Terrific. For those of you I don't know, I'm Jennifer Fritzsche, and I sit in the TMT group on the banking side. In my former life, I was an analyst and had the privilege of covering American Tower for a long, long time. I'm really excited to have Rod Smith here. Rod, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you, Jennifer. It's great to be here. Nice seeing you again. You too. Rod is the EVP and Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of American Tower. He's also a member of the Board of Directors for ATC Europe. He joined in 2009, is that right? Wow. Yes, that's right. Sixteen years ago. Oh my gosh. He has had many prior roles at the company, especially when I knew him as the Treasurer and CFO of the U.S. Tower Division. Welcome. We'll jump right into it. Sounds great. I was saying yesterday with AT&T, these are the years when I miss being an analyst because it's been a really fun ride in 2025 for tower companies, certainly much better than 2024. Can you talk a little bit, a bigger picture question? You have a long to-do list, is my guess. What is on the top of that list in terms of near-term priorities for what you want to accomplish this year? Yeah, there are a few things. I mean, certainly there is a long list, as you suggest. The priorities for us from a macro perspective really are pretty simple. It's driving organic growth across our assets globally. We have teams, operating teams around the globe that that's their mission number one. Their priority is to make sure that we are satisfying the customers in that pursuit that we're driving as much organic growth as we can on the assets that we currently have. We also add to that margin expansion and driving operational efficiency around the globe. Over the last several years, where M&A, not just in our sector, not just for us, but globally and in other sectors, has slowed, we've taken that time to really refocus on the operating business that we have. We have a large multinational organization that we manage, and we've been very focused on driving efficiency there, reducing complications, simplifying the structure, highlighting decision-making paths, and reducing costs kind of across the board. We've done that multiple years in a row. We continue to focus on that, and that's going well. That drives margin expansion, which is critical that we, in our view and from our priority set, focus on margin expansion along with driving that revenue growth. Balance sheet strength. We've always had a strong balance sheet, but as interest rates went up, we re-energized ourselves around creating even more strength in the balance sheet. With interest rates rising as fast as they did, it was a time to take action a little differently than the way we were managing it before. I think that goes for all companies. We have been very focused on reducing exposure to floating rate debt. We have got that down now in the low single digits. I was going to ask what it's at. Yeah, we've got it down in the low -single digits, and our financial policies, long-stated financial policies, suggest that that would be around 20% of our debt stack. We've got that down to about 4%. That gives us much more clarity around what our future interest costs are going to be because that floating rate exposure is much lower. In line with that, we've also been really managing our capital allocation across internal CapEx programs, M&A, share buybacks, even the dividend. We did pause the dividend growth last year to create some additional free cash flow that we could use to de-lever the balance sheet. We've de-levered from above five times down to five times, which was critical for us. That was key. We've also reduced capital spending in aggregate and used those extra funds to put back into de-levering. That's been critical. I would also highlight, and this is, I guess, gets into the fourth priority, which is really focusing on capital allocation very attentively in a very disciplined way to drive shareholder value. Even within a smaller internal CapEx program, we've increased the investments in the U.S. We've increased our capital investments in our data center platform in the U.S. and in our European business. We've reduced capital investments across the emerging markets, India, LatAm, Africa. Part of those reductions went to debt repayment, and part of it went to fueling higher return, higher probability value add for the investors across the developed markets. We sold India and used all of those proceeds to drive down balance sheet strength. The key to selling India was really about improving our quality of earnings and improving our outlook in terms of value creation for our shareholders, consistent, durable value creation. You have really controlled what you have control over and really aligned the model, the balance sheet to really be well positioned. If we could break down the business, let's just start with the domestic tower side. It seems like the carriers, I'm going to say, have finally come back to the spending table after a few years. I know you do not comment on specific customer activity. In Q1, you noticed you were seeing a nice pickup in leases outside of what you have incorporated in your MLAs, master lease agreements. I'm curious, would you characterize this as more coverage or capacity spend by them or a combination of both? Yeah, it really is a combination of both. I mean, the large carriers in the U.S. continue to deploy 5G for coverage, for 5G coverage. That continues. We also are seeing a slight slant towards densification, a pickup in new colocation activity from the large carriers. Not only are they investing in their current infrastructure and installations with us to make them 5G capable, they are adding additional new installations on our assets in order to strengthen that 5G coverage to densify the network. It really is a mixture of both. Both. Okay. A significant headwind for the tower companies in the U.S. has been the Sprint churn. I do not think you have been immune to that and the decommissioning that comes with it. Is it fair to say the worst is behind, speaking for just American Tower in that regard? I will add on to that, if that is behind you, do you see any kind of other black swans emerging here that impact the industry? Yes, the worst is behind us regarding the Sprint churn. Absolutely. We are running through the very tail end of the Sprint churn for us. So we have $70 million of run rate revenue that churned off back in the beginning of Q4 of 2024. So that is a headwind to our growth this year, right up and through the end of Q3. When we get to Q4 of 2025, our churn in Q4 of 2025 will not include any Sprint churn. That'll be the first time in four years that we haven't had Sprint churn in there. Essentially only two more quarters, including the one we're in. Two more quarters and we're done with Sprint churn. I would expect you'll never hear us talk about Sprint churn again after that. There is no other kind of Sprint churn lurking in the background for us. Everything is done when it comes to Sprint churn. After that, when you look around the U.S. business, our revenue is really underpinned with very strong carriers. The demand backdrop, the growth in mobile data consumption across the U.S. network, we expect an acceleration of 5G applications to come at the end of 2025, into 2026. That'll be a catalyst for continued investment from the carriers. In terms of additional black swan churn events, I think we're looking at the backdrop in the U.S. and thinking we get to more normalized churn, which is 1%-2%. We think in this environment, that would even drift towards the lower end of that churn. There are a few blocks out there that people look at, certainly that we look at. The U.S. Cellular business is one. Everyone has ques tions around DISH, so I won't proactively bring that up. We'll get to that when we get to it. Even if you think about U.S. Cellular, they represent a very small piece of our business, about half a percent of our global revenue, less than 1% of our U.S. revenue. If you assume that they churn off completely, which we're not making that assumption yet, that would still most likely fit within our 1%-2% normal churn range. It really is difficult to see a black swan event in the U.S. from a churn perspective. I think when you start the year knowing 90%+ of your revenue, I mean, that's really the beauty of the tower model. It's because of the long-term contracts. Now, also, I want to, you touched on it, more coverage or more usage coming. I would throw in AI as well, driving usage. I want to ask your opinion on spectrum. I mean, DC is talking a lot about spectrum, but I think it's going to be kind of an uphill push to find it. I think of that as either scenario, if spectrum appears from heaven, that we get it, or it doesn't. Both of those are good for the tower companies because either you have to deploy the spectrum that you get, or if you don't have spectrum, you have to essentially spend through it with cell splitting. Do you agree with that assessment? Yeah, I agree 100%. I mean, we are in a very fortunate situation where we're able to help our customers, whether they get new spectrum or not, because they'll do exactly what you said, and we will be able to help them if there is new spectrum allocated from the government, which people are working on that. It will come eventually, maybe slower than people would like, maybe not. When the new spectrum becomes available, the carriers will deploy that spectrum by putting more equipment on towers, more antennas, more base radios, more lines to be able to utilize that spectrum in their network. We get an opportunity to help our customers deploy that, which is exactly what we want to do. If they do not get the spectrum when they want, or if the spectrum is delayed beyond where they would like and they end up with some network congestion, the way we help them resolve that is they put more equipment on our towers so that they can be more efficient and reuse their current spectrum more frequently within the network. In order to do that, they add radios, add cables and lines, add antennas. Yeah, I think the way you phrase it is exactly right. We are here to support the customers deploy their network in the best way they see fit. If they have spectrum, we can help them do that. It will be great for us as well. If they do not, then they are going to reuse their spectrum more frequently, and they can do that on our towers by adding more equipment throughout the network. Which, I mean, I know there's nuances to each MLA, but that would probably show itself in the form of more amendment revenue. Yeah. Yeah, I would say if it was an absence of new spectrum and that was paired with growth in 5G applications and we saw that growing mobile data consumption, there would be a scenario where that densification, those amendments, let's say, that would be required because of the need to reuse the spectrum. There could be a volume there that's not anticipated in our holistic deals that would be additions to pay for us. Our holistic agreements with the carriers are mostly tied towards amendment revenue, meaning the way they work is the carrier will tell us how many amendments, how many sites they want to touch, how much equipment, what is the specific equipment they expect to put up, we'll price that, we'll give them the right to put that up, and they'll agree to pay us those fees. We can smooth that over a number of years or however we want to do it. The economics match up with the activity that the carriers want to do, and that's what they get. In a case like you're describing, if there is an increase in activity required because there's an absence of new spectrum, most likely that would be outside the holistic deal over time. Got it. I want to shift to international. You alluded to this, but last year you had a very, very busy year. As you noted, you exited India, you sold some assets in Australia and South Africa, I believe. I guess my question would be, should we see these activities as kind of a purposeful shift to focus on more developed markets, or am I reading too much into that? It is a purposeful shift really towards optimizing our portfolio for the purpose of increasing the quality of our earnings. We are in a mindset of balancing quality of earnings with growth and long-term value creation. I would say we pair that with the fact that we are a global tower company. There are certain skills that we have as a global tower operator that adds value that we can leverage with customers on behalf of investors to create good returns for people. That does not mean everything we have done is perfect. In the case of India, it was not working the way we intended it to work. We made the decision to exit India because we got to the point where the forward-looking results of India were not compelling. We did not sell it because we had difficulty with the results and the performance over the prior 5, 10 years. It was because when we looked forward, there was really not a good backdrop for us to have a consistency in a reasonable revenue growth and return profile for our customers. It was very noisy to manage. Reducing distractions, focusing on ways that we can create value, and not spending a lot of time chasing a hope and a dream that was not going to materialize. Selling India was all about forward-looking opportunities just did not feel good to us after a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge, a lot of learnings. With that being said, we do believe that our highest opportunity to create sustainable value for our shareholders is to drive a high quality of earnings, not a moderate and certainly not a low. We do not want volatility in your earnings. We want to remove pockets within our business where we can have big surprises. We want to remove distractions that really prevent us from putting the full force of our focus on meaningful ways to create value. With all that said, we are now prioritizing developed markets. Those are the highest quality economies with the highest quality counterparties. That is where the citizens within those economies demand wireless services, increasingly so when they are willing to pay for it. That is where those cash flows are more valuable to investors because of the durability of those cash flows. We are focusing on the places where we can leverage our skills and our platforms to drive maximum shareholder value. Is there, Rod, one area internationally that you're most excited about that either you have? I mean, we are in a great position because we do have this diverse portfolio, which not a lot of, I do not know of any other tower company that has the, or really any other publicly traded infrastructure company that has the diversity of opportunities that we have. When it comes to the best opportunities we have, clearly the U.S. market is the primary market for us. It is not just an affection that we have for the U.S. market because it is where we started, but it has just got great demand drivers. There is just an enormous amount of continued growth in mobile data consumption. There is going to be lots of investing. If we can invest more in the U.S., that would be the number one priority. We also have a great business in Europe, a growing business in Europe that is outperforming our expectations. In all candor, it's not as good as the U.S. environment, but it's better than most. That's a place where, yes, we continue to look there, but we will be disciplined. We're not under an illusion that growth in Europe is at all costs because it's not. We have a great portfolio there. If we don't grow in M&A in Europe, it's fine. We're going to do really well in Europe with what we have. We will be looking at that intently. We also have the data center platform that's in the U.S., again, in that premier economy. It's a differentiated asset that really does drive value. It drives revenue growth. It minimizes churn. We get good cash mark-to-markets on renewals. There's more capital that could be invested there at very high returns. That is certainly something that we look at. If that can transition into synergies, which is what we look at, the reason we own this very differentiated, high-quality set of U.S. data centers in all of our U.S. towers is because we believe there could be synergies between the two, revenue synergies, maybe operating synergies over time as you see a convergence of these networks. Which is a perfect segue to my next question. Obviously, you're talking about CoreSite. You're doing some interesting things on the edge, which I'll get to as well. I think you purchased CoreSite in 2021. I mean, even before this whole AI revolution really kind of kicked into high gear. Your timing really couldn't have been better. I'm sure there's many bankers saying, "Sell it now, it'd be worth a lot of money." I would love to know how you see this evolving to kind of connect those dots with your core tower business and how that kind of transitions also to what you're doing on the edge, namely Raleigh. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. I would say a couple of things. First, before I highlight the edge, I'll just highlight when we originally underwrote the acquisition of CoreSite, there were a few key principles. One is we saw a very differentiated asset. It isn't your typical sort of old-fashioned data center business where you're providing space and power and cooling. These are different, materially different because there are cloud on-ramps, multiple cloud on-ramps in every facility. That's what attracted us to CoreSite. It's highly interconnected, network dense. Our customers interconnect with each other within these facilities. They're not just keeping their own equipment there. That's why we liked the business so much because we just felt the demand backdrop was so strong for that kind of a unique, that kind of a differentiated asset. We did see good demand drivers, not from AI, but just the traditional demand. We felt like the performance of that business justified the purchase price and we were going to be in good shape from that perspective. We also did a lot of work on risk analysis and risk mitigation. We came out with a compelling case that the downside risk was not that significant. That felt pretty good. We underwrote the transaction at a 6%-8% economic growth out over the long term. We're doing much better than that now. I would assume. We're not seeing a lot of AI-driven activity. This core business is performing better than we thought as a core business. With that said, we are beginning to see customers come in and specifically lease space and join our ecosystem for the purpose of inferencing. We're beginning to see that. I think that's a whole 'nother additive demand driver for this unique asset. I think that's pretty good. We feel as though a high single-digit kind of transitioning to double-digit economic growth over the next several years, that's kind of in our line of sight here for that business. It's really performing exceptionally well. The revenue synergies that we see, the operational synergies, is as services across wireless networks and landline networks and what enterprise customers want to do for themselves become more sophisticated and latency becomes more of an issue and they need to reduce the latency to get the peak performance. They need compute power, content caching out towards the edge and actually computing on their own data closer to the edge is going to reduce transport costs over the long term rather than trying to pull that information back and forth every time they want to change a number and recalculate things or every time a surgeon wants to move a pin and redo kind of the imaging. We do think that edge is going to be important. That is what it is about. It's really about having that activity closer to the base radios and closer to the end user so you can reduce latency, get the true experience for it, reduce backhaul costs, all of those things kind of come together. A big piece of that is those edge facilities we believe will have to be able to connect into on-ramps, multiple on-ramps for the cloud. We have that throughout CoreSite. We have 43,000 towers in the U.S. We have landline customers, wireless customers. We have cloud providers as our customers. We have the largest enterprise across the space in our facilities around. We have got the ecosystem that we own and control. Building out an edge facility, taking landline networks, wireless networks, enterprise customers, giving them a place to run and compute, even AI, I think will help drive that so that their 5G and beyond networks work properly. Giving them access into all the cloud on-ramps that we have across the country was another unique part of that CoreSite business. The multiple cloud on-ramps in each facility spanned southern Northern California, the Chicago area, out into the northeast and up in New York, down in Virginia. We have expanded into Miami and a few other places. There is kind of broad distribution. We do not need a ton of facilities, but having multiple cloud on-ramps strategically located across the country is important. I can tell you with great certainty there's a lot of people who wanted that asset. It's a great moat around that business, for sure. I wanted to ask on M&A, there's been a kind of shifting back to towers, a wide, wide, wide disparity between private tower deal multiples and where the publics are trading, even with a better 2025. Do you agree? Does that keep you out of the M&A game? How do you see that right-sizing? We do see it. It's a real thing. The valuations of very similar assets on the private side tend to be higher than a similar asset on the public equity side. It's been like that for a while. That's tightened up a little bit, but it hasn't tightened up to a great extent. There are reasons for that. Number one, I would highlight that the private capital in the developed markets have identified the towers as an asset class and the cash flows from it as highly valuable. Lots of capital is running in and doing it. That just highlights that we have a tremendous asset. I mean, starting in the U.S. with the portfolio and the contracts that we have, it's an amazing business. Then also the optionality we have all around the world in terms of being able to explore and find pockets where we can create value in that model. The assets are super valuable. Private capital has recognized that. The other thing that I think drives some of the differential is just the capital structuring is different. The private investors, they see the high-quality nature of the cash flows because it is tied to high-quality critical infrastructure that will be paid over the long term. It is a very secure cash flow. They are willing to lever it up quite a bit. By doing that, they are reducing their cost of capital and expanding their purchase price. They are competing with one another. You see debt on the front -end and the back leverage coming in, and that boosts pricing. We are not going to do that. We're a different type of a company being a $100 billion public company. We are BBB flat. We intend to continue to be there and continue to drive improvements in the quality of our cash flows and balance sheets. That is who we are. You'll see us, we're five times levered. We may drift a little bit below that, but we'll be around that place. That you could say disadvantages us from a capital structuring standpoint a little bit. That is true. They lever up sometimes eight times, ten times, and that isn't. Even higher, right? In a lower interest rate environment, it was more of a tailwind for them. In this environment, it is a little different. You may see that the leverage come down from where it was a few years ago. That disadvantage may shrink as we go forward. The other thing I would say is we have advantages that they do not have. We are a global tower company. We can help the large multinational carriers in multiple places where other people struggle to provide that sort of value. We have got a rich history of operating excellence, and the carriers understand that. That helps us in the pursuit for good acquisitions. With that said, I would highlight the telephonic acquisition we did in Europe several years ago. We were up against private capital folks. They had the advantage of higher leverage and maybe a lower cost of capital. We had the operational advantages. That is what won the day for us, certainly. The other thing I would say is there is a certain place that private capital operates really well in terms of a size and scale. We are not constrained by that. We are not out of the M&A game by any stretch of the imagination. We have certain advantages over private capital, but there are also some disadvantages, most notably the leverage, the amount of leverage that they put on the assets. Great. I know we have a few minutes left, and I want to turn it over if there's any questions. You have a mic. Any questions? I'll just end how we started. Your overall leverage profile, you said you've reached your goal of five times. I guess how does capital allocation look from here? I mean, you touched on this, but specifically, what's the focus near term? Yeah, we are in a great position. We've got a very strong balance sheet. A strong balance sheet has to come with a very strong business. We have a strong business, which is why we have a strong balance sheet. We have very high-quality, durable cash flows. Now that we no longer have a need to de-lever, that would be optional. That's an option that we have to continue to de-lever, but we don't have to de-lever. Again, with the high-quality cash flows we have, I don't feel the need to rush to de-lever as a priority. We will if it makes sense, but we don't have to. That means we're going to begin to generate a lot of free cash flow that we'll have to reinvest in the business. We will certainly be looking at internal CapEx programs. We're investing $1.8 billion, $1.7 billion in CapEx this year. We have that amount every year that we can allocate. We can move that up if we have good opportunities, we can move it down. The key there, and this is one of our strengths, we can move it around. We can focus it on the U.S. and Europe and CoreSite when we want to, and that's what we're doing today. If we find something different, we can allocate it in a way that best creates shareholder value. There is internal CapEx programs that we have been funding and we will be able to fund. Certainly, I should highlight the dividend. We have a growing dividend. We'll have about 5% growth this year, which will be subject to board approval each quarter. We took the growth rate on the dividend to zero last year. That was temporary, a one-time shot just to strengthen the balance sheet. Now we're resuming growth in the dividend. That's a key priority. That growth in the dividend is really a REIT requirement. It's not a discretionary item for management. We are, as a real estate investment trust, required to dividend out 90% of our REIT pre-tax income. We choose to dividend out our target, about 100% of REIT pre-tax income, because we think that's most efficient. That dividend is required. As our REIT pre-tax income increases, the dividend needs to increase. There's not a lot of discretion there. You'll see a growing dividend that'll grow roughly in line with kind of how our AFFO per share grows over time, on average, over a multiple-year period. In addition to funding the dividend and the dividend growth, internal CapEx programs, then we do have capital, excess capital will be generated that we can invest in M&A. We can increase internal CapEx programs. We can buy back our own shares. It is really just a math exercise. We could choose to de-lever further to be opportunistic and create investment capacity that would be available if there was anything we wanted to do. It is all around the math. It is all tied into driving shareholder value. Anytime we look to allocate capital, it has nothing to do with tower counts, number of countries we are in, size of the business. It is only evaluated through our ability to drive durable shareholder value. That is it. If buying back shares is the best way to do it, we will have the capacity to do that. If de-levering is the right answer from time to time, we will do that. M&A absolutely will be looking at things. Today, we do not see anything that is compelling. We have not done an M&A transaction in an emerging market since 2018, I think, or early 2018. We have done a few big transactions into the developed markets since then. There has been kind of a long-standing focus and prioritization on developed markets. To have such choices with your free cash flow is a problem many CFOs would love to have. That's fantastic. Yeah, I agree with that. Rod, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for coming and really appreciate the time. Yeah, you're welcome. It was great being here. Thanks, everyone.