Uniti Group Inc. Common Stock Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

It's a pleasure to be here, Michael. Thank you for having us, as always.

Absolutely. We are about one month past our one-year anniversary, so good memory, Michael, and appreciate you holding us accountable to what we promised then versus what we've delivered on. We said at the time the merger would make us the premier insurgent fiber provider, which really, to us, meant that we were a large fiber provider, where scale matters in the fiber business. We have 250,000 route miles of fiber across the country and over 2 million fiber-to-the-home customers, and both of those are growing at a rapid clip. So we think we've achieved the goal of achieving scale in the fiber business. But insurgent's important because we want to be small enough that we're nimble enough to continue to outmaneuver our larger competitors. That's very important to us in a highly competitive environment like fiber is.

We also promised to clean up the complicated capital structure and MLA relationship that existed between Uniti and Windstream and was a real deterrent on our cost to capital. We promised to clean that up.

collapse the debt silos, and as a result, our cost to capital has improved dramatically. Our cost of debt alone has improved 600 basis points, and we think we've delivered on that. We talked about removing the operational complexity of that MLA relationship and really untethering our teams towards growth. We've not only done that, we've unlocked over $100 million of true operational synergies, so we've hit that goal. We also talked about, at the time, and this seemed a little bit fanciful at the time, but we talked about the real benefit of bringing together the Windstream wholesale business with the Uniti wholesale business and how that would position us really well to capture the hyperscaler and AI investment opportunity. Boy, we're really proven right on that one, and I can't wait to talk more about that today.

That's been a terrific success for us. We talked about really ramping the build at Kinetic.

Prior to the merger, Windstream had really slowed the fiber to the home build, but we felt it was a strategic imperative to ramp that materially, to get ahead of any over-builders and just get ahead of the build cycle that we saw coming, and we're certainly in the middle of. We've ramped that build materially. This last quarter, we built over 140,000 homes, and we're now building 50,000 homes a month, so that run rate is exactly where we want to be. We talked about how the merger would put us on our front foot from an M&A perspective, and how in the past, the two companies separately had been sort of reactive to M&A, and it was challenging. But with the merger, we knew that it would put us on our front foot.

Despite our inability to talk about that publicly, the reality is we are making great progress there, too. All that to say, I think we have delivered on what we promised, and we are continuing to execute every day. I think over the next 12, 18, 24 months, you are going to continue to see terrific execution on our part.

Well, first of all, it is very important to us to set goals that we either hit or exceed, so we give our guidance. I talk about the vanity metrics of revenue and EBITDA, but we also talk about the less exciting metrics of homes passed and penetration and churn, bookings. I think critically important will be that you continue to see us building roughly 50,000 homes a month at Kinetic, and we have been executing on that. When you extrapolate that number, that gets you to 600,000 homes on an annual basis, which is well in excess of what we have guided towards.

As you know, we have guided to 475,000 to 525,000 for the rest of the year. That is exactly where we want to be, a place where we can ramp the build engine higher if we want to, so it becomes more of a capital allocation question.

than it is a build engine question. Secondly, you continue to look for progression and improvement in penetration levels at Kinetic.

We've stated 40% as our goal, terminal penetration goal, and we're currently at around 29%, so we're progressively tracking towards that, including when you look at our most recent cohorts, one-year anniversary of those cohorts, around 35%. So we're really doing extremely well there. We've talked about bringing down fiber churn to what we think could be, should be industry-leading levels. I've said many times you can't sell your way out of a bad churn number, and continue to believe that, so we're going to continue to focus on bringing churn down. And continue to look at strong bookings from fiber infrastructure. So we just posted a record quarter of bookings, $2.2 million of MRR, which is I think 30% better than any previous quarter. That number will ebb and flow as it does in a wholesale fiber business.