AT&T Inc. 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you and good morning.

Welcome to our third quarter call. I'm Brett Feldman, Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations for AT&T. Joining me on the call today are John Stankey, our Chairman and CEO, and Pascal Desroches, our CFO. We're also joined today by our Deputy CFO, Jennifer Biry. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our Safe Harbor statement. It says that some of our comments today may be forward-looking. As such, they're subject to risks and uncertainties described in AT&T's SEC filings. Results may differ materially. Additional information as well as our earnings materials are available on the investor relations website. With that, I'll turn things over to John.

Thanks, Brett, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today. We continued the momentum we established in the first half of the year, delivering another strong quarter that reflects durable growth from our investment-led strategy. During the quarter, we added over 1 million Advanced Connectivity subscribers from fiber, fixed wireless and postpaid phone, our best quarter in more than four years and our second consecutive quarter with more than 1 million net adds across these services. These are high-quality customer relationships, and we continue to see growth in accounts that select AT&T for both their wireless and internet connectivity. Our improved gains in subscribers and converged accounts are driving strong financial results. In the third quarter, we achieved 3.8% year-over-year growth in consolidated service revenue, our best performance in more than four years.

It was also our second consecutive quarter with adjusted EBITDA growth above 5% and adjusted EPS growth above 20%. Our strong operating and financial performance reflects balanced growth across our portfolio of 5G and fiber services in both the consumer and business sectors. We're achieving these results through consistent execution against our core priorities, which are growing converged customer relationships, operating with greater efficiency, and investing for durable growth and attractive returns. At the end of the third quarter, nearly 43% of our advanced home internet customers also had a postpaid wireless account with AT&T. We added approximately 350,000 customer relationships to our base of converged accounts in the third quarter, which is a faster pace of sequential growth than we achieved in the second quarter.

This includes momentum in territories we acquired from Lumen, where converged penetration has increased by 250 basis points since we closed the transaction in early February. Our fiber reach has never been greater. Our spectrum position has never been stronger, and we're reaching into this large, under-penetrated opportunity with new plans and pricing strategies designed to bring more converged customers onto our network. As we expand our fiber reach, we're using tiered introductory pricing to build penetration and anchor the home early across a wide range of customer cohorts that we can grow our business with over time by attaching wireless and other high-value services and features. With fiber, this is a differentiated and effective go-to-market strategy that we're able to execute efficiently as a result of our local operating scale and owners' economics across 5G and fiber.

We're also removing friction for consumers by constructing plans built around simplicity, transparent value, and convergence by investing in digital experiences that allow customers to do business with us the way they want to and by offering peace of mind through America's Best Guarantee. By continuing to put our service and customer experience at the forefront of our customer value proposition and shunning uneconomical device offers, we are well-positioned to drive durable converged relationships. We saw improved traction with business accounts in the quarter and achieved our second consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in business Advanced Connectivity service revenues. Our performance reflects improved sales execution across direct, indirect, and digital channels, greater penetration of fiber and fixed wireless, and better positioning with business customers that need reliable, secure, and high-capacity converged connectivity across multiple locations.

Our broad and deep fiber network also has us well-positioned to be a leader in AI-grade connectivity. Over 90% of mapped U.S. data centers are within 10 miles of our fiber, and over 80% are within one mile. This is one of the reasons why the nation's leading hyperscalers are working with AT&T to support their rapidly growing high-capacity connectivity needs. This includes AWS, who is using AT&T to connect their locations with high-capacity fiber. We're also working with Microsoft to support its high-capacity needs as AI growth drives demand. These moves are simply foundational to drive sustainable value by layering high-margin services and network intelligence on top of that fiber to connect growing AI workloads across the entire ecosystem, including business endpoints, metro aggregation, and managed multi-vendor cloud ingress and egress. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating.

The strength of our performance comes from the structural advantages we've established after years of consistent and targeted investment. In the dense, urban and suburban areas where we deploy both fiber and 5G infrastructure at scale, we believe that our competitors cannot and will not match our operating proficiency, network performance, or exceptional converged value proposition. By the end of this decade, we expect to operate the most advanced and technologically open communications network in the U.S., built on a foundation of dense, interconnected metro fiber and a nationwide wireless network that I should mention already functions at scale indoors and out. This asset base puts us in a leading position to serve converged consumer and business customers today and well into the future, as AI becomes a key driver of their connectivity needs and requires ever-improving high-performance networking.

Over the past few weeks, we've announced several agreements that further advance our goal of being the leading provider of Advanced Connectivity in the U.S. This includes the launch of our joint venture to help close coverage gaps by making satellite-enabled connectivity easier to deliver where traditional service is limited. We announced an agreement with Global Infrastructure Partners, a part of BlackRock, and CPP Investments to form a JV that includes Gigapower and the fiber assets we acquired from Lumen in order to accelerate fiber deployment outside of our traditional operating territories. We also reached a multi-year agreement with Corning to supply the fiber we need to support our goal of reaching 60 million-plus fiber locations by the end of this decade. We signed an agreement to sell our wireless business in AT&T Mexico.

Combined with our industry-leading capital investment and recent acquisitions of spectrum from EchoStar and fiber from Lumen, these agreements sharpen our U.S. investment focus, strengthen our convergent strategy, and position AT&T to have the leading share in Advanced Connectivity service revenue by the end of the decade. On the cost and simplicity side, we continue to make significant progress in our work to exit less efficient copper-based legacy services. We're putting our customers at the center of this transition, and we're working with them to upgrade to newer, more reliable services like AT&T Phone – Advanced, AT&T Fiber, and Internet Air. Our progress here is picking up momentum, and we now have more than 100 wire centers with no customers supported by legacy services.

This is an industry first at scale, and we're on track to reach our target of discontinuing copper-based services in 50% of our wire centers outside of California by the end of 2027 and substantially all of them by the end of 2029. We still have a lot of work to do here, but we've put ourselves on a path to remove significant cost and complexity as we remove outdated technologies from service. As we accelerate this work, we believe we have a meaningful medium-term opportunity to monetize the copper embedded in our legacy network. As I close, I think many of you are aware that this will be Pascal's final quarterly report.

I know he'll tell you that his tenure has been a relaxing walk in the park and that nearly six years has raced by, but it's fair to say much has been expected of him over this period. It's also fair to say he delivered on those expectations. I could not have asked for a better partner and leader to support the transformation of AT&T's business model. His story is an inspiring story of solid values, quiet determination, respect and care for others, and a daily focus to solve problems on behalf of shareholders and the company. I know I speak for the broader team at AT&T when I say we'll miss his daily presence, but we'll be forever grateful for his leadership and outsized contributions. Now for the final time, Pascal, over to you.

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. At a consolidated level, total revenues in the third quarter were up 5.3% year-over-year, with service revenues growing 3.8%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 5.4% year-over-year, and we achieved an adjusted EBITDA margin of 38.7%. This is our highest third-quarter consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin since we refocused our business on advanced connectivity at the beginning of this decade. We achieved this record despite 12% growth in equipment revenue, which is dilutive to margins. This highlights the continued improvement in our underlying operating leverage as we grow our base of converged customers and achieve efficiencies from our transformation initiatives. For the full year, we continue to expect consolidated service revenues to grow in the low single-digit range and now expect consolidated adjusted EBITDA to grow in the upper portion of the 3% to 4% range.