Verizon Communications Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Yeah, sure. First of all, it's great to see you, and thanks for having me, and thanks, everyone, for being here. I'd also reference the safe harbor that was up there, that I'll be at least talking about the future a little bit, and that always involves risks and uncertainties. I just wanted to point that out. It has been a year. Time flies when you're having a good time. I would say, in general, I'm pretty pleased with the progress that we've made. It's a big company. Those often take time to turn around. There were four things that I really wanted to emphasize when I came in. The first is I wanted the company to stop being overly engineering-focused and really be obsessed with our customer.

I told them I would measure our success on that on two things, was churn going down, because for the last three years, churn has been going up and I wanted to see churn come down. I also wanted to see our net adds, especially on the postpaid phone side, go up. If that happened, I figured we are starting to make progress being customer-obsessed. The second thing is I really felt like the culture at Verizon needed shaking up. We really needed to start to play to win. I am a pretty intense guy. I am very impatient. Verizon is a big company. It is bureaucratic. It is hierarchical. It is process-oriented as opposed to results-oriented. It is very risk-averse, and we were moving very slowly. I was tired of the company being more prey than predator in the market. I basically have a mantra there that every single day matters.

We have almost 100,000 people in the company. We should be doing amazing things every single day, and that intensity, I am beginning to see that in every meeting that I go to. The third thing was I really wanted to redefine our business model. I wanted to become the most efficient telco in the world. In month two, we cut almost 13,000 people. I set what people thought were ambitious OpEx and CapEx targets. They are really not that ambitious, but $5 billion in OpEx savings, $4 billion in CapEx savings, and we will exit the year with over $5 billion in OpEx savings on a run rate basis. I see plenty of opportunity in 2027 and 2028 to continue that. I also felt like we really needed to break through a traditional business model. The business model of most of the carriers, including Verizon, it is very subsidy-focused.

That is how you win customers, that is how you retain customers, by giving away handsets. I felt that really did not need to be the case, that we needed to redefine the rules of competition, and that we could win in the market but be very fiscally responsible. I think you are beginning to see that happen. Finally, the fourth thing is we need to have real serious returns to our investors. For the past five years before I became CEO, our stock was down something like 30%-35%. We had gone from first in market cap to last in market cap. Our forward PE was one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the industry. If you looked at our adjusted EPS free cash flow over the last five years, it compounded at negative 1%.

This year we have guided now to 6%-7% for adjusted EPS, 9%-10% on free cash flow. Our revenues will go from 1.6% in Q1 to we think they will be 4% on mobile and broadband in Q4. We are likely to do three times the amount of postpaid phone net adds that we did a year ago. I would say, in general, I am pleased with the direction of travel. There is a hell of a lot more that we need to do to reach my expectations, but we are on the right track right now.

Yeah. I think we're still relatively at the beginning of our journey of being customer obsessed. I've thrown billions of dollars back into our end-to-end customer experience. Last quarter, we hit an all-time high for customer satisfaction in our consumer division. Everything from the time you walk into a store, from the time you get your first bill, when you call customer service, everything, I want everything to be, I know it can't be this, but I want everything to approach perfection. That's hundreds of things we need to do. That's why you can create real competitive differentiation. We have an initiative inside the company, we call it Every Customer Has a Name, and it basically means we treat you with respect. We treat you like you're a family member, like you're a friend, and that matters to people.

I'm beginning to see churn have been going up for 3 years in a row, now churn is coming down year-over-year. I expect that to continue. Our Simplicity Plans that we put out there, our new value proposition, we spent 6 months in deep customer research before we put those out into the market. I wanted to look at 3 things. I wanted to look at what were customers telling us they wanted in the market? What might competitive response look like? What might our financials look like? What I told the team is, when we put something in the market, I don't expect to see our financials dip, and then we tell everybody, "Don't worry, in a year from now, they're going to go." I want to see continued improvement in all of our metrics.

We spent a ton of time talking to customers, doing deep financial modeling around it. What we saw when we launched is maybe the best launch of a new value proposition that I've been a part of. We put in the market, immediately we saw our net adds go up. We're off to a good, strong start through the quarter right now on our net adds, a lot of it due to our new value proposition. ARPA for those new adds is accretive and going up. The interesting thing about Simplicity is there is no subsidy on that. We are winning in the market and not having to give away free phones to go and do that. That's a big deal when that happens. It's a fundamental change in our business model.

Our cost of acquisition is at three-year lows right now, and that's been going up year-over-year, and we're now seeing that go down consistently, as well as our cost of retention as well.