Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Let's just shift our attention to telecoms.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: There's the news out of billionaires Avier Neil. He's exploring
Speaker 2: a bid to buy out other shareholders the Latin American
Speaker 2: telecom provider Millicom, which will value that carried about four
Speaker 2: point one billion dollars. Neil's holding company that's at this
Speaker 2: invested estimate says it is exploring financing options to support
Speaker 2: an offer price of about twenty four dollars per Minicon
Speaker 2: common share, though it cannot guarantee and offer will materialize,
Speaker 2: and there's already the biggest shareholder in the company with
Speaker 2: the twenty nine per cent stake. We want to dive deeper, though,
Speaker 2: into this industry group right now. We want to talk
Speaker 2: about it from the US perspective and globally. One of
Speaker 2: the biggest telecom providers here is AT and T. And
Speaker 2: I'm pleased to say that the CEO, John Sankey, joins
Speaker 2: us now fresh off comments from a company's multi year
Speaker 2: growth strategy over at the JP Morgan Technology Conference, And
Speaker 2: I just want to weave in the era that we're
Speaker 2: sitting in at the moment, the fact that we just
Speaker 2: hear from Johnson Wang and Ai, and we're talking about
Speaker 2: open versus clothes. We're talking about infrastructure needs a quip
Speaker 2: and needs to talk about energy efficiency. And in many
Speaker 2: ways you're having a very similar conversation over in the
Speaker 2: world of telecoms at the moment innovation, the needs for
Speaker 2: open and in particularly Gone and Ericsson fourteen billion dollars
Speaker 2: spend revamp wireless network focus. You want to have an
Speaker 2: open platform?
Speaker 1: Why we do?
Speaker 3: And we're pretty excited about what I heard before because
Speaker 3: the more workloads that Jensen produces that you have to
Speaker 3: go somewhere and we like carrying those around on our networks,
Speaker 3: whether they're wireless or fixed. So it's an exciting time
Speaker 3: to be in telecom. And our point of view is
Speaker 3: if you're going to scale at the level we're talking about,
Speaker 3: you need to have more cost efficiency and you need
Speaker 3: to be able to scale more dramatically, and so open
Speaker 3: separating hardware and software and our infrastructure starts to give
Speaker 3: us that cost curve and that flexibility, and that's going
Speaker 3: to be critical to have the agility to move forward
Speaker 3: in this.
Speaker 2: Environment agile at a time why wireless demand is plateauing,
Speaker 2: maybe slowing no, not at all.
Speaker 3: Wireless demands up thirty percent a year and it's not
Speaker 3: slowing down. And I think as you start to look
Speaker 3: at where we are with what's occurring from a usage perspective,
Speaker 3: you start getting workloads that come out of AI, it's
Speaker 3: going to continue to fuel that. And really it's one
Speaker 3: of the key things that this country needs to deal
Speaker 3: with is if you're going to continue to see usage
Speaker 3: go up thirty thirty five percent a year, you've got
Speaker 3: to build bigger highways to take that. And that all
Speaker 3: comes on the foundation of spectrum, and we need to
Speaker 3: make sure we got policy right in this country to
Speaker 3: get more spectrum out there to deal with the rising workloads. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: a handset demand might be coming down a little bit.
Speaker 3: We're not seeing quite the growth we saw ten years ago,
Speaker 3: but the utility of connected devices, how people are using
Speaker 3: those handsets, and the demand for the traffic that they
Speaker 3: generate isn't coming down at all.
Speaker 4: John good Morning is ed in San Francisco. Look, my
Speaker 4: head is often outside the bounds of our atmosphere and
Speaker 4: up in space, and I was really interested to see
Speaker 4: your deal with AST. You know, Starlink is doing a
Speaker 4: lot with the other carriers. I just wanted in the
Speaker 4: first sense, if you have a really clear view of
Speaker 4: what the addressable market is for Constellation direct to sell.
Speaker 1: I think we have a view of it.
Speaker 4: ED.
Speaker 3: I don't know whether or not we're going to all
Speaker 3: understand exactly how consumers are going to use this, but
Speaker 3: we've done a lot of work to not only understand
Speaker 3: who's the segment of the population that truly needs always
Speaker 3: on connectivity. I mean, that's really what we want to
Speaker 3: do here. Most people wake up in the morning they say,
Speaker 3: I can't afford to be off the internet. And some
Speaker 3: folks have a lifestyle that take them to places where
Speaker 3: they do, unfortunately get to the bottom of the Grand
Speaker 3: Canyon on a rafting trip and can't continue to post
Speaker 3: to their website about what's going on with their family
Speaker 3: and it's really important to them, or they have an
Speaker 3: important business call. There's others who do it incidentally. Maybe
Speaker 3: they're on a road trip and they're out on an
Speaker 3: interstate somewhere and they drive off the network and they
Speaker 3: need it for a day. So we know those kind
Speaker 3: of behaviors in our customer base because we run the
Speaker 3: networks and we know what our customers are doing. We
Speaker 3: think there's a good application for this, just like when
Speaker 3: somebody leaves the United States and needs the roam on
Speaker 3: a network outside the US to make sure that they're
Speaker 3: they're connected when they're.
Speaker 1: In Europe or Asia or wherever they're going.
Speaker 3: So this is just the next step and simplifying connectivity
Speaker 3: and ensuring customers be connected wherever they.
Speaker 4: Go, John YaST and not starling in SpaceX well.
Speaker 3: As you pointed out at it's a nascent area where
Speaker 3: the technology is starting to develop. We think AST has
Speaker 3: done a remarkable job of getting the technology right where
Speaker 3: it's consumer centric. The customer doesn't have to change any
Speaker 3: equipment and doesn't have to change anything they're doing with
Speaker 3: their handset, and they can still avail themselves of the service.
Speaker 3: That's really important in our view. And so what we
Speaker 3: have going on in other parts of the industry is
Speaker 3: we're kind of taking satellites and services that we're fit
Speaker 3: for fixed wireless connections or fixed satellite connections and now
Speaker 3: trying to make the mobile and it's a little.
Speaker 1: More clunky as a result of that.
Speaker 3: And so I think what we're looking at is cost performance,
Speaker 3: how do we make it easy for the consumer and
Speaker 3: I don't think there's going to be one winner. I
Speaker 3: think there's going to be multiple opportunities going forward or providers,
Speaker 3: and we think that's good for us, especially when we
Speaker 3: have partnerships that ultimately we can have the right kind
Speaker 3: of relationships to satisfy the needs of our customers.
Speaker 2: Satisfying the needs of a customer, you articulated very well
Speaker 2: why we as customers are going to need yet more
Speaker 2: and more data, more and more wareless. But the actual
Speaker 2: business is selling wyness has kind of been slowing for
Speaker 2: you and competitors. How do you stand apart, how do
Speaker 2: you make sure people reach the AT and T versus
Speaker 2: Verizon T Mobile when you have had some hits perhaps
Speaker 2: too worries about data security for example.
Speaker 3: First of all, you know, despite the fact that customer
Speaker 3: net ads are slowing, utility and use is continuing to grow.
Speaker 1: And so we had a very good year.
Speaker 3: When you think about what happened from a service revenue
Speaker 3: growth perspective, we led the industry. We're still seeing healthy growth.
Speaker 3: It's a bit higher than what the GDP levels are
Speaker 3: and an infrastructure business like ours, that's kind of what
Speaker 3: you want to see happen. And so it's not a
Speaker 3: bad thing, but in terms of what we do going
Speaker 3: forward on this is It's what I just talked about.
Speaker 3: Customers want to be connected everywhere. Customers want to make
Speaker 3: a simple decision of how they get on the internet.
Speaker 3: They don't wake up in the morning relishing having two
Speaker 3: or three relationships to be able to use my phone
Speaker 3: when I'm on the go, or my phone at home
Speaker 3: or my computer at home. They want to call somebody
Speaker 3: say just get me on the internet. And I think
Speaker 3: our position at AT and T is about doing that
Speaker 3: better than anybody else. And our focus is on making
Speaker 3: sure we take our great fiber assets, we take our
Speaker 3: wireless business, bring it together, start to do things like
Speaker 3: add value to a customer to ensure that their privacy
Speaker 3: is protected, their traffic is secure. They only have to
Speaker 3: call one place to get it done at a great value.
Speaker 3: They can use it in the Grand Canyon, they can
Speaker 3: use it at home. That's the race were on right now,
Speaker 3: and that's what we're focused on doing tod AT and T.
Speaker 2: John, thank you. I wish we had more time. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for talking us through the focus and
Speaker 2: of course some of those commitments to the financial goals
Speaker 2: that were reinstated yesterday and restated and at the JP
Speaker 2: Morgan event we thank him so much. John Thanky of
Speaker 2: eighty