Lumen Technologies, Inc. (LUMN) TD Cowen 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference – (Transcript)

Lumen Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) TD Cowen 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference Call May 28, 2025 1:50 PM ET

Company Participants

Chris Stansbury – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Gregory Williams – TD Cowen

Gregory Williams

Good afternoon. Welcome to Day One of our 53rd Annual TMT TD Cowen Conference. My name is Greg Williams. I cover cable, wireless, and telco here at TD Cowen. I’m joined in this session by Chris Stansbury, the CFO of Lumen Technologies. Chris, thanks for joining us.

Chris Stansbury

Yes. Great to be here.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Gregory Williams

I want to start off with the AT&T deal that was announced last week. This deal structure is very unique. It’s a first of a kind, potentially last of a kind. Help us understand why the deal was structured this way. I understand you’re going to keep a lot of these wire centers for the enterprise business, and you’re going to direct connect to the cloud. But why do you need 1,700 data centers, to do this?

Chris Stansbury

Yes. So the reason that the deal was structured the way it was really for a few reasons. The value on the consumer side is really in the fiber. That’s the go forward strategy. That’s the asset that people were most interested in, and we built a great business. And that business can be taken much further. And so from a buyer standpoint, that’s why the focus was there. From our standpoint, that footprint generates a lot of enterprise EBITDA in addition to some very healthy consumer copper EBITDA that is in very rural areas that will take years to go away. Fiber is very unlikely to be built to those locations. And then from a strategic standpoint, as we go forward, the real value in the enterprise offering that we’re bringing is