American Tower Corporation Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Hey, welcome. Nice being with you, Michael, and thanks everyone for attending.

Yeah, it's a great place to start. Certainly, American Tower is a leasing business, a run rate business, so in the near term, we're in really good shape to hit our outlook for 2026, certainly. We always constantly think longer term than that. Being a leasing contracting business, contracts are very important, so we take our time with contracts. We make sure we get those right.

They are not necessarily a here and now type of decision. It is about what is happening with the networks in one year, 2 year, 3 years down the road. Even longer term, we have a great set of tower assets in the U.S. and Europe, complemented by some emerging market assets, high quality assets in the right locations that are critical to the future networks, wireless networks, really broadband networks.

around the world. So protecting that value in the contracting is certainly very important. We do see a few catalysts when you look out over the next few years. You heard Steve talk about those on the call recently. The 5G networks in the U.S. have been deployed. We enjoyed the amendment cycle through that, and now most the carriers are 90%, 95% coverage with the 5G networks. As applications become available and bandwidth goes up, they will come in and densify those networks.

They will be adding capacity to their existing cell sites, those will be amendment cycles for us, by and large. They also will likely turn to densifying the network, which is adding co-locations into their network, so new antenna arrays on towers that they are not currently on.

which should be a revenue enhancement, a revenue cycle for us as well. We do see evidence that build-to-suits in the U.S. are going to be going up. They are going to need to build new towers in the U.S. so that they can use the higher band spectrum across the U.S., filling in places where the high band spectrum today does not reach. That could be an amendment cycle, or a revenue cycle for us over time. So, being well-positioned to make sure we can execute and be in a good position to monetize some of those activities is certainly critical. Another catalyst, we see new spectrum coming down the pike over the next few years on a pretty well-set schedule, almost 800 megahertz of spectrum. As that spectrum gets acquired by the carriers and deployed, those are amendment cycles for us certainly.

6G is, I want to say it's right around the corner. It'll be coming later in this decade. But the one thing that never sleeps, never slows down, never stops, is technology development.

It will be coming on different spectrum with different types of equipment and we're in a really good position with the assets we have around the world to monetize that. And the fourth catalyst that I would highlight here is AI. Not only is it going to change the way we all live and work and communicate and play and entertain ourselves and each other, it fundamentally will change the way the wireless networks work. It'll require the asymmetry that's built into the networks today, which favors downlink. In an AI world, the machines will be sending us data through the uplink- more so than any other technology in the past.

That'll be a fundamental shift in the networks that'll have to be built into the networks, which again, should be amendment cycles for us over time. So we think there's a lot of demand yet to come for our business. We are really well-positioned to execute on that, not only in the U.S., but in Europe and other parts of the world.

And we have the data center business, which is a highly interconnected cloud on-ramp centric network dense set of assets that also benefits from these new technologies. And the fact that humans will be consuming more and more bandwidth over time. That is another constant on the planet, which is, people just consume more and more bandwidth. And with our CoreSite assets, the really well-positioned, high quality tower assets, we are in great position to execute on that. And with all that said, I would say, we do see 2026 as a trough year in terms of organic tenant billings growth on the tower side, as well as- Global?

Yes. Not individually, but in total.

You add it all up, we see that inflecting up in future years. One of the reasons is primarily the absence of the Dish churn going forward. Not only the absence of the Dish churn, but consolidation has happened a lot around the world, and we think churn. On average, over time, the consolidation of our global portfolio is coming down. That means organic tenant billings growth is going up. That's a really important fact for us going forward. Not only do we have these four major catalysts that complement our high-quality tower assets, we know we're going to have less churn across the globe. Again, not in every single region, but when you put it all together, when you have the absence of the reoccurrence of Dish churn and the healing that is happening in Latin America, we're seeing churn elevated this year and last year.