Frontier Communications Parent - Q4 2021

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Frontier Communications Q4 2021 earnings conference call. My name is Bethany, and I'll be your operator for today's call. If you would like to register to ask a question during the Q&A session at the end of the presentation, you may do so by pressing Star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, you can press star two. I will now hand the call over to Spencer Kurn, Head of Investor Relations. Spencer, over to you.

Spencer Kurn (Head of Investor Relations)

Good morning, and welcome to Frontier Communications Q4 2021 earnings call. This is Spencer Kurn, Frontier's Head of Investor Relations, and joining me on the call today is John Stratton, Executive Chairman of the Board, Nick Jeffery, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Scott Beasley, Chief Financial Officer. Today's presentation can be followed within the webcast and is available in the Webcast and Events section of our investor relations website. Let me now refer you to slide two, which contains our safe harbor disclaimer, and remind you that this conference call may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed today. In addition, during this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures which are defined and reconciled in our earnings presentation, press release, and trending schedule. With that, I'll turn the call over to John.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's discussion. Our business continues to be well-positioned to win in key markets, and we continue to execute on a unique opportunity to create significant shareholder value. We have a strong foundation of fiber assets and infrastructure, a significant customer base, and strong competitive positioning. In the last 12 months, we've generated $6.4 billion of revenue and $2.5 billion of adjusted EBITDA, which represents a 39% adjusted EBITDA margin. Driving this performance are our 2.8 million broadband customers across both consumer and commercial businesses. As we've said before, fiber is the future of Frontier. $1.1 billion of our EBITDA in the last 12 months have been generated by our fiber products, and we're investing to grow our fiber EBITDA rapidly.

We have approximately 400,000 businesses within 250 feet of our fiber network and over 23,000 towers within one mile of our fiber. As we continue to build out our network, we expect to grow and convert these attractive in-footprint opportunities. Onto slide five, looking back to review 2021, we made significant progress on our transformation at Frontier. It began when Nick Jeffery joined in March, and we recruited a talented new board of directors with high levels of subject matter expertise across key areas, including digital transformation, brand development, capital investment, operational efficiency, and telecom strategy. We emerged from bankruptcy at the end of April and listed on the Nasdaq exchange on May fourth. We refocused the company around a simple but powerful purpose, building Gigabit America.

At our Investor Day in August, we announced our accelerated build plan to reach 10 million locations with fiber by 2025. The Q3 was the first full quarter at Frontier for most of our executive team. Since that new team has been in place, we've consistently set new records on growing our fiber footprint and our broadband customer base. In addition, just yesterday, we launched 2 gigabit-per-second broadband speeds across our entire fiber network. We believe it's a very compelling offer with a large suite of value-added services, which positions us extremely well to provide the absolute best broadband service to satisfy our customers' growing demand for faster data speeds. There are several inflection points that will be critical to our transformation, and we've discussed these as our key indicators of success throughout the process.

The core driver of our business is broadband customer growth, which is ultimately what will drive revenue, EBITDA, and free cash flow growth. Rapidly expanding our fiber footprint is the first critical step in achieving broadband customer growth. We executed on accelerating the pace of our build in the Q2 of 2021, almost immediately after our new management team began to form. In the Q3 of 2021, we demonstrated that we could accelerate the pace of fiber broadband net adds, and we reached the point where our fiber broadband customers overtook our copper broadband customer base. In the Q4 of 2021, we grew our fiber broadband net adds in excess of our copper broadband losses, reaching the key inflection point in total broadband customer growth. We expect that these three critical inflection points will soon drive inflection points in our financial metrics.

While we still face headwinds from legacy products, we expect to drive sequential EBITDA growth for the total company in late 2022 and drive year-over-year revenue and EBITDA growth in 2023. We remain encouraged by the long-term secular tailwinds behind our fiber-centric strategy. Demand for high-speed broadband is increasing at an accelerating pace. Between 2020 and 2025, usage is expected to triple, and fiber is clearly the best product to meet this rising demand. Fiber's performance is vastly superior to cable today, with 34% faster download speeds, roughly 18 times faster upload speeds, and 42% lower latency level than cable.

We're seeing the demand in real time across our network. In January of this year, our average fiber broadband customer consumed 828 GB of data on our 500 Mbps speed tier and 1.1 TB of data on our 1 Gbps speed tier, representing increases of more than 30% since pre-pandemic levels across both speed tiers. We're uniquely positioned to capitalize on these demand trends with a 20% cost advantage in building fiber and a clear low-cost path to extending our leadership in broadband to 10 gigabits service and beyond. We're encouraged that the government is aligned with our purpose of building Gigabit America. The government has already passed legislation that will drive an estimated 5-6 times increase in broadband stimulus over the next few years.

We believe that government funding should be targeted at the locations that would be uneconomic to pass with private capital alone. We've been active in existing government programs within our footprint and will remain active as funds related to the broadband infrastructure bill are released. Importantly, I'd like to reaffirm our commitment to ESG as we build the future backbone of our nation's connectivity infrastructure. This commitment aligns well with growing pools of capital directed at ESG investments. We continue to invest in products that connect underserved communities and rural areas in our footprint, helping to bridge the digital divide. We're committed to creating a safe, healthy, and inclusive workplace in which our people can thrive. We're also committed to investing in the communities where our employees live and work. We recognize our responsibility as stewards of the environment and our opportunity to lead on sustainability in the industry.

Fiber is a passive technology that uses less energy than competing technologies like cable. As we upgrade our copper network to fiber, we'll be on a path to reduce our greenhouse gas footprint significantly. Lastly, we're committed to modeling the highest standards of governance. We have a board with diverse backgrounds and relevant experiences and skills, with separate chairman and CEO roles. We have implemented comprehensive compliance and ethics programs, and we have built a pay-for-performance compensation philosophy into our executive compensation programs. We look forward to providing more details on our ESG commitments as we continue to make progress on our ESG journey. We've built our strategy around four key levers of value creation. Expanding our fiber footprint is at the core of our strategy. We plan to accelerate our fiber deployment to be able to reach over 10 million homes by the end of 2025.

Along with growing our footprint, we'll be launching new best-in-market products to meet customer demands and increase penetration in our fiber footprint. Now, how we engage with customers is also critical to our success. Our goal is to deliver an exceptional experience throughout all of our interactions with customers. Lastly, we continue to identify opportunities to simplify how we operate and focus our operations across all parts of the company. I'll now turn the call over to Nick to review how we performed against these initiatives in the Q3. Nick?

Nick Jeffery (President and CEO)

Thanks, John. Before I get started, I want to acknowledge that many analysts and investors have said that Frontier is an execution story. On this call, we're going to go deeper into the key actions that have contributed to our strong results. In Q4, our team executed extremely well against our strategic priorities. We built a record of 192,000 new fiber locations, reaching our target of 4 million total fiber locations at the end of 2021. We added a record 45,000 fiber broadband customer net additions, which is nearly a five-fold increase over the same period a year ago, and a 50% increase compared with our previous record from last quarter. Our fiber net adds this quarter were greater than our copper losses, resulting in positive total broadband net adds for the first time in more than five years.

We earned record high net promoter scores and record low churn, both across fiber and copper. Importantly, our fiber NPS turned positive for the first time ever this quarter. Just yesterday, we launched the first and only network-wide 2 gigabit per second symmetrical fiber service, which further extends our leadership in offering the best possible broadband products in our market. Moving to our first strategic initiative, fiber deployment. On slide 12, our fiber deployment continues to increase, and we built fiber to a record 192,000 locations this quarter. To put the year into perspective, we passed six times the number of locations in 2021 that we passed in 2020. Our team has demonstrated our ability to accelerate our fiber build and to do so within our established cost target, while also navigating global supply chains and COVID-related disruptions.

We're excited to continue accelerating our build to reach 1 million-plus locations in 2022. This will put us at 5 million fiber locations by the end of 2022 and on pace to reach our previously announced target of 10 million fiber locations by the end of 2025. With all the disruption that I just mentioned, I'd like to reflect on the foundation that we've established throughout 2021, which gives us conviction in our ability to accelerate our fiber build and enhance network performance over the coming years. We expanded our pool of suppliers for both labor and material, providing us with the redundancy if any particular supplier has issues at a given point in time. We secured multiyear agreements with key partners to secure supply while meeting cost targets, and we've improved our permitting processes to reduce our time to market.

We continue to push the boundaries on fiber technology with our industry-leading trial of 25 gigabits per second broadband speed. With our fiber wheel humming, I'd like to touch on our second strategic initiative, fiber penetration. We've made incredible progress in consumer broadband this year, simply by focusing on getting the basics right. We've streamlined our offers to three clearly defined price tiers designed to provide the fastest speed, best value, and best performance, all while eliminating organizational complexity and customer confusion. We enhanced our industry-leading broadband product with value-added services like Hero, YouTube TV, and DIRECTV STREAM to relieve critical pain points for our customers. We established digital customer acquisition capabilities through our partnership with Red Ventures.

Not only do these capabilities open a previously untapped channel through which we can acquire customers, but also our consumer eCard, AI-powered A/B testing, and mix optimization analytics enable more effective customer targeting, resulting in higher customer additions at a lower cost. Lastly, our brand was arguably tarnished before we began implementing our new strategy. We've already seen a sharp increase in net promoter scores with fiber NPS up 33 points since January 2021 and turning positive for the first time ever this quarter. All of these improvements have driven a sharp increase in fiber broadband customer net activation. We added a record 44,000 consumer fiber broadband customers this quarter, driving an acceleration in our fiber broadband customer growth to nearly 8% year-over-year.

To put this into perspective, we are the only fixed broadband provider in our footprint to have higher net adds this quarter than last quarter, which truly underscores our ability to gain market share as we continue to improve on all of the initiatives that I described on the prior slide. On slide 17, we look more deeply into our fiber broadband customer base. We showed that we didn't just gain customers from deploying fiber into low penetrated markets, but we also gained customers in our mature fiber markets or what we refer to as our base fiber footprint. In our base fiber footprint, penetration increased 40 basis points sequentially to nearly 42%. Again, this represents a sequential increase in net adds, whereas all of our competitors showed decline.

Our base fiber footprint serves as a target for where we expect to drive penetration in our expansion fiber footprint, and we expect to steadily grow penetration to at least 45% over time. Our 2020 expansion cohort continued to outperform our expectations with penetration of 22% at the 12-month mark. Last quarter, this metric was 13%, but we cautioned that it represented a small sample size of just 26,000 locations. Bringing in another 60,000 locations this quarter, which is more representative of a scaled build, penetration for our 2020 build cohort reached 22% at the 12-month mark, which outperformed our target penetration of 15%-20%. We continue to expect penetration of 25%-30% at the 24-month mark and to rise further from there towards our terminal penetration of 45%.

Our existing 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps consumer offering with symmetrical upload and download speed and lower latency were already superior to cable. Our recent launch of 2 Gbps speeds across our entire fiber network further extends our network advantage. With 2 Gbps services, we will enable next-generation experiences such as augmented and virtual reality, cloud-based gaming, and multiple 8K TV streams. We're including a suite of value-added services to customers that opt into our 2 gig service, such as My Premium Tech and Multi-Device Security. Our 2 Gbps launch is a big step forward for Frontier, and we plan to continue rolling out faster speeds over time and already in advance planning to launch a 5-10 Gbps ultra-high-speed offering.

Our 10 gig speeds will revolutionize how broadband can be used, including advanced digital healthcare procedures such as telesurgical operations and supporting the widespread use of hologram-like 3D video conferencing. At the same time as we improve our Consumer segment, we're also making significant progress in turning around our Business and Wholesale segments. In SMB, we took a complex offer with generic marketing campaigns and limited ways to engage with customers to a simple three-tier attractively priced offer with specific tailored marketing campaigns which expanded channels to reach more customers that are likely to engage with us, and a proactive strategy to migrate fiber-eligible copper customers to fiber.

In enterprise, we took an undefined coverage model with outdated products and fragmented sales operations to a refined segmentation and coverage model to focus on the highest potential value customers. A simplified portfolio focused on strategic products and a robust CRM platform to optimize sales operations and customer management. In wholesale, we took a declining business that lacked key relationships to a multi-year strategic agreement with AT&T to improve our win share in enterprise and fiber-to-the-tower customers. Taken together, these actions are already showing early signs of improvement, and we aim to take share of an estimated $8 billion market opportunity within our footprint. Now, we still have a long way to go to further differentiate our business with best-in-class products, value-added services, and industry-leading partnerships. Please stay tuned for more updates here, which we'll cover in future earnings calls.

Now I'd like to move on to our next strategic initiative, the customer experience. I've often said that there is no single silver bullet to improve the customer experience, and that it requires hundreds and even thousands of small changes rooted in attention to detail and a determined execution across the business to quickly remove these pain points. We made enormous progress on transforming the customer experience this year. We took inconsistent paper bills and have radically simplified them, making them paperless and introducing autopay, which significantly improves the customer lifetime value. We took our manual customer communications operations and streamlined our IVR, automated and simplified our SMS and email communications, and introduced a whole range of customer self-help tools, which have increased customer satisfaction while lowering call center volumes by 20%. We introduced next day install across our footprint to reduce cancellations arising from long installations.

Instead of requiring technicians to pick up or our customers to drop off equipment, we simplified and automated the return process with a mail-in option and a simple QR code. The improvements made in 2021 are already, which I'll speak to in just a minute. It's important to keep in mind that we're still at an early stage in our transformation. Customer care is a constantly evolving mission for us. Our executive team meets for two hours every single week to review all aspects of the customer journey and build clear, actionable plans to constantly refining, automating, and simplifying our systems and processes for interacting with customers and rigorously measuring our progress as we go. Now, onto the excellent initiatives. Our fiber net promoter score increased 33 points from January to December of 2021 and turned positive for the first time ever in November.

In 2022, and importantly, shorter tenure customers have significantly higher NPS scores than longer tenure customers, which suggests that our overall NPS scores have a long way to run as we grow our customer base. Additionally, broadband churn across both fiber and copper customers continues to fall, each down more than 20 basis points versus the Q4 last year. Churn tends to be higher for the first 90 days of a customer's life cycle than it is across the total customer base, so early churn is an important metric that we track internally to measure customer satisfaction.

Ninety-day churn continues to be down 30% since the same period last year and down 25% since March of this year, which indicates that the changes we are making to the customer experience are driving real results across the business. I'll now turn the call over to Scott to run through our Q4 financial performance and our performance against our fourth strategic pillar of operational efficiency.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. As I have done on the last several calls, in order to more clearly describe the performance of our business versus previous time periods, I will reference pro forma numbers in 2020 that have been adjusted for fresh start accounting changes. Turning to results on slide 24, revenue was $1.54 billion in the quarter, driven by roughly flat sequential data revenue but lower voice revenue. We earned $189 million of net income and $585 million of adjusted EBITDA. $273 million of our adjusted EBITDA came from fiber products. This was roughly flat year-over-year as strong consumer fiber broadband growth offset declines in voice and other.

We generated $468 million of cash from operations in the quarter, helping to add to our strong liquidity. Turning to slide 25, our total revenue declined 6% this quarter, consistent with declines from last quarter. Fiber revenue declined 1% year-over-year as consumer broadband revenue growth of 11% and business broadband revenue growth of 8% were offset by declines in video, voice, and other. Two notes on fiber revenue. First, Q4's year-over-year consumer fiber broadband ARPU growth of 4% was in line with our long-term expectations of 3%-4% ARPU growth. ARPU declined slightly sequentially as we introduced two strategic initiatives in the second half of the year, our $5 autopay discount and gift cards for new customers. Both are value-creating initiatives that will be a headwind to ARPU growth for a couple of quarters.

We do not expect these to be material headwinds to ARPU growth once we lap these impacts in the second half of 2022. Second, as I mentioned on the last several calls, we made the decision to stop marketing video to new customers in early 2021, which has contributed to revenue declines but has had minimal impact on profit due to high content costs. Copper revenue growth was flat sequentially at -9%, as both consumer and business faced expected headwinds. In 2022, we expect fiber revenue growth to accelerate into positive territory as the year progresses, driven by strong growth in consumer fiber and stabilization in business and wholesale. We expect copper declines to moderate slightly as our customer experience initiatives take hold, but we still expect overall declines in copper due to legacy product headwinds.

As a final note on revenue, the Q4 was the final quarter where we received subsidy revenue from the CAF II program. While we expect to be an active participant in the recently announced $43 billion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, these funds are unlikely to be significant in 2022. Therefore, we expect a range of $10 million-$20 million of subsidy revenue per quarter in 2022, with Q1 as the low point because of delayed timing of several awards. Turning to slide 26, total EBITDA declined 13% this quarter, again driven by declines in copper. Fiber EBITDA was roughly flat year-over-year, as strong consumer fiber broadband growth and margin improvements were offset by revenue declines in voice and other. Frontier is a fiber first company.

Fiber represents 54% of our adjusted EBITDA and will increasingly drive the growth trajectory of the overall company. Copper EBITDA declined consistent with our expectations, and we expect sequential declines to moderate over the next several quarters as a result of our improved customer experience. Turning to slide 28, our Fit for the Future program remains on track to exceed our initial goal of $250 million of gross annual cost savings by 2023. When we kicked off the program this past summer, we set out to achieve $25 million of gross run rate cost savings in 2021. I'm pleased to note that we have already surpassed that number and realized more than $90 million of gross annualized cost savings, with more than $40 million in year savings captured in 2021.

This puts us on track to exceed our long-term goals, and I am encouraged by our culture of simplification as we continue to identify areas of efficiency throughout our organization. On slide 29, I'll highlight four key simplification initiatives that will help free up stranded cash as well as structurally lower our cost base. The first is divesting non-productive real estate. We have identified an opportunity to consolidate and exit over 30 locations in our administrative footprint, representing more than 1 million sq ft of office space. In 2021 alone, we sold 18 properties for cash proceeds of $42 million, giving us a solid start towards our goal of achieving at least $150 million of proceeds by 2023. The second initiative was the closure of our retail stores in order to meet the shift in consumer preferences towards digital engagement.

In the second half of 2021, we closed more than 50 retail stores, allowing us to redeploy our attention into more efficient forms of customer interaction. The third initiative was the sale of our CPE business, which did not align with our strategy of focusing on higher margin core connectivity services. We closed this sale in Q4. The CPE divestiture will reduce annual revenues by roughly $50 million, but will have minimal impact on EBITDA. Lastly, we have transformed our procurement team and processes to help drive simplification across our supplier base. Under a newly centralized team, we have diversified our labor and material supplier base for our fiber build, while at the same time consolidating our overall vendor base.

Our actions in procurement have already led to more efficient supplier relationships with lower costs and better reliability, and we are still in the early stages of this transformation. We'll move to capital allocation on slide 30. The underlying cash flow generation of the business remains strong. We generated $468 million in net cash from operating activities in the Q4. We're committed to managing our balance sheet in a disciplined manner with net leverage in the mid threes. Finally, we are committed to rigorous capital allocation decision-making. Our fiber builds will be the primary focus of capital allocation over the next several years. Our projected build cost per location that we have communicated to you over the last few quarters, $900-$1,000 from 2022 to 2025, remains unchanged.

Including the roughly $1 billion of debt that we raised in October, we ended 2021 with $2.1 billion in cash and $529 million of available capacity on our revolver, totaling $2.6 billion of liquidity to fund our fiber build and normal operations. In addition to this strong liquidity, we also have ample balance sheet flexibility. Our net leverage remained low at 2.4 times at the end of the quarter, giving us healthy headroom under our mid-threes net leverage target. We do not have any significant maturities earlier than 2027. This maturity timeline provides us a clear runway throughout our wave two fiber build. Additionally, as a result of our build plan, we do not expect to be a significant federal cash taxpayer throughout wave two.

As I stated before, we will pursue a disciplined financial policy that will enable us to manage the range of economic scenarios. I'll now turn to our 2022 financial guidance. For 2022, we expect capital expenditures of $2.4 billion-$2.5 billion. The increase versus 2021's $1.7 billion is primarily driven by the acceleration of our fiber build, where we expect to pass at least 1 million new locations in 2022. Additionally, we expect higher success-based CapEx as we connect more customers to fiber across consumer, business, and wholesale. Two other notes on CapEx. First, we expect our build cadence throughout 2022 to follow a typical seasonal pattern, with the better weather quarters of Q2 and Q3 at a faster pace than the winter quarters of Q1 and Q4.

Additionally, as we are accelerating our build from 2022 into 2023, we will have CapEx in the latter part of this year that is pulled forward from 2023 for material and build costs related to locations that will not be open for sale until 2023. We displayed a similar trend in the latter part of 2021. Next, we expect adjusted EBITDA of $2.0 billion-$2.15 billion. Our outlook assumes a loss of roughly $275 million of revenue and EBITDA related to subsidies versus 2021. By the end of the year, we expect an inflection point in EBITDA as we return to sustained EBITDA growth.

The loss of subsidy-related revenue and EBITDA will result in a sequential step down in margins of approximately 350 basis points from Q4 of 2021 into Q1 of 2022, but we expect this to be the low point in margins for the year. We expect margins to be flat to up for the first three quarters of 2022 before inflecting more significantly in the latter part of the year. I'll now close by bringing the Frontier investment thesis all together. First, there is strong and growing demand for fiber, driven by expanding household data consumption. As John mentioned in his opening remarks, we are seeing rapid increases in data consumption across our network, and as new use cases emerge, we expect these trends will continue.

Fiber is a superior product for a number of reasons, including symmetrical upload and download speeds that far exceed cable's capability, lower cost of ownership driven by fiber's passive technology, and lower latency levels that enables important uses like video conferencing and gaming. We have a clear strategy and purpose. We are building Gigabit America to connect Americans to the digital economy. We have ample liquidity and a strong balance sheet, providing us with access to capital to fund our strategy. Last, we've attracted a strong and experienced leadership team who are singularly focused on executing our four-part strategic plan. I'll now turn the call over to Spencer to open up the line for questions.

Spencer Kurn (Head of Investor Relations)

Thanks, Scott. Operator, we're now ready for Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, you can press star two, and when preparing to ask your question, please ensure you are unmuted locally. The first question comes from Philip Cusick at J.P. Morgan. Phil, please go ahead.

Philip Cusick (Research Analsyt)

Hey, guys. Thank you. Two things first. Maybe first talk about the confidence in maintaining positive subscriber momentum from here. You've talked about copper churn coming down, fiber momentum increasing. Should we look for positive net adds each quarter going forward?

Spencer Kurn (Head of Investor Relations)

Yeah. Phil, do you want us to go one by each, or do you wanna, provide both questions, and we'll figure out which one we would prefer to answer first?

Philip Cusick (Research Analsyt)

Okay. Second question is, can you give us an update on the wave three progress? Is this a situation where you're building books now and maybe look for a sale later in the year, or are we not that far along? Thank you.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Yeah. Great. Thanks, Phil. It's John. I'm gonna ask Nick to take the question about subscriber momentum, and then maybe, Nick, I'll hand it over to you.

Nick Jeffery (President and CEO)

Yeah. Great. Thanks, Phil. Good question. I think if I step back a little bit from the question of momentum and look at it from a what have we been doing on fundamentals over the last year as we built the new team, we very systematically, as we've said on previous earnings calls, focused on operational execution of the basics. You know, we've simplified our pricing to make ourselves competitive at an entry level and ARPU accretive at a 1 gig and now 2 gig level. We have put in place hundreds, if not thousands, of operational changes to make the customer experience better. We've implemented new channels, improved customer communications, improved brand communications, all of which is a build-up to the results you're seeing here.

I've got every expectation that we'll continue to make those operational improvements, continue to execute well, and therefore, we'll see market momentum where, you know, again, if we take a step back, we're now, I believe, gaining market share in all of our fiber markets against every single one of our competitors. That isn't a moment in time or an aberration. That's the result of strong operational execution across many, many dimensions, and I think we'll see that carry forward into the future.

Spencer Kurn (Head of Investor Relations)

Yeah. Thanks, Nick. Phil, to your question about wave three, you know, one of the things that our naming convention, wave one, wave two, wave three, almost suggests is that it's a sequential pattern. You know, you do one, then you do the other, then you do the third. In fact, wave three is running simultaneous with the work that we're doing on wave two. Just for better detail, when we announced in August 2021 our intentions to build to a total of 10 million homes by the end of 2025. I think we surprised the market a bit in the size of that build and the pace with which it would be accomplished, but that was basically our wave two announcement.

It was this 6 million additional homes from the 4 million we intended to have at the end of 2021. Those were for us the no doubt about it, pin back your ears and just go as hard and as fast as you can. That is well underway. You know, the wave three, which is the balance of our passing, the last 5 million locations are being worked simultaneously. You know, we're progressing actually quite well, and it's a matter of working through the specifics of those locations to determine the best approach to either build it out. You know, is there an opportunity to partner? Is there some divestiture? What is the mix of solutions that allows you to optimize value there?

This is something that we're working on in the next couple of quarters. We'll expect to be more specific. We'll come to the market with an explanation of precisely what we plan to do with that remaining 5 million households. It's not gonna be after we finish wave two, but rather very much here shortly this year.

Philip Cusick (Research Analsyt)

Got it. Thanks, guys.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Okay. Thanks, Phil.

Nick Jeffery (President and CEO)

Thanks, Phil. Operator, we'll take our next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Jonathan Chaplin at New Street. Jonathan, your line is open.

Jonathan Chaplin (Managing Partner)

Thanks. Two questions from me as well, if I may. The NPS improvement that you guys reported is stunning. It took Comcast and T-Mobile about four years to generate an NPS improvement of that magnitude. Does the improvement that you've seen with the brand that you've got obviate the need for a new brand, at least at the product level, or is that something that's still in the works? On the opportunity with stimulus funding for closing the broadband divide, I agree with the comment that you made at the beginning of the call that to get this done, you need to attract private capital alongside stimulus money, and that it should be focused on markets with no broadband today.

When, during the course of this year, do you think your discussions with the states will have progressed to a point where you've got clarity on how the biggest, most important states in your footprint are gonna handle the allocation of the stimulus money? Thanks.

Nick Jeffery (President and CEO)

Yes. Jonathan, it's Nick here. Perhaps I'll take the first of these, and John, you could pick up the second. First of all, Jonathan, thank you for your observation on the speed of our NPS turnaround. I have to say we are and I am very pleased with the progress we've made. I think it's also fair just for transparency and honesty's sake to say that we are coming off a low base, of course. Look, why have we been able to move it so far so quickly? I think a big part of that is the leadership team that we've put together. It's a very experienced leadership team.

At the risk of sounding a bit like the techs, and I'm fast becoming, this isn't the first NPS horse we've ridden. We've taken a lot of time to really deconstruct the underlying drivers of NPS, of which you'll know there are many hundreds, and figure out the ones that really make the biggest difference to our customers, and then bring all of our operational expertise to bear on the small number of things that really make a big difference to our customers. Sure enough, mathematically, we're seeing the flow through from that into improved NPS. I would say I'm pleased with the progress we made. I'd also say we're at the beginning of that journey. There is still a long way to go.

Now, I'm encouraged by the fact that the NPS of our newer customers is also higher on average than the NPS of our base or legacy market customers, which is also improving by the way. The fact that we're building at a very aggressive rate means that we've probably got some NPS upside to see into the future as well as we have more new customers relative to our base customers. We continue, you know, the weekly focus on driving improvement actions inch by inch, yard by yard and mile by mile. That's what we're gonna continue doing. Good progress, a lot more to be done, but really based in the science of understanding the drivers of NPS and then strong operational execution.

Now how that reads across into brand is a great link, and I'm glad you made it, because as we've said on previous earnings calls, you know, a brand is what a brand does. So our effort is to completely focus on what the brand is doing. That would suggest from the early results that the brand is repairable and indeed is repairing quite rapidly. You'll also see from our launch of our national network-wide 2-gigabit service yesterday, that we're experimenting now with some new brand tonality, let's just say. New color palette, new fonts and so on to make the brand more modern, more relevant, more tech oriented, and more appealing to wider segments of the market.

We'll be monitoring that very closely as we come to the wider decision on what do we do with the brand and the name in the future. That's a decision we'll be taking to our board in coming quarters.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Yeah, maybe if I can, John, I'm just gonna build on Nick's point here. You know, one of the most important things for any leadership team, and particularly a new one, is not the words that they say, but what they do. And what I would say, just you know, observing Nick and his beginnings at Frontier, the very first recurring meetings that he put on the calendar was a very close review of what was broken in the business, what were the issues that were causing customer pain, and it's literally every week with every member of his senior team. As new leaders joined the company in the last six, seven months of 2021, you know, they recognized that this was the number one priority for the CEO, and therefore it became important to them as well.

I think that cascades a message, and a very positive shadow out to the organization about why this is important, why it matters. I would also say that, as Nick described, it was very negative. The first thing is the improvement is coming off an insanely low base. What that reflects also is we were just going out of our way to break the promise that we made to our customers to do things that would really irritate them. Moving to a point where you're no longer doing that gets you to neutral buoyancy. What I'm most excited about is we're now breaking into clearly positive territory, and you see that continuing to grow.

The ambition for the firm is to not be just okay here, not just to be at neutral point, but rather to be a leader in terms of how consumers view the way the business values their business. Anyway, good progress there, and hopefully we'll continue. You asked a question about stimulus funding. We think this is really important. You know, this mission of building digital America is something we talk about all the time inside the company and out to the market. Yet, in some parts of the United States, it's very difficult for private companies to create those networks in an economical way.

This notion that there is some level of funding subsidization at the federal and state level is something I think that will help us to heal this continuing divide. It's complicated, and I think the rules of engagement, both at the federal and state level, are still being worked. Our expectations, this probably is a very late 2022 into 2023 reality in terms of a meaningful flow of subsidies into the market. Scott can speak more to the specific numbers that we have built in here. Our thought process is this is a 2023 and onwards in terms of it becoming something that starts to scale and really address this opportunity that's in front of us.

We will be active in terms of our participation in those processes in the states that we do business. Hopefully we'll see our fair share or better outcome in terms of our success in whatever auction process is put in place.

Jonathan Chaplin (Managing Partner)

Okay. Thanks, John. Thanks, guys.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Operator, we'll take our next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Brett Feldman at Goldman Sachs. Brett, your line is open.

Brett Feldman (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks. Just two. First, you know, Scott, you talked about the company's strong balance sheet and liquidity position, but it certainly looks like you are inevitably gonna wanna go raise some additional capital to complete the wave two build. I was hoping you could share your current thinking around timing and some of the financing options that are gonna be available to the company. I'm curious whether your assessment of your wave three options, if one of the objectives there is to use the wave three portion of your footprint maybe as a tool for financing the wave two build out, or if those are distinct processes.

On wholesale, I just wanna clarify, are we at the point where some of the pressures you experienced because of the repricing are fully in that quarterly run rate we've seen as we were exiting 2021? Maybe bigger picture, you obviously have the strategic agreement with AT&T. How are you thinking about the opportunity to add more strategic wholesale partners as we move into this year? Thank you.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Sure. Brett, this is Scott. Thanks for the question. On your first one about funding, so we did our $1 billion debt offering in October, which positions us very well until mid-2023. Then for the rest of wave two, beyond mid-2023, we said we have a wide range of options, some of which you mentioned. First, we have internal cash flow, including the Fit for the Future cost savings and real estate dispositions. We have potential government funding, that John mentioned as part of the $42 billion infrastructure bill. Wave three presents a range of options. Then we do have access to additional new capital if we need it.

Overall, a really solid range of options for funding beyond mid 2023, and we'll continue to evaluate those and update you all as we can. On your second question on wholesale and the cadence of that in 2022, we still do have a bit of headwind in 2022, at least through the first several quarters in wholesale due to contracts that we lost prior to this management team. They're still flowing through. Then the repricing that we announced late last year, some of those impact 2022. Bit of a headwind through the year, but by the end of the year, we expect wholesale and business to be stabilized and then returning to growth by the end of 2022.

Brett Feldman (Equity Research Analyst)

Just in terms of additional opportunities in the market for wholesale partners?

Scott Beasley (CFO)

We do think there are, yes. We signed obviously a big strategic agreement. We think there are other opportunities with other carriers. John mentioned the stats on the number of towers in our fiber footprint. Carriers will continue to add towers and, I think we're very well positioned to win more than our fair share there.

Brett Feldman (Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Thanks, Brett. Operator, we'll take our next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Greg Williams at Cowen. Greg, your line is open.

Greg Williams (Senior Analyst)

Great, thanks. I have two questions, if I may. You posted solid fiber broadband, and you pre-announced it, and you did mention low churn. I'm just trying to understand how much of the fiber wins was migration from your existing DSL subscribers versus outright stealing share. Second question just on Altice. They announced an aggressive fiber to the home plan, particularly in settlement territories and a few Texas territories. Do you have a sense of the overlap in your footprint, specifically that Texas territory? Thanks.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Sure, Greg, I'll take the first question. So we did have very solid fiber broadband net adds in Q4, 45,000. We said the vast majority of those were new to Frontier, so either share that we won against competitors or new household formation. We did have really healthy migration from our copper base that provides a nice base load, and you know, that's usually the first set of customers that you seek to address because you own the customer relationship, and it's easier to migrate them. The vast majority of the customers in Q4 were new to Frontier. I'd also point out while we're on that note that we had healthy growth in both the base markets and the expansion markets, and we talked through those dynamics in the prepared remarks, but real healthy base of growth there.

The second question on Altice's overlap. Across our entire footprint, there's a 6%-9% overlap with Altice, so it's not our largest competitive overlap. We don't have perfect clarity as to their build. I think your question was on where their builds will be. Obviously, we don't have clarity there, but they have about a 6%-9% overlap overall.

Greg Williams (Senior Analyst)

Got it. Thank you.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Thanks, Greg. Operator, we'll take our next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Frank Louthan at Raymond James. Frank, your line is open.

Frank Louthan (Analyst)

Great, thank you. Just wanted to talk on the cost savings. How much of that is coming from headcount? Have you done any RIFs since the last earnings call? Then, the follow-up, are the 1 million homes that you're targeting for this year, is that in line with the expectations for 2022 that you laid out at the Analyst Day? Thanks.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Yeah. Let me take your first question on cost savings. A very small portion of it is related to headcount. We haven't had any significant headcount reduction since the last earnings call. As we continue to get more productive, you know, we'll likely have a lower employee base per customer. But the vast majority of it is from non-operational initiatives to lower our structural cost base, whether it's real estate rationalization, energy efficiency, becoming more efficient in our fleet. That's where the vast majority of cost savings are coming from.

Nick Jeffery (President and CEO)

Yeah. Scott, thanks. It's Nick here. Frank, if I can perhaps pick up the second part of that question, perhaps build a little bit also, Scott, on your answer. You're quite right, of course. The majority of the cost savings come from us being operationally more efficient and executing well against those plans. On headcount, it is also true, of course, that we're gonna need to re-profile our headcount base. As we become more digital, more tech oriented, with stronger distribution, stronger branding, stronger marketing skills, there'll be a natural reprofiling of our workforce. Within the overall envelope of increased efficiency that Scott's talked about. In terms of the 1 million homes passed being in line with our expectations, the short answer is yes, absolutely in line with our plans and what we previously announced.

Frank Louthan (Analyst)

All right, great. Thank you.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Thanks, Frank. Operator, we'll take our next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Simon Flannery at Morgan Stanley. Simon, your line is open.

Simon Flannery (Analyst)

Great. Thanks a lot. Good morning. Just following up on Frank's question there. On the 1 million homes, what's the ability or what's the focus on potentially accelerating the pacing? Because you're looking to take that up to 1.6, 1.7 over the next couple of years. Clearly, you've mentioned several times the broadband, the infrastructure fund money that, you know, you'll be looking for, but so will others. Presumably, you've got fixed wireless rollouts ramping as well. Is there an opportunity here to perhaps compress some of this build-out plan and get the opportunity and the market share quicker? I guess that ties into the it's good to hear that we haven't really talked a lot about supply chain and cost inflation on this call, but any perspective there would be great.

Nick Jeffery (President and CEO)

Yeah. Simon, thanks. It's Nick here. So yes, the one million homes we say we're gonna build this year is in line with our plan. If you perhaps wind back to I think our second earnings call, when we announced our plans to accelerate our build to 10 million homes and do it by you know 2025 in a very rapid timeframe, I think there were two things that perhaps stood out from that. One is the scale of the build and lots of ambition early on before frankly everyone else was also talking about building fiber. The second is the speed with which we are planning to do it.

We really recognize the value of a fast build and have built an operational team and an operational engine to go as fast as we can. Now, we need to do that in a balanced way. We need to make sure that it's sustainable accelerated growth because the last thing we want to do is build up resources for one or two quarters, then have to take them down in a following one or two quarters. Sustainable acceleration of our build is exactly what we're targeting and to go as fast as we can within the constraints of a high-quality build that really delivers for customers and delivers for our shareholders.

On the supply chain question, I think we were lucky to start our accelerated build earlier perhaps than the rest of the industry. Through hiring people like Veronica Bloodworth and others in her team, we're able to gain the wisdom of their experience over time, which led us to securing multiyear supply contracts, both for equipment, for fiber and for labor earlier than I believe the rest of the industry was able to do. Therefore, we've got good supply resilience. We've expanded the number of vendors in every category, and we've got good forward cost visibility as well. I think that's been very helpful to us.

Of course, as the demand for fiber accelerates across the industry, as others realize that fiber does what cable can't, it's a fundamentally superior product, we're in a relatively good and insulated position because we frankly got there first and we signed up the term deals before anyone else had a chance to do so.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Yeah. If I can, Nick, just to add. Listen, I think there is an orientation by this team to set an expectation and ensure that it's met in the marketplace. If we can go faster, we will. I think that Nick's described the preplanning that went on before our August 2021 investor day. You know, the work that had been done for diversifying the labor pools for ensuring a resiliency in terms of material, fiber and electronics to support a very substantial build is what gives us confidence. Lastly, you know, you'll recall that we set an expected cost for passing and have mentioned the fact that we had anticipated some inflationary pressure in that number.

Spencer Kurn (Head of Investor Relations)

Therefore, we are holding that number as we look outwards to the balance of this build.

Simon Flannery (Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

John Stratton (Executive Chairman of the Board)

Thanks, Simon.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Thanks, Simon. Operator, we'll take our final question.

Operator (participant)

The final question comes from Nick Del Deo at MoffettNathanson. Nick, your line is open.

Nick Del Deo (Managing Director)

Hey, good morning, and thanks for fitting me in. The first question, you know, the guidance for 2022 EBITDA looks solid, which is great, but it comes with a reasonably wide range. You know, can you talk a bit about, you know, what you see as the most important swing factors behind it and what needs to happen for you to deliver a result towards the high end versus the low end? Second, you know, to follow up on Frank's cost savings question from earlier, you've basically hit your 2022 cost-cutting target a year early. Can you share some thoughts regarding what your updated objectives for 2022 and 2023 might be?

You know, is what you've achieved, you know, a more rapid than expected realization of savings, or do you think the total opportunity for savings is greater than what you initially expected?

Scott Beasley (CFO)

Sure, Nick. Thanks for the question. This is Scott. On the guidance for 2022, I'd first say we're early in the year. You know, it's February. We're very confident in the fundamental trajectory of our business, of each of the four strategic pillars we talked about, building fiber, selling fiber, improving our cost structure, and improving the customer experience. I'd say we're still operating in a pandemic, and COVID impacts aren't quite clear to us yet. As we get more clarity on the impact and timing of COVID, we would expect to be able to tighten that range in the next quarter or two, once we have better visibility there. On the second question, cost savings, I think you're right.

I like the characterization of we're basically a year early in getting to the $100 million target that we had by the end of 2022, but we're not stopping there, and we haven't given additional guidance as to what our higher cost targets may look like. As a team, we're very focused on exceeding the $250 million target that we have for 2023. That will give us the flexibility to reinvest a portion of that savings in growth, which we are doing, and then flow a chunk of that savings straight to the bottom line, which we're doing in 2022, and we would expect in 2023 and beyond. As we get more clarity on the cost savings, we'll give some updated guidance.

I agree with your assessment, we're likely to exceed the $250 million.

Nick Del Deo (Managing Director)

Okay. Thank you, Scott.

Scott Beasley (CFO)

All right. Thanks, everybody. That concludes our call. We appreciate you joining. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.