Windstream Communications at Deutsche Bank Securities Leveraged Finance Conference - Final.(Broadcast transcript)

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: We are going to go ahead and get started. We are actually just slightly ahead of schedule, but maybe that will actually allow us some time for a little bit more cumin Q&A. So this is the presentation for Windstream Communications. As you guys here all know, although, Windstream is one of the largest RLEC's in the US. Here presenting from the Company today is the Senior Vice President and Treasurer, Rob Clancy. Also in the front row is the manager of the investor relations department for them, Brooke Cyphers.

So I want to bring Rob up, and he's going to run us through the story. Hopefully, we'll have some time for questions. So thanks and thanks to Rob for coming.

ROB CLANCY, SVP, TREASURER, WINDSTREAM COMMUNICATIONS: Thank you. Good afternoon, glad to be here. It's about 105 degrees outside, but trust me, in Little Rock 105 is a little different than it is here in Phoenix. But I'm glad to be here with you today and share some updates on what's happening at Windstream.

I think you all can manage through the Safe Harbor just fine. So what I would like to cover today is a couple of things. First, give a little bit of background about Windstream, secondly talk a little bit about our business model, and then thirdly I'll talk through a variety of operational, financial and strategic initiatives and accomplishments that we have had in place here.

For those of you who are not familiar, Windstream is a communications and entertainment provider, one of the largest RLEC's in the space, significant scale and profitability. You can see here on the map we operate in 16 states, gives nice diversity. A little over $3.2 billion in annual revenue, just under $1.7 billion in OIBDA or cash flow, just a little bit north of 3.1 million access lines. I think it's important to highlight the fact that roughly one-third of our access lines are comprised in the business segment or business customers, and less two-thirds, are from residential customers. We have about 2 million long distance customers, just under a million broadband customers and 934,231 digital TV customers.

Our focus -- when we put this business -- Windstream was formed two years ago as a spinoff from Alltel and subsequent merger with VALOR Communications. When we put this business together two years ago, it was our belief that we could create a company to really transform this business, to transform this business model from a voice model to a broadband model and one where we could really influence some of the trajectory and the run rates of various operating metrics. I think, as we go through this presentation, you'll see we at least are pleased that we have been able to do that and then some, really, in the two years of our existence.

Oftentimes, folks wonder about, well, what is the RLEC universe compared to a more urban footprint? Well, we like to categorize ourselves, as I mentioned, as an RLEC. And one of the metrics you can see that helps substantiate that is the density of the number of access lines per square mile. You can see on this chart here, we have about 20 access lines per square mile. Frankly, what that means is that the rural space is much less competitive than the urban space. It doesn't mean it's not competitive at all. We certainly have our share of competition. In fact, you can see from the other chart here our cable overlap.

But 50% to 55% of our lines have voice competition from a cable provider today. That percentage has increased over time by some 10 percentage points or so a year for the last couple of years, and it's our expectations that we'll probably continue at that pace. Importantly, our cable competition is very fragmented. You can see Time Warner here at 29%, and beyond Time Warner it gets rather fragmented, a whole host of smaller cable companies in the other category here. But this fragmented cable competition, I think, coupled with the density provides just a little bit less competitive environment than, say, urban America.

In terms of cable broadband competition here, we say 75 to 80% of our lines have broadband competition. That's a number that's real hard to get precise on, but I think that probably gives you some sense of maybe where the ceiling is from a voice perspective. So we have certainly taken, I think, the major thrust of the voice competition to date. Still, obviously, a little bit of room for some additional voice competition. But importantly, we continue to get better with each of these new cable voice deployments as well.

Just gives you an illustration here in terms of our size and scale. We are a bit bigger than most of the others here in the RLEC space in terms of access line, revenue, cash flow, which obviously then translates down. Importantly, I think we've got some of the best cash cost metrics, cash cost per customer metrics in the industry. This is a business, quite frankly, where scale matters and scale is very important. I'll talk in a moment about some of our strategic accomplishments and achievements over the last couple of years. But we've had a couple of transactions where, because of our size and scale we have been able to essentially fold those businesses into the Windstream portfolio and realize fairly significant synergies and cost savings as a result.

Let's spend just a moment on the regulatory position. This is obviously a topic of great interest, and it has been for many years and our space. I think I'd like to make a couple of …