Uniti Group at TD Cowen Conference: Strategic Insights Amid Market Changes

On Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Uniti Group (NASDAQ:UNIT) participated in TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The discussion, led by CEO Kenny Gunderin, provided insights into the company’s strategic direction, addressing both challenges and opportunities. Despite a recent dip in stock prices, attributed to technical noise around the Windstream merger, the company emphasized strong business fundamentals and growth prospects in the fiber industry.

Key Takeaways

• Uniti Group’s stock dip post-earnings is linked to technical factors surrounding the Windstream merger.
• The total addressable market for hyperscalers in the fiber industry is expected to grow from $15 billion to $50 billion in the coming years.
• Generative AI continues to drive demand, with a robust funnel of opportunities and no observed pullback.
• The Windstream merger is expected to transform Kinetic into a fiber-to-the-home business, with plans to reach 3.5 million homes by 2029.
• M&A remains a key focus, with potential for bolt-on acquisitions and joint ventures.

Financial Results

• Stock Performance:

- Shares declined post-earnings due to technical noise, including concerns about misguidance and dilution.

• Hyperscaler TAM:

- Currently estimated at $15 billion, with projections to reach $50 billion.

• Revenue and EBITDA:

- Hyperscalers contribute less than 5% to revenue and EBITDA.

• Deal Yields:

- Current hyperscaler deals approach 20% blended yields, compared to traditional deals nearing 30%.

Operational Updates

• Hyperscaler Demand:

- No decline in demand; the opportunity funnel is expanding.

• Generative AI Deals:

- The number of deals in the funnel has increased significantly, now representing about 20% of the funnel.

• Service Delivery:

- No issues in meeting demand for labor, supply, or equipment.

• Kinetic Build:

- Targeting fiber coverage for 3.5 million homes by 2029.

Future Outlook

• Generative AI:

- Anticipates a shift to the inference phase, boosting bookings and recurring revenue.

• Wireless Growth:

- Expects growth in 2025 over 2024.

• M&A:

- Open to acquisitions and joint ventures, with Kinetic expected to play a role in fiber consolidation.

• Fiber Coverage:

- Aims for 80-85% fiber coverage in the Kinetic footprint.

Q&A Highlights

• Hyperscaler Spend:

- Fiber spend is minor compared to power and data center expenditures.

• AI Integration:

- Plans to automate 80% of costing and pricing with AI.

• Copper Decommissioning:

- Opportunity to decommission uneconomical copper, not included in cost synergies.

• Crown Castle Sale:

- Valuation differences highlight focus areas, with small cells valued at a higher multiple.

In conclusion, Uniti Group’s strategic focus on fiber expansion and AI integration positions it for potential growth despite recent market fluctuations. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025:

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Let’s get started. Good morning. Welcome to day one of TD Cowen’s fifty third annual TMT conference. My name is Greg Williams. I cover cable, wireless and telco here at TD Cowen.

I’m joined for this session by Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO of Unity. So, Kenny, thanks for joining us.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: It’s a pleasure to be here. Greg, thanks for having us as always.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Sure. Wanted to start with, you know, your stock price. On earnings day, shares were down on what I thought was an otherwise decent print and so did a lot of the investors we spoke to. You know, we wrote that it was possibly the optics of missing guidance, including mine, because we had the Windstream numbers in there. And your numbers, at least optically, don’t show that.

And there could have been some algo driven selling, but have you heard any updates to this theory or any other theories? You know, the 13S were published and we didn’t see anything glaring.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, thanks for the question, Greg. We’ve heard lots of theories. I think the underlying issue candidly is a symptom of one of our biggest challenges right now, but also one of our biggest opportunities for investors. And what I mean by that is, there’s just a lot of technical noise around our stock right now. And it could be the perceived misguidance when that obviously wasn’t true.

We had a strong quarter, strong demand. We reiterated guidance for the company. We reiterated guidance for the combined company and we think the trends in the underlying business are very, very strong. So that wasn’t an issue. We’ve heard theories about algo trading.

We’ve heard theories about dilution when the deal closes. We’ve heard theories about de reading and transitioning to C Corp. And candidly, I think all of those are probably true on some level. And I think on top of all of that Windstream, the business that we’re merging with is private. And so there’s asymmetrical information, right, with the marketplace.

The good thing about that and look, as a large shareholder, I hate to see that. But on the other hand, the good thing about that is it’s all technical. And I do think at closing and not long after closing, many of those issues will resolve themselves and we’ll get back to focusing on the fundamentals which for me is what we focus on every day. And the fundamentals of the business couldn’t be stronger, not just the performance of the business, but also the overarching themes that are happening in the industry, whether it be generative AI demand, hyperscaler demand, the convergence themes around fiber to the home, all of those things are really pushing the business forward in an exciting way.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Right. You mentioned one of the potential technical noise issues would be the dilution that’s coming up. So, the deal actually transacts, you know, shareholders would get like a point six to one dilution. So, the theory is there might not be bid support. Like, why buy the stock now?

Wait till after the deal? But then, of course, you’d be part of a much larger company, much larger EV.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, that’s right. I think from a fundamental point of view that should be a non issue. But I also think because there’s some noise related to that, because there’s some noise related to the de reading and REIT funds that are required to sell and some of the other issues that you mentioned, there could be a view, let’s just wait for closing, let all of that wash its way through the stock and then come in. We’ve had terrific engagement with both the bond market and the equity market over the past number of months And our perception is that people are doing their work and they’re digging into the fundamentals. And yeah, there could be some folks who are sitting on the sidelines waiting for closing.

It’s hard to say. We don’t have perfect information on that. But when we do our best to try to surmise what’s going on, that’s our perception.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: I wanted to switch gears and actually talk about the business, bookings and the bookings cadence.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Thank

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: you. One source of potential disappointment could have just been with all that Gen AI hype, perhaps there’s an expectation of these big hyperscale deals that would just keep coming. Though you’ve informed us multiple times, there’s going to be lumpiness in these deals. Can we see million dollar plus quarters, or is that sort of behind us? There’s some thought that there’s hyperscaler pullback.

They might have plans for moving on to inference, so maybe the training’s sort of done. So help us with all of that. I mean, what are you seeing? Is it still lumpy? And is there still a lot of fervor in the training connectivity?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, so short version, we have not seen a pullback at all. In fact, the opposite. We’ve got a terrific funnel of opportunities and I’ll come back to that in a second. So that’s the short version. Longer version, I’ve said that you should expect lumpy bookings but I’ve also said that you shouldn’t necessarily expect to see these learning deals flow through the vanity metrics revenue, EBITDA and bookings necessarily.

Because the nature of those deals don’t impact revenue and EBITDA immediately. They don’t impact necessarily bookings given the nature of those deals. And I’ll come back to that in a second too. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a terrific opportunity and a terrific amount of demand that’s growing. So for example, a couple of years ago, the TAM around hyperscalers in the fiber industry was de minimis.

Now, we estimate the TAM to be $15,000,000,000 so in a very short period of time, a year, year and a half, two years, you’ve gone from de minimis to $15,000,000,000 And we also estimated that over the next several years, we think that TAM is going be close to $50,000,000,000 And Greg, you know when you compare that $50,000,000,000 the wireless carriers today on a collective basis spend 30,000,000,000 of CapEx. So that just point of reference, that is a tremendous amount of growth that’s ahead of us. And so we’re in the very early stages of it. And when you look at the types of deals that we were doing a couple years ago with the hyperscalers, we were selling six strands, 12 strands, maybe doing some waves deals. Today we’re selling fiber that’s 30 times that amount, 40 times, 50 times that amount.

And they’re coming back and buying more fiber on top of those original deals. So just massive amounts of capacity that’s being bought. And again, lot of those types of deals don’t show up in a big way on bookings and they don’t show up in a big way on revenue and EBITDA today. So today, hyperscalers represent probably less than 5% of our revenue and EBITDA. But on a go forward basis, that’s going to really change because when these deals start to when we start to see the economic benefits of these deals, like for example, you’ll continue to see capital intensity be lower because NRCs on those deals are higher as you know.

And we believe the yields that we’re going to be able to get on these deals are going to be terrific after lease up. We started to give some data on that already. So over time, and this kind of gets into your inference question, Greg, but over time as we move away from more of these bespoke, highly structured type learning deals and into more of the inference phase of AI, you’re really then going to start to see a consistent uptick in bookings and a consistent uptick in recurring revenue and EBITDA from an MRR perspective. All that to say million dollar bookings quarters are definitely not off the table. Know, we used to get asked about 800,000 bookings quarters and that’s become sort of the norm.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Very greedy.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: And that’s okay. We’re the same way. We love to see bookings growth. But I also remind folks, we don’t need bookings growth to show mid single digit top line growth. We need steady bookings and very, very low churn and we have very, very low churn.

So, you that’s one of the benefits of our business that I don’t think the market really focuses on. We have incredibly low churn and so just with consistent flat bookings, we’re going to show mid single digit top line growth. But we’re greedy too. We want to show bookings growth because we want to get our fair share of growth in the industry and we definitely want to play defense in our footprint and prevent others from coming in and winning these big deals.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Right. Box them out if you will. Right. And you mentioned that the hyperscaler is about 5% of your revenue. But what percentage of the bookings?

Give us flavor of how many Gen AI bookings are in the funnel or deals are in the funnel and the size of these typical deals.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: We’ve given a lot of metrics on this and Greg, you know this. But a couple of years ago, the number of generative AI deals in our funnel was less than five. Now it’s close to 100. And so that’s one metric. When you look at percentage of the funnel, it was less than 1% a couple years ago.

Now it’s close to 20%. And it’s kind of consistently been around that 20% number over the past year or so, which by the way is good. We want any customer segment to represent 40% or 50% or 60% of our funnel. We want to be diversified across all the different customer segments that we support. So 20% is good.

And that means new deals are coming in while we print existing deals. And when we look out over the rest of this year, I’d say the number of bigger deals that we see with the hyperscalers is better than it’s ever been. And I mentioned that on our last quarterly call. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to materialize. They’re not.

That’s the definition of the funnel, right? Only a certain percentage of those print. But with respect to the opportunity there, it’s terrific. And I’ve also said and will reiterate again, the most exciting part about the hyperscalers to us is not the period of time that we’re in today building these learning models and building these sort of bespoke network solutions for them. It’s the inference phase that’s going to kick in when the edge of the network really matters, right?

That’s when you’re going see edge data centers being built by the hyperscalers. That’s when you’re going to see them coming back for more fiber to support the learning models which is going to add to lease up on the deals we’re doing today. And importantly, you’re going to see other customer segments that are going to need to support the inference models that they’re using whether it’s large enterprises, healthcare campuses, schools, college campuses, etcetera. And so I think that opportunity is going to be a really big opportunity for us given that we’ve got a very robust edge network.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Got it. I do want to speak a little bit about inference but before I do, just wanted to talk about the current deal constructs. You mentioned, you know, high NRCs or upfront fees has been the norm with some of these big hyperscaler deals. Yields can be north of the typical five to 10% range. Are those sort of deal constructs still holding?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yes. Very consistent deals. I try to remind folks that we do all types of deals with the hyperscalers. We sell traditional IRUs. We sell dark fiber leases.

We sell waves. We sell even Ethernet DIA. Those are those are like regular way. That’s regular way business. What what what I think you’re asking about Greg and what gets a lot of focus is what what are these large learning model deals look like?

These are more of the deals that are exciting and these are the larger deals. And we at Unity view those as anchor deals and we’ve always said that we want to do anchor deals in the five to 10% cash flow range. So every dollar that goes into the ground immediately has a 5% to 10% cash flow yield generating on it over a ten or twenty year contract. And then we add the second, third, fifth, tenth customer on top of that to really get well north of 10 yields. And historically, we have executed on that to the point where our traditional anchor deals are now approaching 30% blended yields.

So over the past number of years, we’re really executing on that model. And what we said with these hyperscaler deals is we’re over performing on that. So regardless of what you characterize as the anchor yield versus lease up, right now we’re approaching 20% blended yields on a combined basis.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: There was a fear that you’re building out to quote unquote the middle of nowhere because that’s where the power is and how you’re gonna do lease ups. But you’re saying if you’re getting 30% blended rates, lease ups aren’t, so don’t seem to be a

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: There are those deals out in the middle of nowhere. We’re not doing those deals. We’re doing deals in Mobile, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi and Little Rock, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee and we’re connecting those markets with some long haul routes which by the way is also a new sort of thing. It’s been a while since the fiber industry has built long haul routes. We’re now building long haul routes with hyperscalers as anchors.

So we’re connecting these core markets our that highly strategic to our network. And yes, we’re getting that lease up. So long winded answer to your question, Greg. But yeah, we’re I think we’re over performing on our traditional metrics of five to 10% anchor plus, you know, 10% plus for lease up because within a year and a half, we’re already at nearly 20% blended yields.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: That’s great. And we were at ConnectX, the conference, a few weeks ago. We spoke to a couple of fiber providers and it seems to me that when it comes to the RFP process, training and inference is getting a little more nebulous. Meaning, you know, one provider saying, We are doing a long haul route from many miles connected to one location, but then we’re doing lit services for four or five data centers in an availability zone. So that tells me it’s a little bit of training with inference sort of blended.

Is that the way are you seeing that? And is that the way it’s going to maybe we’re going to see this unfold from phase one training to phase two inference? More of a nebulous sort of mix of offer?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: I like the word nebulous because I always try to translate what we think about every day with the business and what we talk about with the team and our customers and then translate that to conferences and investors. And the reality is on a day to day basis, we don’t talk about inference. We don’t talk about inference. We don’t talk about large learning models. We just talk about building fiber.

And so I think that’s proof that what you’re saying is true. That it is nebulous. That right now, you know, we estimate eightytwenty learning versus inference and it’s going to be eightytwenty the other way around three or four years from now. And I can’t tell you how much time we spent trying to figure that out to like give a number that we could stand behind because the reality is we don’t know. All I know is the hyperscalers are building a boatload of data center capacity and fiber capacity.

And in some cases today, they’re building it in locations that are not at the edge of the network. And we do think over time they’re going to build more and more at the edge for inference. And to support those inference models, they’re going to need more fiber back to the learning models. And more and more is going to be built around the edge by non hyperscalers to support their own inference models. So all that to say, yeah, it’s nebulous.

I think when you listen to what our customers say publicly and what they say to us, they also view it as nebulous. You know, they’ve said repeatedly that they’re buying this infrastructure and they may use it for AI or they may use it for something else in the They don’t care. And Microsoft really got pushed on the Azure growth that they had last quarter and they were pushed on how much of that is AI versus cloud. And I could listen to them struggling to answer that question. Eventually they just said, We don’t know.

It’s becoming so intertwined that it doesn’t matter. And I think, Greg, that a couple years from now we’re not going to talk about AI anymore. I think it’s just going to be part of the accepted use of broadband because it’s going to be infused in virtually every broadband use case that we have.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Right. Right. Good point. Have you experienced any challenges in the service delivery and meeting the demand, whether it’s labor, supply equipment?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: No, we really haven’t. I think and honestly have not heard of any of our peers struggling with that either. But at least with Unity and this kind of goes back to your earlier question about building in some of the remote locations. We’ve stayed disciplined about where we’re building. We’re building in our footprint and we’re building on the edge of our footprint to expand our network.

So we’re not building in remote locations that are locations for us where we don’t know the permitting environment or we don’t know the construction environment or the geology of ground that we’re going be building in or where we’re taking a flyer on can we get good contractors or can we get our crews to those locations. Those are all variables that you can control when you’re building in your footprint and you know those variables within a plus or minus. And so as a result, we’re delivering on time or ahead of schedule and we’re delivering on budget or ahead of budget. And I accentuate that point because we sometimes get the question about are these hyperscaler deals RFPs or are they bespoke? And the reality is they’re not bespoke but they’re not robust RFP processes either because I think the hyperscalers really want to work with partners who can deliver on time because time is critically important to them and can deliver on budget.

And so they’re not pricing every deal to the last penny or to perfection, I guess.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: So The amount they spend on GPUs and data centers, the network is

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Well, that’s a terrific point. When you look at what they spend on power and what they spend on data centers and compare that to what they spend on fiber, it’s I hate to say it’s a rounding error relative to the overall spend because

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: rather spend a couple bucks more and get it done and get it done yesterday?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: That’s a better way of saying what I was trying to say. Sure.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Maybe talk about bookings that are not Gen AI related. Like you mentioned, AI is probably 20%, but you want that diversity. Are we still seeking a typical cloud on ramping, which is, I guess, in the middle of later innings? Is that still strong? And then you noticed wireless is up year over year.

Can you help us with that? Is that fiber to the tower? What’s happening there?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah. So what was so yeah. No customer segment represents more than 20% revenue for us and doesn’t represent more than 20% of bookings or 20% of the funnel. So we often talk about the benefit of the wholesale fiber model is that we’re diversified across all the different use cases for broadband whether it’s fixed wireless, mobile wireless, fixed broadband, cable even or our big customers and certainly generative AI and others. And so depending upon the theme of the day or the trend of the day, we benefit.

And yeah, there are times when certain customer segments are down and everyone in this room knows that the wireless carriers have spent less over the past year or so. So 2024, they were down. We saw that in our business. But our bookings were almost a record year of bookings because we offset it with other opportunities. And we said for wireless in particular that this year we would start to see some growth.

We saw the early signs of that last year and that’s what we’re seeing. I think I don’t have a percentage that I’m comfortable sharing yet but I think there’s going to be some solid wireless growth in ’25 over ’24. Network in filling, backhaul purchases, just some things that had been deferred I’d say for the

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Sort of cell splitting after taking that five gs breather.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Exactly, exactly. So nice growth in wireless this year. But the customer segment that continues to outperform is just fiber to the home providers buying backhaul. And that includes the wireless carriers by the way. So some of that wireless demand I just mentioned is actually those customers buying backhaul.

But the fiber to the home carriers this year I think last year for sure and even the year before was probably our best customer segment. And you wouldn’t guess that, right? We talk about fiber to the home and we talk about that last mile and we’re excited about that given our kinetic asset. But one of the great parts of fiber to home for us is it’s been our biggest customer segment in wholesale. And we’ve talked about how backhaul is critically important to providing fiber to the home.

Represents roughly 10 to 20% of the cost of providing fiber to the home. And we’ve got a big robust backhaul network that’s going to be very synergistic to Kinetic once our deal with Windstream closes.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Right. And you saw the AT and T Lumen deal, there’s possibly more back opportunity for providers since that deal was very unique.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: I think that’s right. I think, you know, as you know, and T is buying the last mile

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: That last half mile.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Everything from the node back is a wholesale arrangement.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Right. Before we talk about some M and A opportunity, just wanted to ask a question about AI in general. You know, are you seeing Gen AI benefits internally with your business or any opportunities to come in terms of taking advantage of it?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Excuse me. For sure. So early stages on implementing it internally. Our business today at Unity is really simple. We like to keep it simple.

Not a lot of moving parts. That’s one of the benefits of a wholesale business model. And I would say close to 80% of our costing and pricing is automated now. That’s a trend that is going to continue and it’s never going to get to 100% because we’ve got a lot of bespoke type complex network solutions. But automating day to day, site to site type costing and pricing is a huge benefit to our model.

And we’re test casing a lot of other things with our business today. But to your question about on the come, obviously post merger with Windstream, the business becomes a lot more complicated. So you’re going from thousands of customers to millions of customers. So customer care and automating a lot of that plus automating costing and pricing and service delivery and other things is going to be critically important. And Windstream today has a dedicated team within their IT group that focuses only on AI and innovating AI into the And so we’ve been collaborating with that team and working on some test cases.

So I think there’s more to come there. And as we say internally, we want to be a leader in AI when it comes to network infrastructure and deploying infrastructure because we’re set up to do that. But we’re going to be a fast follower when it comes to implementing AI into our business. We’re going to follow the big guys. We’re going to follow the tech companies and we’re going to follow our vendors like Oracle and Salesforce and ADP and others who are developing, who are spending billions of dollars to develop AI for their customers who we are obviously.

So we’ll benefit from that over time.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Sure. And I did want to talk about M and A. One would have thought with the tariffs and macro concerns we would have been pencils down but couldn’t be more wrong. Like Charter Cox, AT and T Lumen, Crown Castle. So, you know, you’re in the late innings of the Windstream merger, you know, and there’s folks out there thinking that it’d be right for some sort of transaction, whether it’s on the Uniti Fiber side or doing something with the Windstream side, but, you know, a lot of M and A opportunities on the fray, on the common.

Just help us with the M and A scenarios that would be most attractive to you, if any.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah. So, well, Greg, you know our history. M and A is always top of mind for us. I mean, it’s just a big dominant gene in our DNA. But right now, when we look at our use of capital, putting fiber in the ground is a terrific return on capital, especially for Kinetic.

And when we think about the yields that we’re getting on these hyperscaler deals, we think about the returns that we get there over a period of time. When you do the inverse of a 20% yield or a 30% yield, that’s a five times multiple. So if there’s stuff out there that we can buy for five or six times then yeah, we may look at it. But right now, putting dollars in the ground is our best use of capital. With that said, given the assets that we have, we’re getting lots of ideas presented to us.

I mean there’s bolt on ideas for both businesses, both Kinetic and the commercial fiber business. There’s a lot of opportunity out there. We’re definitely having real conversations about joint ventures, joint ventures to not only build hyperscaler opportunities like you’re seeing in the data center world and we’re also getting opportunities to build, to supercharge the build at Kinetic with joint venture money.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Sure. Seems to be a hot one too.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: There’s just a lot of capital. Another JV. There’s a lot of capital out there and when you’ve got investment grade companies like AT and T and T Mobile and Bell Canada tapping into that capital, we would be remiss by not focusing on it ourselves. And so we certainly are and we’re excited about what those opportunities could bring. So I’d say those are some of the ideas that we’re looking at and obviously we’re always looking at non core assets as divestiture opportunities And I think we’ve been very good at that over the past number of years and monetizing things at either good multiples or premium multiples.

So I consider all that sort of tactical M and A, you know, advancing the business and finding ways optimize cost of capital. But overarching strategic transformative type M and A is out there and it’s on the come, I think especially when you see the convergence trend continuing with consolidation in that fiber in the home space. And I fully expect Kinetic to be a player in that when the time comes.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: And back on the fiber, Uniti Fiber valuation, you know, one that’s sort of come to market or in print is the Crown Castle sale and valuation. You know, I don’t expect you to talk about Crown’s valuation, but maybe talk about how you’re different, what you’re doing differently as folks sort of make the I guess erroneous read throughs between what they’re being sold for and where you are?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah. You know, we obviously follow that deal closely. Knew, know a lot of the assets that Crown acquired over the years to build that business. We looked at a lot of them ourselves, very high quality set of assets. I think when you look at the deal that they did, it’s a very unique deal for a lot of reasons.

One, I don’t think Crown was trying to maximize value on the transaction. I think they had other goals they were trying to accomplish, right? So that’s one very important point. Two, it’s a carve out. And on top of that, they’re splitting the business apart after the carve out.

So it’s hard to get a perfect read and it’s certainly hard to translate that to our business because there’s just a lot of differences. But I will say, you know, Crown was very public about focusing on small cells over the past number of years. That was their focus. And the rest of the business, less of a focus. I’ll say it nicely.

We’re the other way around. We focus on all the other things. We focus on wholesale and enterprise and hyperscaler demand. And small cells is a very small part of our business. But when you look at the valuation differential, they’re getting roughly 15 times multiple on small sales, which is the business they focused on and a smaller multiple on the business they didn’t focus on.

That’s not a surprise, right? We’re the other way around and continue to think our business that we focus on day to day that we talked about earlier does deserve those premium multiples as a result. So again, not a perfect analogy. Hard to play translator for the read through. But that’s how I look at it.

Think when I saw the values, thought, wow, 15 times for small cells? No, no, no. It should be the other way around. And I do think that’s the case for our business.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: Got it. And with the little time we have, just last topic would be on Kinetic and Windstream. You’re on the cusp of closing that deal. So you do, help us with the next steps for execution, biggest challenges and biggest opportunities with the Kinetic assets.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Yeah, very, very excited about that business. Know, one of the really big reasons for doing the deal with Windstream was to bring Kinetic on net. And that’s our, that’s the way we characterize basically eliminating the MLA, eliminating the complicated OpCo PropCo relationship and now having one fully constituted fiber to the home business which we think is one of the last remaining large fiber to home businesses and independent fiber to home businesses in the country. Execution has already started. I mean we brought in John Harobin a month or so ago.

John’s joining us from Frontier. He had a front row seat at Frontier in helping them transition out of bankruptcy and really supercharging their copper to fiber conversion obviously now to a great conclusion with their transaction with Verizon. So he had a front row seat on the go to market and a front row seat on the build. And so we’re excited to have him on board and immerse with the Windstream team at Kinetic. And we’re really focused on the build.

And we’ve talked publicly about the 4,500,000 homes that Windstream has. We’re going to be able to get to 3,500,000 of those homes with fiber by 2029. And we’re not going to stop there. There’s more to do. That’s roughly 3,500,000 homes without bead and other things.

And so we think on it and we’re going to talk more about this in the coming weeks, Greg, especially as we get past closing. We have an opportunity to get to 80%, eighty five % fiber coverage in the footprint and that’s without right and without the numerator shrinking because when I say that, there’s also a terrific backdrop right now for decommissioning copper that’s unaffordable. Right. You see AT and T doing it and you see the FCC

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: right the letter a few weeks ago.

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: Exactly. So there’s a terrific backdrop there to really maximize fiber penetration from the denominator perspective to minimize uneconomical copper from the numerator perspective.

Greg Williams, TD Cowen - Cable, Wireless and Telco Coverage, TD Cowen: And were those contemplated in your cost synergies?

Kenny Gunderin, President and CEO, Unity: No. The copper decommissioning was not actually. And we’re going talk more about that in the coming weeks too. But so very

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