ago to now a TAM in our fiber space of almost $20,000,000,000 15 billion to $20,000,000,000 So almost overnight in twelve, twenty four months, it’s evolved into a very large TAM. And a few years ago we were selling six to 12 strands of fiber to the hyperscalers and it was a de minimis part of our business. Today we’re selling thirty, forty, 50 times that amount of fiber to hyperscalers in single deals and they’re coming back and buying more on top of that.
So the strand count type of deals that we’re talking about here are deals that we haven’t seen in the are types of deals we haven’t seen in the fiber industry. So that’s a huge increase. And to that point, Greg, it’s right to question when do you start to see those that those numbers in the bookings numbers for example or in or in the other vanity metrics that I like to call them revenue and EBITDA. And I’ve cautioned people not to expect to see those necessarily because a, they are lumpy and b, they’re the types of deals that don’t necessarily run through bookings in a traditional sense because in addition to dramatic increases in strand counts, we’re also building greenfield more as opposed to selling lit fiber or existing capacity. We’re also selling more long haul as opposed to metro.
And so these deals in some cases are structured in a way that are different than traditional deals. So for example, for us at Unity, the rest of this year, we have two really sizable hyperscaler deals that are going to hit probably in the fourth quarter and they never hit bookings. These two of the biggest deals we’ve done with hyperscalers, they never hit bookings over the past twelve, twenty four months, but they’ll hit revenue and EBITDA in the fourth quarter of this year. And so when we think about guidance for the year, we’re right in line with guidance as we said at our last quarterly call, but analyst estimates are actually low for the second quarter because our year is back end loaded because these really large mega hyperscaler deals that never made their way through bookings because they’re structured in a unique fashion. But make no mistake with that said, the demand from the hyperscalers has been terrific and we think that $15,000,000,000 to $20,000,000,000 that I just mentioned is growing to 40,000,000,000 to $50,000,000,000 in the next several years.
And when you consider that the wireless carriers historically have been one of our largest customer bases. They spend as a group roughly $30,000,000,000 and that’s across the board, not just in fiber. So that just gives you a point of reference about how big of a customer opportunity that is for fiber companies like Uniti on a go forward basis. So we’re very excited about it and they’re terrific customers. They’re buying substantial amounts of fiber to build data centers that enable AI learning as Greg mentioned and ultimately that will enable AI inference, which Greg also mentioned.
And we’ve said, and Greg, I think you agree with this, but the the inference phase of AI is gonna be more exciting to to us at Unity than than the learning phase. And that’s when you’ll start to see the demand and the opportunity flow through bookings and revenue and EBITDA in a more traditional sense with recurring revenue.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Got it. And thanks for the intro to the company too. I always know, has a twin engines, right? It’s a commercial fiber and it’s the fiber to the home both going through nice up cycles.
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: I like that. I’ll use But
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: back on the Gen AI demand, were just at our conference a few days ago and so at the risk of repeating some of it, you mentioned that leasing is I’m sorry, the funnel has 20% of the funnel is AI related. Do you expect that to grow and take advantage of that demand or have lots of other business, wireless, enterprise cloud on ramping. So do you keep it intentionally at 20% to stay diversified or just are you just going after anything?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: So both, we’re a wholesale fiber And we like that model because our customer segments range from the hyperscalers like we talked about to the wireless carriers who provide mobile broadband and also fixed wireless and the satellite companies, the fiber to the home providers who are building fiber to the home, but need backhaul for that traffic to get back to the core international ISPs, large enterprises, large healthcare campuses, government agencies, etc. So we have very wide array of customer segments. And as a result, no single customer segment represents actually more than 10% of our revenue or EBITDA. And to Greg’s point, not one customer segment represents more than 20% of our sales funnel.
And that’s not necessarily intentional. We don’t try to get down to the precise percentage, but it just happens to work out that way because we focus on a diverse set of customers. And the demand across all customer segments is generally growing. It may ebb and flow. Had Greg, as you know, last year the wireless carrier spending was down relative to other segments, but we never noticed that at Uniti because other customer segments made up the difference and that’s the beauty of a diversified business.
So ultimately when you look at the hyperscalers, the important thing to note is not necessarily that it’s 20% of the funnel, it’s the fact that it came from virtually zero to 20% of a very large multi billion dollar funnel within a very short period of time. And when you consider that some of the transactions and opportunities that we have with hyperscalers are not unique and don’t get reflected in bookings in the traditional sense like I said, if you actually reflected those types of deals in the funnel, that 20% number would be a lot higher. And so we don’t look at it that way in the funnel, but if you did look at it that way, be substantially higher. And I think I said this last week, Greg, and if not, I’ll say it here, but the funnel of opportunities for the hyperscalers for us is as good as it’s ever been. And when I say that, I don’t just mean the unity funnel.
I mean looking at the opportunity that Windstream has with hyperscalers in their wholesale business, because we’re about to merge with Windstream that deal is closing soon. And Windstream has a large wholesale fiber business themselves and there’s a lot of synergies in bringing those two companies together. And they also have a large focus on the hyperscalers and there’s some really large transactions that we’re working on together with Windstream already with hyperscalers.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Got it. And the deal construct and the yields on these hyperscale deals, have they changed? We spoke I think this time last year, we spoke about really high upfront or NRC costs or fees going to you. Yields could be north of the typical 5% to 10% range. Has that evolved or is it sort of the same construct?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: It’s definitely the same construct and it’s evolved a little bit and I would say it’s evolved in a favorable way. So as a wholesale fiber provider, we’re a shared infrastructure provider. So we build fiber and we usually have an anchor customer when we build that fiber. We don’t build fiber for demand on the come, we always build it with an anchor and we target a 5% to 10% initial yield on any capital that goes into the ground. So on day one, we’ve got an initial yield that’s usually a 10 to 20 contract locked in.
And then we have a plan to sell the second, third, fifth, tenth customer, etcetera on top of that fiber and we call that lease up. And our plan is to have a lease up strategy where we get to 10% plus yields within a very short period of time. And for those of you who follow us, you know we track this each quarter and show investors that our initial blended anchor yield is around 7% on greenfield builds and our blended all in yield is close to 30%. So we’ve been really executing well on that anchor lease up strategy. And so Greg is rightfully asking the question, well, do the hyperscalers fit into that model?
And we approach hyperscalers as anchor customers generally. Now they sometimes lease up existing fiber. They sometimes buy waves. They sometimes buy fiber in the traditional sense. But the big deals that we’re working on with them are anchor deals where we’re largely building a lot of new fiber and those yields blended with lease up that we’ve already started to see on those opportunities are already approaching 20%.
So we’re well ahead of what we would say is our traditional model. So we’re not only executing on the anchor builds for the hyperscalers, but we’re also really executing on the lease up of those networks and again approaching nearly 20% yields.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. It’s good to hear because there’s a concern out there that you know the fiber that’s connecting to training data centers is kind of built in the middle of nowhere because the training data centers need a ton of power and where can you get power in remote areas. So if you’re building out in the middle of nowhere, are you passing the schools, the universities and the business campuses, hospitals to get So I guess you’re choosing deals that have the good lease up opportunities then?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, absolutely. And you’re touching on another theme that’s important to Unity. So Unity, we’ve got a nationwide network, but we focus on tier two and tier three markets. We focus on the NFL cities. We like to go to the smaller markets.
And one of the reasons I think we’re benefiting, I would say in a disproportionate fashion with the hyperscalers is for the reason that Greg just mentioned, the power grids in places like New York City and Virginia and Chicago and other places are stressed because they’re just bigger markets. And so in order to service these mega data center campuses, they require substantial amounts of power, heating and cooling, and using already stressed power grids is a challenge. So they’re looking for areas that are in rural America or Suburban America, which happens to be in some cases in or near a lot of our markets. And so we’re building network in or near our markets that are additive to our network. Having said that, there are also some locations that they’re building that are way the heck out in the middle of nowhere.
And we’re not building there because we don’t view that as a shared infrastructure model where there’s lease up potential. But there’s plenty of lease up potential in the areas that we are building for the hyperscalers.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: And is it still predominantly training rather than the inference that we spoke earlier? Like the two sizable deals that will hit in the fourth quarter, are those sort of training? And do you see some of your RFPs? I think last week you spoke some of it’s nebulous, some training, some inference. I guess the next question then is, when do we move to that eightytwenty towards inference do you think?
I think two years, three years?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah. So Greg, we don’t know for sure is the short answer. But as usual, I’ll give a longer one, which is we think it’s largely training today. And part of the reason we know that is because the training data centers tend to get built in the more remote areas because latency is less important for training than it is for inference. So that is where majority of the data centers are being built that we’re connecting to today.
And so I think it’s fair for us to call that training. With that said, we believe inference is probably gonna be here sooner than we thought because I listened to all the hyperscalers and what they say publicly including Nvidia which is a really important part of the supply chain here. And last week they had earnings and they were talking about how the demand and the procurement of inference chips is substantially higher than expected. And so they’re already seeing the, I think the inflection point in their business, which means it won’t be long before we’ll see it in hours. And so as a result, we’ll start seeing more edge data centers being built by the hyperscalers because that’s where the data centers need to be closer to this end user so that latency is substantially better.
And in addition to that, and what’s probably most exciting to us is when the inference phase hits, we won’t just be pointing to data centers from the hyperscalers. We’ll really be looking at just increased demand across the board from our customers who will be using AI, whether it’s all of us as individuals using ChatGBT or Grok on our mobile devices or healthcare campuses using it or government agencies using it or large enterprises using it. And that’s when I think Greg will probably stop even talking about AI. I think it’ll be such a foundational, one of those foundational elements of broadband growth that we see that drives overall demand. And it will be infused really I think in virtually every work stream.
And I think that’s a really exciting time for both the fiber industry and the data center industry for that matter.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: And you’re short of answering my next question, but can you help the audience in the room and explain why inference would be more exciting for you? Is it just the demand size? Is it the margins, the CapEx intensity?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, it’s really all of the above because I think when inference so to be clear, inference means you’re using AI. You in this room are using it and various institutions are using it, which means when you do a chat GPT search that you expect a really quick response on that. And when an enterprise uses AI, they need a really quick response in order for that to happen. All of that demand is going across either starting with a wireless connection, but definitely backhauling the fiber or it just goes immediately to a fiber connection if it’s fiber into the home. So it’s driving a substantial increase we think in demand for fiber.
And you’re broadly increasing the number of customers who need to buy large bandwidth pipes into their homes, into their buildings, into their upgrading wireless towers, upgrading small cells, all those things needed to drive incremental demand. And ultimately to your point about capital intensity and margins, we do think a lot of that will be lease up, right? So the networks that we already have in place at Unity, and again, we’ve got a close to 200,000 route mile network around the country, but we also have close to 5,000,000 connected endpoints in the network, including homes, buildings, wireless towers and small cells. And that’s when those connected endpoints are going to be essentially used as on ramps to drive traffic onto that network. So I think a lot of the inference phase should come at a more capital it should come in the form of lease up, which should come at better capital intensity and higher margins.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Can we talk about, the fiber demand that’s not AI, whether it’s cloud on ramping, enterprise connectivity, wireless, what are some of the other verticals that are more exciting and just speak to the demand backdrop for those?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Sure. And I love to talk about hyperscalers because that’s an area that’s really attractive and sexy to investors now. But the reality is last year and actually including this year, our biggest customer segment has not been the hyperscalers, it’s been the fiber to the home providers. So this is another theme that I’m sure Greg’s going to get to, but there’s a lot of capital that’s being spent to build fiber to the home by Verizon and AT and T and T Mobile and others. And ultimately building fiber to the home is only part of the story.
You’ve got to build backhaul. You’ve got to have metro fiber and you have to have long haul fiber to connect that fiber back to the internet or to the core. And that’s where Unity comes in. So a lot of the people who are building that fiber to the home are not actually building the backhaul. They’re using providers like Unity for that backhaul.
And as a result, past couple of years, they’ve been a terrific customer segment for us with the demand that’s growing at the edge of their networks, they’re procuring demand from our fiber from us. So terrific customer segment, not nearly as sexy, but very attractive. Wireless was the wireless carriers were down last year as a customer segment, but we foreshadowed that we think this year that there would be growth in wireless and we’re really seeing that. Early indications are that our original estimates of the growth in the wireless segment are probably conservative. So we’re probably going to exceed growth, our expected growth in the wireless segment.
And that’s just the wireless carriers coming back and building more towers or in some starting to build a little more small cells. And again, anytime you build a wireless tower or a small cell today, you need a fiber connection. And so I always say, can’t have wireless unless you have fiber. So we’re seeing some of that. So ultimately, Greg, those are two customer segments that we’ve been excited about this year.
I do think over the next several years, we’re going to start to see large enterprises become a bigger customer segment for Unity. So today, our large enterprises are not a huge focus of ours, but it will be increasingly because we think they’re going to be important users of inference going forward and just general broadband growth.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Got it, it’s helpful. I wanted to shift gears to Kinetic real quickly. Last week you spoke about you had real conviction in the 3,500,000 homes, if not more now. Can you talk about how we should think about the cost to build and upgrade those homes at Kinetic? Windstream is known for lower density markets, more rural.
One would have thought the cost per home pass would be well north of your 600 to $700 range. And just speak to the why it could be so much lower than others and just the cost for Home Pass in general?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yes. So Kinetic today services close to 4,500,000 total homes and today about 45% of those have fiber built to them. And by the end of this year, we’ll have about 2,000,000 homes built with fiber, of the 4.5. And we have said publicly that we’re really going to accelerate that bill. So we are big believers in fiber of the home, big believers in that as the superior product relative to cable, relative to fixed wireless, relative to satellite, anything else that’s out there, fiber is a superior product.
And we believe that by getting to 3,500,000 homes by 2029 and covering roughly 80% of the footprint, that’s a terrific business model for us. And I’ve said, we’re not going to stop there, but that’s the goal that we’ve set out publicly and feel great about the returns on that number. And a big input to that model is the build cost. So how much does it cost to build to get to that home? And today, Kinetic is building at roughly $6.50 per home.
And as Greg knows, a lot of you know, most people are spending well north of a thousand dollars per home to build. And so we get the question a lot, why is Kinetic able to build at a lower cost? There’s really multiple reasons. One is these are smaller markets. And so building along a street in Greenbrier, Arkansas is just cheaper than it is in New York City.
We see that in our Uniti Fiber model, but also over the past ten years, Kinetic has built a substantial amount of fiber already building the backhaul, building the Metro fiber. So as I was talking about earlier, the fiber of the home carriers are in a lot of cases not building that for themselves, but over the past ten years, Kinetic has built a lot of that and that’s the network that Unity owns today. And so we’re already saving 10% to 20% on the build cost because that investment’s already been made. And thirdly, Kinetic builds a lot of their homes internal with an internal sales In
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: house team.
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: With an in house team, that saves another 10 to 20%. And on a go forward basis, Greg, that $6.50 is probably going to increase because as we accelerate the build, we are going to be outsourcing more of that build just to the time value of money to capture that demand. We’re going to need some outsourced help. So that six fifty is going to increase, but we still think it’ll stay north or sorry, south of a thousand over the next number of years. And ultimately, that’s a huge input.
ARPU is an important input. Right now Kinetic has higher ARPU than most in the space. We think there is some pricing power in these smaller markets and ARPU has been growing nicely 1%, two % a year and we expect that to continue as well. So when we put all that together, it’s a terrific model. The returns have been great and we expect that to continue over the coming years.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Got it. So cost per home pass might go up, but still south of $1,000 because you’re going to be outsourcing more of it. And the reason you’re outsourcing, you don’t have the engine to go out and accelerate. But again, you ran the NPV on these things and it’s better to do so. Capture that.
You mentioned ARPU, it is higher. And you mentioned you have pricing power in your markets. Is there a fear of vulnerability if lower priced fixed wireless comes into those neighborhoods and ARPU goes the other way?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yes, yes and no. So fixed wireless, the demand for fixed wireless over the past several years has been better than expected in the industry. I think even if you ask the wireless carriers, they’ve probably outperformed what they expected. And it’s a good product, right? It’s very easy to turn it up.
It’s convenient, it’s affordable, it’s somewhat reliable and it has decent speeds, 100 meg speeds, which when you compare that to cable and you compare that to DSL, that’s favorable comparison across the board today. But, and so as a result, Kinetic and other fiber to the home providers, cable providers have definitely lost share to fixed wireless. By the way, as a wholesale fiber provider, we’ve also benefited from that fixed wireless demand because that means our wireless customers are buying more backhaul to service that. So we’re sort of hedged a little bit. But on a go forward basis, I actually think Greg that the fixed wireless losses that we’ve seen over the years are going to be an opportunity for us to take back subscribers because as we all start using more AI on our handsets, we all start using more bandwidth hungry applications, you’re going to need more than 100 meg speeds in your home.
And at that point, those subscribers are going to be looking for, I think in a lot of cases, new home, they’re going to be looking for a fixed broadband solution and we’re going to be there with fiber in order to bring those consumers back. And so the 50 to 60 per month that fixed wireless is that you’re paying today for fixed wireless. I think in a few years, that’s going to be still affordable relative to fiber, but the speeds and reliability of fiber are going to outweigh cost savings. And by the way, think that’s one of the reasons the wireless carriers are some of the biggest investors in fiber in the home today. I think they see that same theme coming.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: You have the convergence.
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: I do want talk about convergence if we have time. But before that, I just want to talk about financing these builds and then I’ll turn it to the audience. There’s concerns of how are you going to finance these 3,500,000 builds. ABS, SFX Securities has been a newer subject in the commercial fiber and fiber to the home world. You successfully raised ABS in the past.
That sounds like something you can be doing in the future. Help us with the ABS capacity you have now, where it can go and how would you use it?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, great question. The ABS market has been sort of the gold standard in shared infrastructure communications over the past ten, twenty years. The tower companies have been users of that, the data center businesses, and now fiber companies are fiber to the home providers and commercial fiber companies, wholesale fiber companies. We did our first ABS at the beginning of last year, Zayo and other large fiber providers done an ABS, a number of fiber to home providers have. And we at Uniti have said that in the near term, we think there’s another billion dollars of ABS capacity that we have.
We also Greg, don’t we’ve said it a little bit, but we actually think the real capacity there is three to four times that billion dollar number.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: 3 to $4,000,000,000 of capacity.
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: 3 to $4,000,000,000 of capacity in the
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: Securitizing the commercial side or fiber to the home side?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Both. So both the fiber to the home and the commercial side. That well exceeds how much we need to spend to build to get to those 3,500,000 homes. So we have more than enough capacity in the ABS market to fund that build. But I’m not suggesting that we’re going to use ABS to fund the entire build.
I think that’s a great arrow in our quiver. We anticipate having a healthy mix of both high yield and ABS in our capital structure on a go forward basis. But ABS is going to be a terrific tool. And when you consider that we have some expensive debt in our capital structure, there were we had to raise debt at times that were in volatile times in the past. So for example, we have 10.5% secured debt in our capital structure.
The ABS transaction that we did a number of months ago was it’s less than 6.5%. So there’s
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: a Huge refi opportunity.
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Huge refi opportunity and ABS will be a good part
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: of that. In short order, right, in the fall that some of that’s callable?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Absolutely. Yeah.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: And is there any questions in the audience? I’m sure you’re not happy with your stock price. What is the market not getting right or what are the levers you’re pulling to or maybe? I’ll just repeat the question for the webcast. In the audience, they’re asking about your stock price.
Investors clearly aren’t happy. So levers can you pull and what’s the market getting wrong here?
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, great question. And I think I don’t think the market is necessarily getting our story wrong. I think the market is not really paying attention yet. Think that’s a big part of it because for those of you who know our story, we’re on the verge of merging with Windstream and Windstream has been a private company for the past really six years if you include some really virtually for the past six years. So the equity market is not as knowledgeable of that business.
And that’s going to represent three quarters of the business on a go forward basis. So there’s an asymmetrical information out there on Windstream. Secondly, we’re de reading at the corporate level. We are going from a REIT to a C Corp. And so there’s a transition in the shareholder base as a result of that.
And there’s also some technical elements related to the merger that are going to impact the stock at closing. And so we hear from investors directly that there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the story. There’s a lot of excitement for the story, but there’s also some concern about the technical overhangs that exist. And the good thing about that is a lot of that, if not all of it gets washed away once we get to closing and beyond. And so as a large shareholder myself, I don’t like to see where the stock is, but I’m not deterred or I haven’t lost any enthusiasm or excitement for the story.
I think we’re just in a period of time where there’s some technical overhang and we’re going to work through it. But the fundamental intrinsic value of the business is there.
Greg Williams, Analyst, TD Cowen: And it’s tough to get the bid support with the dilution that’s coming up when you close the deal, right? Who wants to necessarily buy in front of that? But I guess the answer is you’ll be a much larger company too. So that’s sort of an offset. Absolutely.
Well, with that we are just about out of time. So Kenny, you very much.
Kenny Gunderman, President and CEO, Unity: Great. Thank you, Greg. Thank you all.
This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.