American Tower Corp

NYSE:AMT

Earnings Call Transcript 2019-Q2

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the American Tower Second Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Mr. Igor Khislavsky. Please go ahead.

[Igor Khislavsky, Vice President-Investor Relations]

Thank you. Good morning and thank you for joining American Tower’s second quarter 2019 earnings conference call. We’ve posted a presentation which we will refer to throughout our prepared remarks under the Investor Relations tab of our website www.americantower.com.

Our agenda for this morning’s call will be as follows. First, I’ll quickly summarize our financial results for the quarter. Next, Jim Taiclet, our Chairman, President and CEO, will provide a brief update on our international business. And finally, Tom Bartlett, our Executive Vice President and CFO, will discuss our second quarter results and revised 2019 outlook in more detail. After these comments, we will open up the call for your questions.

Before I begin, I’ll remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Examples of these statements include, our expectations regarding industry trends, as well as our future growth, including 2019 outlook, capital allocation, pending acquisitions and future operating performance; the pacing and magnitude of the Indian Carrier Consolidation process and its impacts on American Tower; and any other statements regarding matters that are not historical fact.

You should be aware that certain factors may affect us in the future and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. Such factors include the risk factors set forth in this morning’s earnings press release, those set forth in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, and in other filings we make with the SEC. We urge you to consider these factors and remind you that we undertake no obligation to update the information contained in this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

Now, please turn to Slide 4 of our presentation, which highlights our financial results for the second quarter. As expected, these results as well as our year-over-year growth rates were impacted by Indian Carrier Consolidation-Driven Churn. During the quarter, our property revenue grew 5.7% to $1.8 billion; our adjusted EBITDA grew over 9% to $1.2 billion, and our consolidated AFFO and consolidated AFFO per share increased by 7.8% and 7.4% to $910 million and $2.04 per share, respectively.

Finally, net income attributable to American Tower Corporation common stockholders increased by more than 39% to $429 million or $0.96 per diluted common share. Additionally, similar to the last few quarters, many of our comments around second quarter results and our updated 2019 outlook will be focused on growth rates normalized for carrier consolidation-driven churn in India. Normalized outlook growth rates also adjust for the non-recurrence of the impacts of the Tata settlement in Q4 2018. We view these normalized results as important indicators of the underlying trends of our business. Reconciliations of these normalized metrics to our GAAP results are included in the back of our earnings presentation, in our press release and in our supplemental package.

And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Jim.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Thanks, Igor, and good morning to everyone on the call. Consistent with our past practice for second quarter reports, my remarks today will center on American Tower’s International business. But first, I do want to make just a few comments on the anticipated merger between T-Mobile USA and Sprint, which was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice last Friday. Since then, T-Mobile and Dish have made public statements and filings regarding their agreements and plans for their respective networks. Based on what has been made public today, we at American Tower continue to expect that these developments will likely result in net positive impacts on our U.S. business over the long-term. While there may be some decommissioning of sites as the new T-Mobile optimizes its network and rolls out 5G, we would also expect significant demand from the combined company for our extensive U.S. portfolio during that process and well into the future.

Furthermore, Dish is set to acquire Sprint’s prepaid business and has made a commitment to deploy facilities based 5G broadband network capable of serving 70% of the U.S. population by June of 2023. As a result, we also expect to secure meaningful new business from Dish, as they transition their current narrowband IoT network design into a full-fledged 5G mobile architecture over the coming years. In the near term, we do not expect the recently announced transaction approval to material impact our 2019 results and we will provide you with ongoing updates as the situation develops going forward.

With that, let’s get into our International business. For the portfolio of approximately 130,000 communication sites in 16 countries outside the U.S., we believe that our global scale diversity and reach is unmatched. As a result, we are well positioned to work closely with the large multinational tenants, who comprised a significant majority of our international revenues and who together are on track to spend upwards of $25 billion on network CapEx in our served markets this year. In the second quarter, our business outside U.S. accounted for nearly half of our property revenue and about 35% of our property operating profit, generating an aggregate U.S. dollar NOI yield of over 11%.

In our most seasoned vintage of international sites, those built or acquired prior to 2010 is yielding approximately 30% in U.S. dollar terms, illustrating the power of our recurring organic revenue model overseas. We’ve been growing this portfolio steadily through a combination of internal new build programs and selective acquisitions. The most recent example, being the Eaton Towers transaction that we signed and announced in May. The thesis underpinning our international expansion is a rapid growth in mobile data usage is not just the U.S., but a global phenomenon. And as a result, demand for communications real estate is expected to grow over an extended time horizon.

Under that premise, I’d like to spend a few minutes discussing each of our international segments and their key growth drivers. I’ll begin with Latin America, where we’ve owned and operated towers for over two decades in Mexico and Brazil, and now have nearly 38,000 sites across eight countries. Just to give you a comparison, we have about 40,000 sites in the U.S. Today, carriers across Latin America are focused on 4G network deployments. Fueling this trend are a series of recent and upcoming spectrum auctions, primarily in low and mid-bands in our two largest markets, Brazil and Mexico, and in many other countries in the region as well.

Moreover, our long time presence and scale in Latin America has resulted in substantial business relationships with the key operators in the region, including AT&T, Telefonica, America Movil and others. Consequently, over the last five years, we’ve averaged double-digit organic tenant billings growth in Latin America, backed by strong levels of new business activity and the continuing appetite for mobile data in the region.

In addition to continuing organic growth opportunities, we’re now seeing solid momentum from new build towers, with our outlook for new tower construction in Latin America in 2019 up significantly versus last year. And with regional 4G penetration still well below 50%, we expect solid demand for co-locations, amendments and new builds in Latin America to continue for some time.

Moving on to EMEA. We currently have a portfolio of nearly 17,000 sites building over 11% on U.S. dollar basis and another 5,500 reserve site coming with the Eaton Towers transaction. Since entering the region in 2011, we helped bringing greatly improved connectivity to hundreds of millions of subscribers while partnering with many of the key telecom operators across Africa and Europe, including Vodafone, MTN, Airtel and others. And while our German and French markets are well into the 4G transition, with stable carrier investments and relatively consistent growth prospects going forward, most of our African markets are much earlier in terms of technology evolution, network capacity and mobile data usage. We see a tremendous opportunity in the region as a result, particularly given that there is limited fixed line infrastructure in place in Africa, and wireless broadband has been recognized by African governments is one of the key aspects of their economic modernization plan.

At the current time, 4G penetration on average is still under 10% in our African markets, and mobile data usage is a fraction of what we see in the U.S. and other more advanced countries. As smartphone prices continue to come down and as more Africans begin using advanced handsets, we expect to see significant incremental mobile data usage and consequently demand for towers, both for existing sites as well as for new builds. We spent the better part of the last decade positioning American Tower to benefit from this upcoming wave of demand by acquiring more than 10,000 sites in Africa and constructing another 1,700. This macro tower oriented portfolio has performed well to-date with significant future upside expected.

In addition to the Eaton Tower’s acquisition, we’ve also started to ramp our build program in the region with 2019 new build expected to be roughly double 2018 levels. We’re also making great progress increasing our operational efficiency, while reducing the mobile industries carbon footprint through our innovative power and fuel program. In Africa, where grid power in many areas tends to be unreliable, we are actively deploying next generation greener technologies, including lithium-ion batteries and solar solutions. We expect to invest more than $50 million in 2019 to enhance the uptime performance of our sites in the region, while at the same time significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Finally, moving to India. The mobile communications industry is completing a much needed consolidation to support the funding of 4G technology throughout the country. There are now four large and capable wireless carriers, Vodafone Idea, Airtel, Reliance Jio, and BSNL. In our view, each has sufficient spectrum assets and customer basis to credibly deploy 4G in the coming years. Although only a relatively small proportion of subscribers in India are on a 4G network today, their usage pattern indicates a bright future for adoption and network demand in India. Incredibly, those people with smartphone access are using an average of upwards of 10 gigabits per month already more than the current average for U.S. smartphone subscribers. We believe that a significant build-out will be needed in India to meet 4G-driven demand and then our portfolio of approximately 75,000 sites is well positioned to garner solid organic growth for years to come.

Beginning at some point in 2020, as we’ve said previously, we would expect to see the leading edge of more normalized levels of organic growth as Indian Carrier Consolidation Churn subsides, enabling organic tenant billings growth to resume an upward trajectory. New build demand in India is also robust and we anticipate constructing more than 2,000 sites this year as 4G deployments ramp up there.

To summarize, Indian macro trends are stable, the telecom industry seems to be on the right track, and we think that our portfolio coupled with our relationships with the major carriers now in the marketplace positions us to be successful over a long period of time in that region.

At the consolidated international level at American Tower, we are confident about the prospects for strong long-term growth as the global migration to 4G continues to progress in Latin America, EMEA and India. We view our International business is tremendously complementary and additive to our core U.S. tower business, which continues to drive the majority of our AFFO.

So with that, let me hand it over to Tom to go through the details of our results and our updated outlook.

[Tom Bartlett]

Hey, thanks Jim. Good morning, everyone. As Igor highlighted earlier, we posted another quarter of strong results with U.S. organic tenant billings growth of 7.5%, improved organic growth in EMEA, and the construction of more than 1,100 sites globally. We also announced the Eaton Towers transaction, which will build in our presence in Africa, while further aligning us with key multinational tenants. Also, together with our other completed and signed acquisition agreements, we now expect to acquire more than 6,000 sites globally in 2019.

With that, let’s take an in-depth look at our second quarter results and our revised outlook for the full year. So if you please turn to Slide 6. During the quarter, we generated consolidated organic tenant billings growth normalized for the impacts of Indian Carrier Consolidation-Driven Churn of nearly 8%. Volume growth from co-locations and amendments contributed about 6% of this growth, driven by carrier network investments across our footprint.

Our U.S. business property revenue grew over 5% to just over $1 billion this quarter, with organic tenant billings growth of 7.5%. Volume growth from co-locations and amendments drove around 6% of this growth, and escalators contributed just over 3%. This was partially offset by nearly 2% the negative impact of lower non-cash straight line revenue, as well as churn of roughly 1.3%. All four major carriers in the market contributed to our results, and roughly 80% of the new business activity generated was in the form of amendments.

Our reported international property revenue growth during the period was over 6%, including a negative impact of over 5% due to Indian Carrier Consolidation-Driven Churn. Underpinning our international revenue growth this quarter, was a normalized organic tenant billings growth rate of about 8%. Solid demand trends throughout our key markets like Brazil and South Africa continue to drive the strong normalized growth as our tenants deployed capital to support their network build-outs.

New business revenue from co-locations and amendments was about 6% of this growth, while escalators contributed nearly 4%. Other run rate items added nearly 1% with normal course churn offsetting these items by just over 2%. As expected, the financial impacts of Indian Carrier Consolidation-Driven Churn were slightly lower sequentially and we continue to expect these impacts to decline throughout the remainder of the year.

In addition, Q2 included higher than typical contributions from several non-run rate revenue categories, which positively impacted our results. These items which included some increased pass-through revenue, the benefit of some tenant settlements in India and elevated levels of backfilling totaled roughly $45 million in the quarter.

Finally, the day one revenue associated with the nearly 16,000 sites, we’ve added over the course of the last year, contributed just over 2% to our global tenant billings growth. These new assets include our acquisition around 10,000 sites from Idea in India, as well as the nearly 4,000 newly constructed sites over the last year. Demand for new towers continue to accelerate, and as a result, we’ve built nearly 1,100 towers across our international markets in the quarter, more than doubling our pace from a year ago.

New builds continue to be an integral part of our capital deployment program, driving attractive day one returns. In fact, initial NOI yield for these builds averaged about 12% in Q2 and we expect additional lease-up opportunities to raise yields further. Our new build program remains focused primarily on macro towers, given their strong recurring revenue, exclusive franchise real estate characteristics, and superior return profile. Importantly, we believe that we’re still in the early stages of a long period of new build demand as 4G technology reaches more and more subscribers, particularly in less mature markets.

Turning to Slide 7. We also generated solid adjusted EBITDA and consolidated AFFO growth during the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA grew by over 9% with our adjusted EBITDA margin increasing to 62.6%. Normalized adjusted EBITDA growth was more than 12% and our normalized adjusted EBITDA margin excluding the negative impact of non-cash straight line revenue was over 63%.

We continue to effectively manage our SG&A during the quarter and continue to realize operating expense benefits from recent investments in power and fuel. This was particularly impactful in our African markets, where we continue to optimize our processes and invest in lithium-ion batteries and solar power to enhance the efficiency of our sites and reduce our emissions. As a result, our Q2 generator run hours were down nearly 20% as compared to the prior year period, and we’re on track to hit our green energy deployment goals for the year.

We also generated strong consolidated AFFO and AFFO per share growth, with consolidated AFFO growing nearly 8% and consolidated AFFO per share up over 7% to $2.04. Meanwhile, AFFO attributable to common stockholders grew over 15% or nearly 16% per share, which is partly attributable to our increased ownership interest in India. On a normalized basis, consolidated AFFO and consolidated AFFO per share grew nearly 11%.

Turning to Slide 8. Let’s now take a look at our updated expectations for 2019. We are raising our organic tenant billings outlook for the – our U.S. segment and now expect growth of at least 7% for the year. New business activity is running ahead of our prior assumptions, backed by strong carrier investment to support continued growth of their customers mobile data usage. In EMEA, we are seeing lower churn than we anticipated, and as a result are raising our organic tenant billings outlook to about 7% for the year. Meanwhile, trends in Latin America and India are consistent with our prior assumptions, and we are reiterating organic tenant billings growth expectations of 7% to 8% in Latin America and 8% to 9% in India on a normalized basis.

Taking international as a whole, we now anticipate normalized organic tenant billings growth will be nearly 100 basis points higher than the U.S., driven by a record year of contributions from co-locations and amendments. With our revised 2019 outlook, we also continue to expect to return to positive organic tenant billings growth in our international business by Q4 when the impact of Indian Carrier Consolidation-Driven Churn begins to subside.

Looking at Slide 9, we are raising our expectations for 2019 [ph] consolidated property revenue by $60 million or nearly 1%. This reflects organic tenant billings outperformance as well as the benefit of the Q2 items I discussed earlier. Our revised outlook also includes about $6 million of additional straight line revenue, partially offset by $2 million of negative translational FX impacts.

Flipping to Slide 10. We’re also raising our expectations for adjusted EBITDA by 1.3% or $60 million. This reflects the strong conversion of the incremental property revenue I just mentioned, as well as roughly $11 million in additional adjusted EBITDA from our Services segment, which set a new record for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the quarter.

Lastly, we are increasing our expectations for consolidated AFFO for the year by $70 million or approximately 2%. This is primarily being driven by our higher outlook for adjusted EBITDA and the benefit of lower projected financing costs, and includes assumptions of slightly higher maintenance CapEx spending in the back half of the year. On a per share basis, we expect normalized consolidated AFFO growth of nearly 11% at the midpoint, reflecting the strong operating leverage embedded in our business. Finally, I do want to note that holding the current spot FX rate steady for the rest of the year will result in approximately $8 million or $0.02 per share in incremental consolidated AFFO as compared to our outlook.

Now, turning to Slide 11. Our capital allocation plans for the year reflect our disciplined investment evaluation process and diversity of our global portfolio. We expect our dividend in 2019 to grow by around 20% to a total of $1.7 billion subject to Board discretion. In addition, at the midpoint of our outlook, we plan to deploy just over $1 billion of CapEx, over 80% of which is discretionary, focused on augmenting the capacity of existing macro sites and building new ones. This is up $50 million as compared to our prior expectations, in part, driven by a 250 site increase in our new build expectations to 3,500 sites at the midpoint for the year. By the way, building 3,500 sites would be a new record for American Tower.

We also plan to enhance our global scale through attractive M&A as we’ve done in the past. Year-to-date, we’ve committed approximately $3.3 billion, including $1.85 billion for our recently announced acquisition of Eaton Towers, which we expect to close by the end of 2019. This transaction will enhance our scale and markets like Ghana and Kenya and Uganda, and further solidify our presence in Africa, is a key partner of the major wireless carriers in the continent, many of which are our existing tenants.

We’ve also acquired and closed 363 other sites year-to-date for a total of $150 million, primarily in Latin America and expect to close on around 400 additional sites in other related property interests in the United States during the third quarter for around $500 million. Like the Eaton Towers transaction, we’ve not included any impact from these U.S. assets in our current outlook.

Finally, included in $3.3 billion I just mentioned, is the $426 million that we paid for the first set of Indian inputs in April, and around $360 million for the second set that we expect to pay for in the third quarter subject to regulatory approval. In total, we expect to deploy approximately $6 billion of capital during 2019, primarily to enhance our global scale and expand the future cash flow generation of our business.

Turning to Slide 12, you can see that our capital allocation strategy has driven strong financial performance. Since 2007, we’ve increased our global site count more than sevenfold, by acquiring and constructing high quality communication sites with strong growth characteristics and attractive recurring revenue profiles. As a result, across this time period, we’ve generated a 15% consolidated AFFO per share CAGR, while increasing our return on invested capital by more than 200 basis points. Looking forward, we believe we’re well positioned to continue to selectively grow our portfolio as we build in our history of delivering strong organic growth.

Now looking at Slide 13, our build program continues to be a critical component of our capital allocation program. And as I mentioned earlier, we expected record year of new-build activity in 2019 throughout our international markets. Importantly, the initial NOI yields of these international new builds continue to average double digits, with Asia and EMEA approaching the mid teens. These returns further improve over time as we lease up the assets, and in fact, many of the top performing sites in our portfolio are sites that we have built ourselves.

International sites built before 2010, for example, now yield approximately 45% on a U.S. dollar basis, and even sites constructed since 2014 are generating an average NOI yield of 20%. Given this favorable return profile, we remain committed to helping our multinational carrier tenants improve their networks through the construction of new sites. Of all the ways we can add scale to our business, our new build program again primarily focused on adding new macro tower sites remains one of the most accretive.

Turning to Slide 14, and in summary, our second quarter results were strong with solid organic trends across our global footprint. Our U.S. business generated organic tenant billings growth of 7.5% in the quarter, enabling us to raise our full year U.S. organic billings outlook to at least 7%. Meanwhile, organic growth in EMEA and Asia continue to improve, and Latin America trends remain solid. We also increased assumptions for new site builds for the second consecutive quarter, driven primarily by elevated demand from carriers in India, Nigeria and Brazil, which speaks to the tremendous need for incremental network density to support our continuing deployment of 4G. Combined with our 2019 M&A activity, including closed and signed transactions, we expect to add approximately 10,000 towers to our portfolio this year.

Finally, we converted our strong top-line results into solid growth in adjusted EBITDA and consolidated AFFO per share in the second quarter, and now expect to grow consolidated AFFO per share on a normalized basis by nearly 11% for the full year. Furthermore, we remained firmly committed to growing our common stock dividend as a key component of our total return profile subject to the Board discretion, while maintaining our long held financial policies and investment grade credit rating. Overall, 2019 is shaping up to be another great year for American Tower and we’re focused on finishing the year strong to position us for continued success.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to the operator, so we can jump into some Q&A. Operator?

[Operator]

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Simon Flannery [Morgan Stanley]. Please go ahead.

[Simon Flannery, Morgan Stanley]

Great. Thank you very much. Good morning. Jim, thanks for the overview on international, just doing a lot of activity in Europe recently from Vodafone and others, can you just comment on that market? Is that something we’re likely to see American Tower, you know as it just not give you the growth and value equations. And maybe back to this 35% of operating profit, where is that likely to be over time might that get to 50-50? And then just on the merger, if we assume that Sprint, T-Mobile goes through, how would we expect the transition to go in terms of activity and would you expect to try to negotiate a master lease agreement to minimize the churn and decommissioning? Thanks.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Sure. Yes, I’ll start with the international piece. I mean, Europe has always been a major target of American Towers international strategy since we really accelerated in 2007. But as you point out, Simon, the growth and costs of asset equation hasn’t at – in the larger deals that have traded so far met our investment criteria. We’re actively there. We’ve got a great standalone team in Europe that is only doing two things, looking at new opportunities for asset growth and operating our current German and French businesses to their maximum potential.

So we are going to be in the hunt continually here and as far as the overall operating profit as a percentage of the company’s, international is designed here to naturally grow up to 50%, I should say, over a long period of time, because we have more towers, they grow faster and we think the deployment timelines are longer because many of these countries as we’ve talked about our earlier phases of the technology lifecycle from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G. So yes someday, we’ll have 50% of our operating profit coming from international, but that’s going to depend on the M&A flow, the U.S. growth rate and a few other factors, but we’ll get there someday and the whole system is – it was designed to do that.

When it comes to Sprint and T-Mobile, at the highest level, the way at least that we’re looking at this situation is that the agreement that’s been announced between the Justice Department, T-Mobile and Dish, really positions the U.S. to accelerate its achievement of global leadership in 5G technology, while at the same time retaining a competitive industry structure that benefits consumers. So to answer your question, I believe this will be an excellent environment for American Tower, especially with the increasing focus that you’ve heard about recently on low and mid-band spectrum for 5G, especially from the Sprint, T-Mobile sides of the equation, not to mention Dish, just last week Verizon, and of course, AT&T has been talking about this already.

So, that’s really coalescing to what we think is a great environment for us long-term in the U.S. As far as the transition, of course, we are going to – one could imagine, already started talking about the contours of what a new MLA might mean for some of these industry participants of the transactions that we’re talking about. So that’s part and parcel of what we do. We’re going to try to accomplish in that transition period with the MLA is to retain as much of our business as we can, while making it more efficient, not just for American Tower, but for the industry to make that 4G to 5G transition, and because we’ve got those 40,000 really well-positioned high capacity macro sites in the U.S., we’re in a really good place to work with each of our customers to do that. So, the transition will be much like you’ve seen us do it before as far as trying to work within the situation that we’re facing to minimize our churn and optimize our growth trajectory going forward over a long period of time.

[Simon Flannery, Morgan Stanley]

Great. Thanks a lot.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Colby Synesael [Cowen and Company]. Please go ahead.

[Colby Synesael, Cowen and Company]

Great. Thank you. Two questions if I may. First off, your – just want to talk about your U.S. organic growth, so that 8.2% in the first quarter, 7.5% in the second quarter, can you just raise guidance from approximately 7% to just over 7%, which would imply then a pretty notable step down in the back half of the year. Just curious if you think you will be able to give a little bit more specifics on what you would expect to be exiting the year in terms of growth rate and what’s really driving that deceleration? And then secondly, as it relates to India, I know you slightly adjusted the guidance for some payments and I think some other things that weren’t previously anticipated. I’m just curious what’s the risk to your forecast in India right now? That market seems still pretty fluid, still pretty dynamic chance for incremental consolidation beyond what’s already been announced. How confident are you that you really get back up to that high single-digit, low double-digit growth rate, I guess, over the next, call it, 12 months? Thanks.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, hi Colby. With regards to the growth rate, keep in mind that in 2019, we’re going to be generating more in business coming into organic growth than we actually did in 2018. So, it’s a very, very strong year. In terms of the timing of the growth rates on a quarter-by-quarter basis, a lot of it is a function of the growth in the prior quarters and the prior year. And so if you look at kind of the third and the fourth quarter of 2018, they’re very, very strong quarters for us. And so as a result, it’s having an impact in terms of the overall organic growth going into the second half.

So, the first half is stronger than expected, tougher comps in the second half. We do have also a slight increase in churn, I believe in the fourth quarter, still well within the 1% to 2%, but that’s also impacting the overall growth. So, we’re going into 2020, we will be back in the next six to nine months to talk about what those growth rates look like going into 2019, but I think the leading growth rates that we’ve got in our core organic growth are very, very strong and we’ll continue to update them as the carriers continue to process more search rings and applications with us.

[Tom Bartlett]

And as far as India goes, Colby, we don’t see any risk to the forecast for 2019 is material. We got a really good pipeline of actually organic growth as it is. In fact, we’re already above 9% organic tenant billings growth in India, ex the consolidation churn. So, we’re already kind of at the gross run rate minus normal churn that we would expect in that market and it’s just a matter of what’s the timing of the roll-off of the consolidation churn. It could be, just a couple of quarters and it’s going to go down through the rest of the year anyway. So, we’re quite confident in achieving not only our short-term 2019 objectives in India, but really confident in achieving our target IRR over the planning period for the investments we’re making in India. We used 10-year models IRR from that market for us, that’s target is above 10% and we’re very confident that we’re going to achieve that over the planning period.

So, it’s a long-term business. There will be some industry changes. There’s one happening in the U.S. as well. We’re confident there too that there is a path through consolidation that actually could be stronger for our company. Then pre-consolidation, I’d say both in the U.S. and India, and it takes time to get there, but we’re confident we will.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

And Colby on that, we continue to underpin and see that growth as a function of just a growth in pure leases. Right now, with a churn that’s occurred over the last two years, roughly again, from an industry perspective, 600,000, 700,000 leases, we continue to believe and see and reexamine this on a current basis if the leases are going to be well over $1 million – 1 million leases over the next three to five years. So, there is strong growth in the market.

[Colby Synesael, Cowen and Company]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brandon Nispel [KeyBanc Capital Markets]. Please go ahead.

[Brandon Nispel, KeyBanc Capital Markets]

Hey, guys. One question on the U.S. market and one sort of housekeeping item if I could. One of the things you guys have always pointed to in terms of demand for your tower sites is mobile data usage. But the other thing you guys point to is capital spending in the U.S. from the wireless carriers. So, I was hoping you could just share some thoughts in terms of what 5G means from a capital spending perspective, particularly around some of the M&A that’s going on? Then two on just housekeeping. Maybe, can you update us on the exact dollar amount of property revenue churn you expect to the rest of the year in India and potentially anything that’s remaining in the 2020? Thanks.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Okay, Brandon and it’s Jim. I can speak to the U.S. kind of main parameters of what drives our demand. The data usage continues to go up 30% plus per year in the U.S. even as we’re well into the 4G transition. What’s interesting to me about that is, that every three or four years people go, how can it keep going up? And one of the reasons it keeps going up is every app you put on your phone actually refreshes in the background when you’re not even using it.

So, there are data draws on people’s phones that occur when you’re not have even using the app or watching a video whatever. So, these are going to continue to drive usage in addition to the video uptake, both in social media and in branded media that’s coming on mobile devices. So, we’re really quite confident that 30% plus data growth in the U.S. is something that will continue for some time. And actually for the next five to 10 years, most of that is going to have to be dealt with by the 4G network in the technology that we’re using today, while we transition to 5G.

So as you go from – look at capital spending, it’s $30 billion plus and it has been roughly for many years in the U.S., that’s the industry spend rate for 4G. We can’t really see a scenario, where the industry – the U.S. wireless industry would spend less than that transitioning to 5G, because they’re going to have two things going on at the same time. One is, managing 30% plus growth on the existing network and laying the groundwork and introducing the 5G network. So there is – we think there is going to be plenty of opportunity and really need for the industry to continue to spend that $30 billion plus a year run rate of CapEx, and again, the transaction that’s been announced might actually bolster that going forward based on the competitive dynamic between the three largest of the expected industry competitors in the U.S., plus the disruptives from entrepreneurism of Dish in there as well. So, we feel good that capital spending is going to stay at the same level or better as we move from 4G to 5G.

[Tom Bartlett]

And then on the churn question, in Q2, we generated about $66 million, of which about $63 million was actually the Indian Carrier Consolidated Churn. In Q3, again, as we’ve said, we expect that to wind down. In Q3, we would expect it to be in the $55 million to $60 million range in Q4, down into the $20 million to $25 million range. So again, a significant fall off as you would expect of that churn that occurred from the consolidations over the last couple of years. And we – again, we expected the ongoing churn rates to get back down into kind of that on a – run rate basis kind of in that 1%, 1.5% kind of rate.

[Colby Synesael, Cowen and Company]

Great. Thanks for taking the questions.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of David Barden [Bank of America Securities]. Please go ahead.

[David Barden, Bank of America Securities]

Hey guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I just want go back to the merger a little bit. I mean, it’s been a long time since we had one of these. Jim, could you kind of walk us through, kind of when you think American Tower will know what the game plan is? Would you know that ahead of time before the close, because they’re trying to get ready or will you not know until afterwards and then you kind of have a six-month period, where you’re trying to figure out the details? And then the second question is, just related to the Dish option to kind of take over decommission sites, what would that look like? Can that really happen that way or does Dish have to have their own agreement with you before that could happen? And then the third, I guess, question would be just the 400 tower acquisition in the U.S., it’s a big number of towers. It looks like it was 1 million in quarter, so it looks they were pretty well loaded towers. Where did those come from? Thank you.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

So, David, let me start with the T-Mobile, Sprint merger. The timing of when information is going to be available for us to model and forecast the results as to our company is going to evolve over time. As you saw over the past couple of weeks that this agreement has come together very quickly. It’s multi-party. There is still another circuit of legal challenges that needs to be resolved with the set of states out there. So, we will learn incremental information probably, over the next number of months and not all before the closing will be available.

So, we will continue to be very close as we have been with the – I mean, frankly outstanding management teams across our industry, whether it’s T-Mobile, Sprint, Dish, AT&T, Verizon, these are very well-organized, incredibly capable management teams, and I can tell you highly competitive with each other. We work with each of them closely. Remember, there’s only four of us on the wireless side, three of us of size on the tower side. We will be with each of these players every step up their way and as this information comes to light and they feel that they either are disclosing it or providing it to us in a confidential manner and negotiations. We’ll work with that as it comes, but there is no way to predict right now when we are going to know enough material information for us to understand what the rollout is going to look like.

The other side of it is that, we will be endeavoring to give offers out there to help accentuate and benefit each of these carriers based on how they tell us that their strategy is coming to life. So, this is a very interactive process. It’s going to take a lot of time and it gets down literally the way we forecast as applications coming and the timing of those, the bill of materials that comes along with it on each application and whenever set of rights that we all agree to. So, it’s going to take time frankly. There’s is no other way to describe it.

The Dish option to take on leases, we’ll have to dig into the contracts on all sides. We have MLAs with Dish, we have them with Sprint, we have them with T-Mobile, and there are also contractual obligations we don’t have access to yet between those parties. So, once we get all again the information we need, we will understand how the contracts need to look or be revised or created between us and Dish to do assignments or new leases on towers as the case maybe.

And then finally, we do put our money where our mouth is. The U.S. is an important growth region for us still. Again, it’s most of the AFFO that comes from the company today. International will catch over – up over some long period of time, but we’re still investing heavily in the U.S. and we just demonstrated that with the announcement of this sort of mid-sized acquisition, if you will, and it’s a private transaction.

So, we really can’t disclose too much more about it than we already have. But it will be a great tuck in and in the last – 1% or so to our portfolio, which we think will be high growth, which is where the real value is in these sites along with some really solid big four rent roll that will come with it. So again, it’s just the normal course of business with us. We’re able to meet our investment criteria with this particular counterparty. The fact that our financial position allows us to move quickly and with surety allows sellers to feel good about making agreements to purchase towers to scale with us. So, it’s just normal course for ATC.

[David Barden, Bank of America Securities]

Thanks, Jim.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brett Feldman [Goldman Sachs]. Please go ahead.

[Brett Feldman, Goldman Sachs]

Thanks. Just two if you don’t mind. Your other revenues in the quarter were particularly strong that can include a lot of things including settlements, but I also think your fiber solutions revenues are embedded in there. So, if you can give us a little insight as to whether there was any one-time strength and maybe, just the extent to which there was recurring strength in that line item. And then are you seeing anything, even though, it’s early days around the deployment of millimeter wave spectrum in the U.S., I think, we all just sort of assumed that’s going to be predominantly on small cells. But if you’re seeing on towers, that would be interesting and maybe just even higher level. Do you see new emerging franchise real estate opportunities around 5G deployments in the U.S. is something beyond the scope of towers and maybe historically would not have been interesting to you. Thank you.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Brett, on the other revenue and the non-run rate, we generally run in kind of that 4% revenue range. They’re difficult to forecast – as you said, things like the straight line, the back billing, these are things that our teams are doing every day of the year and it’s difficult to determine exactly the timing of when these types of things will hit. And so we’ll have a quarter that’s bit outsized, another quarter that’s bit undersized, but averaging in that kind of that 4% range. This particular quarter, we’re just over 6%. Then again, it’s a function of a little bit higher back billing, some small settlements in Latin – markets like Latin America and India, as well as some additional work that we’ve done on pass-through. So, very difficult thing to forecast, definitely contribute to our overall growth. Don’t know candidly, in Q3, Q4, where there will be other items like these, but what we’ve included in our outlook is the impact of what we did realize in Q2.

[Brett Feldman, Goldman Sachs]

Is there anything that’s generally recurring in there? As you saw in the footnote, you mentioned fiber solutions, I’m wondering if we’re under appreciating that?

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

No, I mean I think back billing is something that we do every day. Settlements, we’ve got 2,500 customers plus around the globe. And so there are constantly going to be settlements going on, renegotiations on certain terms, on certain contracts and things like that. And those types of events are in fact recurring. It’s not driven by fiber. This is really largely driven just by our pure macro business.

[Brett Feldman, Goldman Sachs]

Got it.

[Tom Bartlett]

Yes. And Brett, when it comes to the millimeter wave spectrum, we’ve seen some, but not significant business on our macro towers around those kind of deployments, but there are going to be some potentially significant opportunities for our adjacent asset classes to our macro towers for 5G. And many of them are starting already today. So, one of the largest ones outside the U.S., frankly, and it will continue and accelerate from 4G to 5G is the need to fiberize as they say in India towers or to bring fiber to the tower in Latin America, Africa and other places.

In countries where there is not a large capital commitment or large industry commitment to fiber deployments, and these are places we’ve made those investments, because we need fiber to the tower and we can charge for that last mile. And then when we make those investments, we then can go to our customers and allow them to use those right of ways in some of that fiber, because we’re passing homes, we’re passing businesses. We don’t do that in retail side. We wholesale some of that fiber capacity that we need for the tower anyway along the route if you will to some of our Telco customers to do retail business on their – that they will manage. So that is one opportunity that will go from 4G to 5G.

Another one, which I think is quite interesting, we’re still in its evolution, is applying in the U.S. CBRS spectrum to a much more efficient and low cost indoor small cell solution. Again, early days there, it would apply to 4G and 5G, it doesn’t necessarily have to be 3.5 spectrum, but in the U.S. that type of spectrum is being deployed with both a licensed prioritization and an unlicensed of general access bands, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that you can use in buildings at very low cost that general access band to serve a specific need.

So, CBRS on the indoor side, fibers outside the U.S. and other developed markets to towers are both going to be needed. And we also see kind of an interesting innovation initiative around edge compute and that will be more of 5G program. So, a little bit longer time horizon to get there, but we’re already finding that distributed compute and storage is relevant even today, and now – and we’re trying to figure out exactly what that capillary system needs to look like, what the customer bases are and who the customers will be, and I think that will really be part and parcel of 5G, but again, we can get started on it even now.

[Brett Feldman, Goldman Sachs]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ric Prentiss [Raymond James]. Please go ahead.

[Ric Prentiss, Raymond James]

Thanks. Good morning, guys. I wanted to follow up on some of Brett’s questions there. As you think about maybe doing more fiber to improve the visibility of your tariff plus wholesale along the route. Do you envision a day, where you would report fiber separately from tower property rent?

[Tom Bartlett]

Yes, Rich, depending upon the size and things like that and the decision-making, I mean, there is whole array of areas of decision that would go in to being able to need to disclose that. I mean, we’re clearly to the extent that people are interested in it, in terms of what we’re doing around the globe, clearly willing to talk about that and be transparent about it. But candidly, it needs to be a lot bigger from where it is. I mean we’ve invested probably upwards of $1 billion on some of the innovation types of programs, including fiber, but it really represents about 2% of our revenue. So, it’s quite small right now. And by design, because these are part of our overall elevation strategy that we’ve got within the business.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Right. And I would say if the – here in long time run likely, Ric, that we’d ever split this out because the whole innovation program that Tom just referred too including the fiber investments, it is really designed to enhance the macro tower portfolio we have.

[Ric Prentiss, Raymond James]

Right.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

So, whether it’s share generators once you had for a long time is an offering, whether it’s ground space or edge compute on our tower sites for American Tower or its fiber that makes it a more valuable or more sticky site for customers, who want to be on and stay on. It’s really part of the macro tower property business and that’s probably where you will see it embedded for quite some time.

[Ric Prentiss, Raymond James]

That makes sense. And one of the reason for the questions, you’ve get a lot of questions from investors and it comes up in industry shows like maybe the Tower Infrastructure Show, where people look at a multiple American Tower is trading at on an AFFO multiple basis versus some of the peers out there. And I think you guys know we prefer funds available for distribution, you get the real cash, but is there a debate out there about your multiple versus some of your peers. Thus, it seems maybe more likely that tower business is maybe worth more and you need to look at cash. Any thoughts to get those questions on kind of multiple disparity?

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Well, let me just say, to address it this way, Ric. Our fiber investments outside the U.S. have to meet the same investment criteria the tower acquisitions have to meet outside the U.S. And that would apply into – in the United States too and that’s why you have never seen us make a fiber acquisition in the U.S. The return criteria, we cannot figure out how to achieve at the level of macro towers in the U.S. But when it comes to these, really as Tom referred to, relatively small acquisitions or investments in South Africa, Brazil, Argentina et cetera, those have met or exceeded our investment criteria for macro towers in those countries. And that’s the only time you’re going to see us at.

So, frankly, we give you a fiber investment in ATC is just as valuable, just as high growth and high return in the macro tower or we won’t put the money into. So, we won’t be different than someone – the company that may have decided to go all in on a fiber business, whether it’s inside or outside the U.S., because if you are not discriminating about this, we haven’t been able to find ways to match macro tower returns and growth rates outside the investments we made where we made.

[Ric Prentiss, Raymond James]

Sure.

[Tom Bartlett]

And Ric, we were able to do that, because of our international opportunity, being in the 16 markets as Jim talked about, $25 billion of capital is being invested by our customers in those markets. And so on top of that $30 plus billion there being invested in the U.S., we’re contributing in a total opportunity if you will from a market perspective of over $50 billion. And so that is where we believe that we will be able to drive those tower like returns as Jim referred too.

[Ric Prentiss, Raymond James]

That’s very helpful. Thanks guys.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Batya Levi [UBS]. Please go ahead.

[Batya Levi, UBS]

Thank you. In the press, you had a target for international growth to be 200 basis points to 300 basis points faster than the U.S. Now, with the disruption in India behind us this year, an accelerated build program, I was wondering if you still think that you can get back to that kind of growth internationally. And second question, can you provide an update on pricing, maybe the revenue profile on new business in LatAm. It looks like new billings is not really ramping as much as the new tariffs added and just wanted to see if that’s just due to timing? Thank you.

[Tom Bartlett]

I think on that one particularly, Batya, I think it is just the timing of it. The new business from a function of the builds down in the program as well as – you also have some contractual year-over-year going on, but the new business is stable. I mean, you saw even in our updated guidance, it still remains very, very strong. From an organic perspective, we do have a lower inflation in some of those markets.

And so on a year-over-year basis, I want to say that’s 80 basis points to 100 basis points impact to the overall organic growth just because of the inflation is lower, but the new business is very strong in those markets and the build program is very strong. We do have slightly higher churn in Brazil as a function of some of the items churn kind of coming off from Nextel, but very solid and stable growth rates in the region.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

And Batya, in Latin America, we do have a more aggressive build plan and I think showing up in some of the tables at this point in the second quarter report, that’s timing. So, there is a ramp-up in actual build volume in Latin America this year for American Tower. And then on the broadest level of your question, over a long period of time, we still think that international will grow a couple of 100 basis points higher than the U.S., because it began earlier in the cycle, some CPI based inflation, which is actually declined recently in some markets. When all those things normalize over a long period of time, we still think there’s outsized growth in the international markets that we’ve chosen to go into, but that’s going to fluctuate as Tom said earlier, year-to-year based on a number of factors, including the U.S. growth rate at the time that delta is going to be a little smaller.

[Batya Levi, UBS]

All right. Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Rollins [Citigroup, Inc.]. Please go ahead.

[Michael Rollins, Citigroup, Inc.]

Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Just have two. First, you mentioned I think that in the U.S. activity about 80% was amendments, 20% was co-lo. For the co-lo, is there a common narrative as to where they’re going, it could be more rural coverage, densification and suburbia, just kind of curious if there is a common narrative of where this tight placements are going and then what your view may be in the future of how the deployment strategies could evolve over the next few years given some of the comments you made about 5G in your anticipations? And then second, as you look at the return on capital in the international business, is that denominator on adjusted for current currency rate? And do you also look at it as returns based on the initial dollars that we’re putting at those historical currency rates? Thanks.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Mike, it’s Jim. I’ll start with the U.S. piece and turn it over to Tom for the ROIC calculation. The 80:20 amendment to co-location is normal course for us. There’s really no unusual theme as to where the co-locations are happening. The breadth and the scope of our portfolio allows us to have a pretty consistent co-location business, and it’s along all those lines that you kind of touched on. There is suburban to fill in, whether there’s just for cell-splitting capacity or adding maybe a higher spectrum band that then requires a tighter array in a suburban environment. There is also, as you said, the rural coverage piece that kind of continues to go on, whether it’s the cafe programs or others that are driving this brand-new Greenfields out in places to reach more people.

We have the Verizon towers that are still leasing up with co-locations from some of the other carriers as we go. So, this is a set of initiatives and sources of where that co-los come from. And in the 5G environment that fill in, because there will be higher band spectrum coming in 2.5 that you’ve already read and heard about, perhaps 3.5 outdoors as well as indoors and you’re also going to have C band spectrum in the plus or minus 4.0 gigahertz coming in. There’ll be that higher frequency, shorter-transmission radio bands coming in over the next few years. They’re going to require a denser network nationwide at some proportion. So that’s where you’ll see the future of 5G co-locations will be a big part of that.

[Tom Bartlett]

And Mike, on the ROIC, I mean it comes out right out of the current financials. So, both in numerator and the denominator have been adjusted for FX current rates.

[Michael Rollins, Citigroup, Inc.]

Thanks.

[Operator]

Thank you. There are no questions in the queue. Please continue.

[Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Great. Thank you everyone for joining and have a good day.

[Igor Khislavsky, Vice President-Investor Relations]

Yes. Have a great rest of the summer everybody. Bye now.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference for today. We thank you for your participation and for using AT&T Executive Teleconference Service. you may now disconnect.