Ladies and gentlemen, hello, and welcome to the CommScope fourth quarter and full-year 2020 results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star then zero on your touch-tone phone. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Russell Johnson, Vice President, Treasurer and Investor Relations. Good morning, thank you for joining us today, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full-year 2020 earnings call. I'm Russell Johnson, Vice President of Treasury and Investor Relations, and joining me today are Chuck Treadway, President and CEO, Alex Pease, Executive Vice President and CFO, Morgan Kurk, Executive Vice President, CTO and Segment Leader for Broadband Networks, and Bud Watts, Chairman of the Board. You can find the slides that accompany this call on our investor relations website. Please note that some of our comments today will contain forward-looking statements based on our current view of our business, and actual future results may differ materially. Please see our recent SEC filings, which identify the principal risks and uncertainties that could affect future performance. Before I turn the call over to Chuck, just a few housekeeping items to review. Today, we will discuss certain adjusted or non-GAAP financial measures, which are described in more detail in this morning's earnings material. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures and other associated disclosures are contained in our earnings materials and posted on our website. All references during today's discussion will be to our adjusted results unless otherwise noted. Also note, the full-year 2019 results include historical ARRIS pre-acquisition results reflecting certain classification changes to align to CommScope presentation. All quarterly and annual growth rates described during today's presentation are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. I will now turn the call over to our President and CEO, Chuck Treadway. Chuck? Thank you, Russell, and good morning, everyone. Today, I'll start with a review of our 2020 highlights and our fourth quarter results. I'll then provide a preview of our transformational initiative to drive growth and value creation, which we refer to as CommScope Next. Let's turn to slide three. As the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to unfold, we moved aggressively to keep our people safe, continue delivering for our customers. We pivoted quickly to remote work, put in place robust health and safety systems, and initiated a business continuity program. Our team leveraged the diversity of our global manufacturing footprint to mitigate supply chain risk and respond to the evolving regional challenges. Within a matter of weeks, we mitigated the vast majority of our supply chain challenges, and our factories were running at capacity. The management team and I are proud of CommScope's ability to deliver on our promise to meet customer needs in such a challenging time. In addition, we continued to innovate across a wide range of technologies and businesses. At CommScope, the future of wireless networks, 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and 6E are rapidly taking shape. As new CBRS and C-band spectrum is introduced, we are ready to bring all of this to life by developing innovative technologies. One example is our new interleaved passive active antenna that we developed together with our partner, Nokia. Last year, we delivered the largest DAS in the world to AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, to enable 5G services to their fans. We also helped education customers like the New Zealand Ministry of Education meet connectivity demands for their students and faculty with Wi-Fi 6 access points and switches. In the U.S., the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, or RDOF, has generated enormous demand across our portfolio of fiber cable, hardened connectivity, and fixed wireless products. We are actively investing in capacity and technologies to meet this demand. Across our portfolio, virtualization, cloud, and analytics are defining a new generation of products and solutions. Whether it is helping operators mitigate a Distributed Access Architecture, manage the network ecosystem through the cloud, or optimize performance through self-healing tools and technologies, CommScope is leading the way to the next generation of networks. Thanks to the hard work of our dedicated employees, we delivered solid financial results despite many challenges faced by our company, industry, and broader economy. In the fourth quarter, we delivered $362 million in adjusted EBITDA, up 6% from the third quarter and 12% from the prior year, despite declines in revenue. We also delivered an adjusted EPS of $0.59 per share and generated $65 million of adjusted free cash flow. Since the close of the ARRIS acquisition, the team has over-delivered on a synergy commitment of $150 million one year ahead of schedule. These results are directly tied to the hard work, discipline, and efficiency in 2020, which we will continue to build on in 2021. While I acknowledge we need to do more as a company, I commend the team on delivering consolidated adjusted EBITDA margins up sequentially and year-over-year. It is important to note that these results reflect lower incentive compensation, strong CMTS, license sales, and certain COVID-related benefits such as reduced travel and marketing spend. We attribute our performance in 2020 to our strong supply chain and decades of experience supporting our customers through challenging times and periods of network transformation. In 2021 and beyond, we will continue to build on our ability to provide next-generation solutions and execute with agility. There's a lot more work to do, and we are not slowing down. As the business environment normalizes from the pandemic, a portion of our cost savings will come back, whether it's through increased travel, resumption of customary sales and marketing activities, or normal inflationary effects. We will also continue to invest in next-generation R&D programs to lead in the markets we serve and fully realize our growth potential. This is one of the focus areas of CommScope Next. Let's go ahead and turn to slide four for some more perspective on CommScope Next. CommScope Next, which we launched in January, will focus on driving business growth that outpaces the market, controlling costs, optimizing business performance, and unlocking significant shareholder value. As we shared last quarter, the board and management team understand that our stock has underperformed. We're confident that executing CommScope Next strategy, we will ensure the company is on the right path for the next level of growth and profitability. CommScope Next will be a defining chapter for the company and my highest priority as CEO. It will focus on three primary vectors of value creation. First, we will double down on delivering growth. Even in my first quarter with the company, our team has uncovered many opportunities for profitable growth. The areas we will explore include vertical market strategies designed to gain market share, capacity constraints in our factories to deliver more product where demand already exists, investing in international expansion, enhanced channel relationships, and development of critical technologies. As we continue to analyze and prioritize these opportunities, I'm confident we will be able to accelerate growth as we drive commercial excellence and refine our go-to-market strategies. Second, we will focus on business optimization, initially evaluating and reducing non-value-added costs. While the company has a strong history of cost control, we can do more. We will eliminate unnecessary complexity and cost by streamlining duplicative systems and redundant processes that exist today. As we dig deeper into the business units, we've discovered unproductive investments that could provide us with additional financial flexibility to reallocate development funds to higher return projects. We also see opportunities to implement tools to advance business operations to take the company to the next level of efficiency through continuous improvement. We will be tackling all of this quickly, and we will share more details on the plan and our financial goals as we progress. Third, we will actively evaluate the health of our full portfolio of products and services. We intend to dynamically reallocate capital to those businesses where we have winning value propositions, industry-leading technologies, and a clear path to growth and value creation. In our businesses that are more commoditized, we'll either manage those for cash or, where appropriate, evaluate alternative ownership structures that can unlock greater shareholder value. We're confident that by implementing CommScope Next, we will create a stronger, more efficient CommScope and deliver long-term value for all of our stakeholders. With all of this said, I'd like to manage expectations on timing. We will not see the impact of this initiative immediately. In some cases, it'll take quarters, in others, longer. It should be expected in the immediate future, as COVID-related restrictions on travel, marketing, and other business activities subside, we will see some costs coming back into the business. It will be one of the jobs of CommScope Next to accelerate paths to short-term net ones. In addition to CommScope Next, we have taken other significant action. Morgan Kurk was appointed the segment leader of Broadband Networks in addition to continuing responsibilities as the company's Chief Technology Officer. Morgan's strength in technology and business leadership will serve broadband and CommScope well as we develop the next-generation network architectures and drive profitable growth. We also brought in Jack Carlson as Chief Commercial Officer to help CommScope drive above-market growth and Kyle Lorentzen to assist in executing CommScope Next. I've worked with both Jack and Kyle in previous companies and have firsthand experience with their ability to drive go-to-market excellence and achieve sustainable cost efficiency. The team has mobilized enthusiastically, delivering strong bottom-line results through the end of the year, and we are energized by the opportunities ahead. We've begun to put a foundation in place to shape the future of CommScope and deliver a step-change improvement in the shareholder value through our CommScope Next initiative. We look forward to providing more detail on the progress we have made implementing CommScope Next during our first quarter earnings call. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Alex to recap the full-year and provide more detail on the quarter and trends we're watching in 2021. Alex? Great. Thanks, Chuck, and good morning, everyone. This morning I'll start with a recap of 2020 before moving to our fourth quarter results, segment performance, and some commentary on cash flow and our capital structure. I'll finish with some closing thoughts on key industry and technology trends that we expect to influence CommScope's performance during the coming year before we open the call up to Q&A. Turning to slide six. The full-year 2020 net sales of $8.44 billion declined about 14% from the prior year of the combined company. We saw moderate growth in our Broadband Networks segment during 2020, but sales declined across all other segments, most notably Home Networks, which was down 30%. From a geographic perspective, sales declined across all regions. full-year adjusted EBITDA of $1.22 billion declined 11%, while adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of sales improved more than 40 basis points year-over-year for the combined company. We over-delivered on our 2020 synergy plan and moved quickly to take additional cost actions, particularly in Home Networks, to help preserve the bottom line in response to the challenging business environment. From a segment perspective, Broadband Networks delivered significant growth and profitability of over 18%. This was more than offset by adjusted EBITDA reductions in all other businesses. As Chuck mentioned, embedded in these results are the favorable impact of certain COVID-related benefits, such as lower travel and marketing spending, that are likely to return in 2021 before the impact of CommScope Next is fully reflected in the financials. Finishing up slide six. Adjusted net income for the year was $371 million, or $1.56 per share compared to $479 million, or $2.15 per diluted share in the prior year. Adjusted free cash flow was $415 million compared to $793 million from the prior year. Noting that in 2019, we generated significant cash flow from working capital as we integrated the ARRIS acquisition. Our business model has proven remarkably agile and resilient in delivering bottom-line results. Our global supply chain team worked tirelessly to mitigate disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, while simultaneously prioritizing the safety of our employees. We over-delivered on our original $150 million synergy target well ahead of our original timeline and took significant cost out of the Home Networks business in response to increasing pressures within the video sub-segment. We also leveraged our variable cost structure effectively to reduce operating costs throughout the entire business. As a result, we are in a position to emerge from this cycle a dynamic and more streamlined company, and one that will be made even stronger through the impact of CommScope Next. As the industry tailwinds of 5G, RDOF, and DOCSIS 4.0 begin to take shape, we believe we're extremely well-positioned to benefit for many years to come. Now let's move to slide seven for a deeper dive into our fourth quarter results. As a reminder, all of my references to quarterly growth rates are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Net sales for the quarter of $2.13 billion declined approximately 7%, primarily driven by declines in Home Networks. Orders for the quarter were approximately $2.54 billion, with a book-to-bill ratio of 1.18. While we're pleased with the strong orders flow, we do not expect to realize all of this backlog immediately due to capacity constraints, other supply chain-related considerations, and a portion of these orders that are related to support agreements or multi-year deals. Adjusted EBITDA of [audio distortion] million and adjusted EPS of $0.59 per share increased approximately 12% and 28% respectively. The company ended the year on a positive note with profitability highlighted by sales strength in the higher-margin Broadband Networks products, combined with a laser focus on company-wide cost control. For the quarter, we reported adjusted operating expense of $406 million, an 8% reduction from the prior quarter, primarily related to approximately $40 million in incentive compensation favorability. Turning to slide eight, I'll move to our segment results. Beginning with our Broadband Networks segment. Net sales of $789 million grew over 17%, primarily driven by growth in North America and Caribbean and Latin America region. From a business unit perspective, sales grew in the mid to high teens in both network cabling and connectivity, as well as in network and cloud. On a sequential basis, video systems and access technologies revenues were strong, although this was offset by supply constraints in our outdoor fiber and copper cabling product lines and the acceleration of a large DMPS license deal into the third quarter, which we spoke to on our last call. Order rates and backlog in the business were both extremely strong as cable operators continued to invest in their networks. Adjusted EBITDA of $213 million grew nearly 49%, driven primarily by higher volume and strong expense control. During the quarter, our Broadband Networks segment benefited from a continuing trend of network investments as cable operators seek to reduce pressure on the uplink portions of their network created by the new normal of working from home, video conferencing, and virtual learning. The existing networks were not designed to sustain the uplink demand in the home alongside continued video demand. To address this, we continue to see more node winning, PON, and DOCSIS 3.1 investments. Turning to slide nine for our Venue and Campus Networks segment. Net sales of $477 million declined 7%, primarily driven by softness across all regions except China and the Caribbean and Latin America region. The structured copper cable product line was down significantly year-over-year as COVID-19 had a substantial impact on the commercial real estate market that this product line serves. We also saw a moderate decline in our Ruckus business that were somewhat offset by growth in our hyperscale and multi-tenant data center fiber business, as well as our DAS and small cell business. On a sequential basis, sales were relatively flat in our inside plant copper and fiber businesses, but declined in our DAS and small cell and Ruckus businesses, in line with normal seasonality patterns, in addition to the completion of several large venue projects. Adjusted EBITDA of $48 million declined 19%, driven by lower volume, as well as commodity cost inflation, particularly in copper. Within the Venue and Campus Networks, we continue to see extremely strong growth in our hyperscale and multi-tenant data centers business as we gain share in this highly strategic growth segment of the market. We expect continued future growth as cloud-based professional and social collaboration tools, data storage, and streaming media become more mainstream and reduce reliance on legacy on-prem data centers. Our DAS and small cell business pipeline remains strong. CommScope's ERA digital DAS platform continues to be the wireless infrastructure application of choice for some of the world's largest and most demanding public venue applications. As an example, during the quarter, CommScope delivered a suite of solutions to the Grand Hyatt at San Francisco International Airport that integrated our structured cabling, Ruckus access points and switches, and ERA in-building cellular into a seamless ecosystem for their customers and staff. This project also illustrates the trend of owner operators taking advantage of lower venue occupancies during the COVID pandemic to proceed with major communication upgrade projects and prepare for the coming 5G revolution and emerge from the pandemic even stronger. We are also optimistic that our OneCell product line will become an integral part of providing future-ready indoor mobile connectivity for enterprise customers in a 5G world. Looking now to the product line details. As indicated previously, we have experienced significant headwinds in those products having exposure to verticals negatively impacted by COVID, particularly in structured copper cabling and Ruckus, given the linkage to commercial real estate and hospitality. This has been offset somewhat by gains in the federal, education, and healthcare verticals where stimulus dollars are continuing to drive spend. Turning to slide 10 for our networks segment. Net sales of $295 million increased modestly at just over 1%, driven primarily by the Asia Pacific, European, and North America regions. North American sales increased slightly despite two of the three major operators indicating a redirection of capital spending priorities for the recently completed C-band auction. From a product line standpoint, the bulk of the growth occurred at the macro layer, particularly in base station antennas and offset by weakness in metro cell deployments, which was created by COVID-related permitting and crew delays. Adjusted EBITDA of $60 million grew nearly 24%, primarily driven by the higher sales volume, favorable mix, and ongoing strong cost control. From a customer standpoint, T-Mobile has begun an aggressive investment cycle to build out their 5G networks with their 2.5 GHz spectrum, and our base station antenna and cable businesses saw solid benefits from our long and very constructive relationship with T-Mobile during the fourth quarter. Given the very active role taken by the other two carriers in the recently concluded C-band auction, we expect the required investments to build out this newly acquired mid-band spectrum will create significant new opportunities for CommScope in 2021 and beyond. The timing associated with the 5G ramp relevant to our product lines is likely to be weighted towards the latter portion of 2021 and beyond as operators shift focus to building out nationwide coverage. Internationally, the momentum for our active passive radio solutions in collaboration with Nokia is growing in various global trials and other optimistic stages of evaluation. During the quarter, we had some large wins with European operators and advanced discussions around several additional opportunities. In other areas of our international portfolio, we've seen positive momentum in key Asia Pacific markets also driving future growth. Lastly, while the metro cell business growth was slower than expected during 2020 due primarily to COVID-19 related municipal office closures and associated zoning and permitting delays, we're optimistic that as COVID recedes and the country begins to reopen, this business can return to its prior growth trajectory. As major U.S. carriers proceed with 5G-related build-outs with the new mid-band spectrum, an absolutely critical component will be the densification of coverage within the metro layer using CommScope's products. Turning to slide 11 for our Home Networks segment. Net sales of $571 million declined 31% and across all regions. While we saw strong growth in our broadband gateway business, this was more than offset by declines in video. Adjusted EBITDA of more than $40 million declined 44%, primarily driven by the volume declines in video. During the quarter, Home Networks saw strong and consistent demand for broadband gateways through both the service provider and retail channels, which served as a positive catalyst for growth in this segment, offsetting continued weakness in the video market. New platform wins like the XB7 provide additional tailwinds for broadband gateways going forward. Broadband products also benefited from international growth trends, as illustrated by Vodafone Germany's recent pass of a million subscribers using CommScope's DOCSIS 3.1 gateway. Lastly, like many other global industries, our home network business is experiencing silicon supply constraints. This recent development has extended lead times across the home network ecosystem that may persist throughout 2021 and that likely accelerated revenue from certain key customers in Q4 in advance of anticipated shortages in 2021. Turning to slide 12 for an update on our cash flow. For the full-year, cash from operations was $436 million and adjusted free cash flow was $415 million. For the fourth quarter, cash from operations and adjusted free cash flow were $98 million and $65 million respectively. While 2019 cash flow significantly benefited from working capital as we integrated the ERA solutions, we experienced a more normalized usage and increased capital investments in 2020. We continue to make progress on extending our terms with our supply base and remain focused on collecting timely from our customers. For the quarter, working capital was a net use of cash driven by accounts payable and the timing of certain payments. Looking forward, through the annual improvement targets set within the organization, as well as the efforts of CommScope Next, we continue to evaluate opportunities to optimize working capital and unlock excess cash, particularly on the inventory front. Turning to slide 13 for an overview of our liquidity and capital structure. During the fourth quarter, our cash and liquidity remained strong as it had throughout the prior quarters in 2020. We ended the quarter with $522 million in cash and no outstanding draws under our ABL revolver. Our total available liquidity of nearly $1.3 billion was relatively flat to the prior period. We also repaid $108 million of debt, and as a result, net leverage declined modestly as compared to the third quarter. CommScope has now repaid over $800 million of debt since the close of the ARRIS acquisition in 2019, which speaks not only to our ability to generate cash flow even when faced with challenging market conditions, but also to our continuing commitment to reduce leverage as quickly as possible while maintaining ample financial flexibility in uncertain times. Before we open the line for Q&A, I'd like to end with my view on how we see the market developing throughout 2021 on slide 14. Before going market by market, I'd like to remind everyone of our normal seasonality patterns. For all of our businesses, Q1 is typically the weakest quarter of the year, driven by a combination of weather-related factors as well as a general pause in capital spending as budgets are being finalized. For outdoor wireless networks and the portions of the Broadband Networks tied to construction spending, sales tend to peak in Q2 and Q3 as operators take advantage of more favorable weather conditions. For the portions of Broadband Networks and Venue and Campus Networks tied to electronics and licenses such as CMTS and Ruckus product lines, spending tends to ramp towards the back half of the year. The Venue and Campus Networks business can be very lumpy as large portions of that portfolio are tied to individual project awards. It is reasonable to expect a weaker Q1, especially coming off the strength we saw in Q4. For the individual segments within Broadband Networks, we are seeing a fundamental change in how networks are being used as a persistent trend. This considerable strain on the uplink will require steady and consistent investment. The pressure on the network is driving more traditional node splitting activity at a higher pace while deferring some of the next generation of virtualized investments. There's also increased demand for ubiquitous high-speed, low-latency broadband funded in part by the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, or RDOF. This represents another significant opportunity for CommScope in the back half of the year as those investments begin to ramp. Within outdoor wireless, the release of the new mid-band spectrum through the C-band auction is likely to drive the first real wave of 5G spending across the U.S. While this will also be more back-half weighted as operators finalize their strategies for deploying the spectrum nationwide, there is an increasing level of urgency as T-Mobile spending continues to ramp. Internationally, we're seeing improved competitive conditions in many of our markets and had several strong wins in both the Europe and Asia-Pacific regions, which shows a generally favorable trend as 5G spending begins to take shape. Within the Venue and Campus segments markets, we expect a variety of business conditions to contribute to some choppiness throughout 2021. Commercial real estate spending is likely to remain soft, which will negatively impact both the copper structured cabling volume as well as orders from traditional on-prem data centers. Hospitality, a highly strategic and important vertical for Ruckus, is also likely to remain under pressure, creating challenges for those product lines. Additionally, we're seeing some potential headwinds relating to our ability to access silicon used by some of the Ruckus product lines in the beginning of the second quarter. Offsetting these headwinds will be continued growth in the hyperscale and multi-tenant data center markets, as well as increasing opportunities and growth in the federal, education, and healthcare verticals. Lastly, we expect our next generation ERA DAS platform, as well as our industry-leading OneCell in-building LTE solution, to begin ramping meaningfully in 2021. Finally, on our Home Networks segment, work from home, virtual learning, and increased media consumption continue to fuel the need for higher performing broadband gateway devices, and we see continued growth in this important area. While we have achieved several wins in video streamers offsetting the declines in traditional video set-top boxes, we see continued pressure on the video product line as cord-cutting and cord-shaving momentum continues to create a meaningful headline. We also recognize that the global silicon shortages mentioned earlier will create a significant headwind to revenue and adjusted EBITDA, particularly in the first half of 2021 as lead times are pushed out and pricing pressures emerge. Before turning the call back over to Chuck for Q&A, I will close with a few words on our cost structure in 2021. While Chuck mentioned CommScope Next and the actions we will be driving aggressively in 2021 around both cost and growth, there will be some inflationary effects we need to contend with, as well as some one-time cost savings we experienced in 2020 that are likely to come back as COVID abates and business activities start to return to normal. Annually, we realized approximately $70 million in travel and marketing-related savings directly attributable to COVID, $20 million of which we expect to come back into the business in 2021. In addition, we expect approximately $20 million of additional incentive compensation expense in the first quarter of 2021 as compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. We're also seeing inflationary effects in many areas, most notably in copper, steel, and resin. We will need to reinvest in core strategic markets and technologies to achieve the growth that Chuck laid down. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Chuck for Q&A. Chuck? Thank you, Alex. Before turning the call over to Q&A, I want to close with some final thoughts regarding CommScope Next. While we initially indicated an intention to reserve formal commentary on my plan until Q3, I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing and become increasingly comfortable that we can share certain aspects of the plan in advance of this initial timeline. We started the process today at a very high level, I anticipate it will begin to communicate certain directional targets when we report earnings in Q1, with more detail to follow in Q2, culminating with an investor day featuring the extended management team later this year. Thank you very much for your attention. With that, I'll turn the call over for Q&A. Operator? Your first response is from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks, and congrats on the quarter. Just a couple of questions just as you start formulating next. You had noted international opportunities as an area that you were potentially evaluating. In the past, there's been some volatility there with kind of what the margin opportunity is there. Just kind of how you're thinking about that. Additionally, just how you're thinking about the strategic makeup of the business and whether there's anything that can be separated. Thanks. In terms of an international market expansion, when you think about Europe, the Middle East, some parts of Asia, Japan, Korea, there are actually some pretty good price levels we can get there, very similar in what we would expect to see in the U.S. We're targeting areas there. However, we also are looking at, across the board, what can we do in India. We just have to think about completely different design concepts. It's going to take a little more time there. We have to think about bare bones things, in that particular market. With that, your question about what businesses could we disconnect or whatever, we're going to just hold our comments on that till we finish our analysis of all the different businesses and portfolio products that we're going to be reviewing. Obviously, we're still in the middle of that, so I'll hold my comments there. Meta, let me just pile on a little bit on the international, because you're probably remembering, a couple of years ago, we talked about exiting certain regions that were extremely margin sensitive, and we felt like we just couldn't compete. I think there's been a bit of a strategic pivot, which Chuck alluded to since that time around how do we design a product that are much, much lower cost for those markets where the price is just so depressed. That's a bit of a shift from what we've communicated previously, but we're pretty excited about the work the team's done to really innovate and drive cost and functionality down for those more challenging markets. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Your next response is from George Notter of Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Thanks very much. I guess I wanted to try to dig into the CommScope Next program a little bit more. Chuck, you said a lot about the different aspects of the program, including reallocating capital, removal of redundant costs, systems issues you can kind of hash through. Could you give us some more tangible examples of things you've found as you've dug into the company and realized these opportunities to take cost out? I guess, frankly, the company's been restructuring costs for a long time now, and it feels like a lot of the low-hanging fruit may have been picked, but is that a view you agree with? Walk us through the picture at this point on cost restructuring. Thanks. When you think about duplicative systems, just think about the acquisition of ARRIS. You brought two very large companies together, two $5 billion-plus companies. When you put those together, you find a lot of duplicative systems. Great example is what we have in the IT side. One company runs Oracle, one company runs SAP. As we move to one system, we're going to have significant savings from that. We've really dug, and we're starting to do a pretty big, deep dive with all of the business units, to understand where are we spending money, what are we investing in. We're finding things that we can frankly, get from the outside without developing on our own so we can take that money and then double down on things that are really critical and core for us. That's just a couple of examples. I would also say that when we think about discretionary spend, whether that's indirect or Well, let's just start with indirect discretionary spend. There's an opportunity when we move to a general management strategy where the general managers are going to be able to look at all those expenses with a good eye, of a business leader that's saying, "I want to get allocated costs," and now they don't have to. They can really make decisions on their own, and we're going to be really giving them a lot of opportunity there, and we're going to also be providing some oversight there, more to details when we think of those types of expenses. If you think about direct procurement, we doubled what we buy, right? There should be some opportunities, depending on what the commodities are, that we can do more there. I have to say there's a lot, and I think as we really start to talk to the team, we got some general managers really getting excited about looking deeper and we're getting into the details there, and we're finding out. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Your next response is from Sami Badri of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Great, thank you. I just wanted to flip back to the broadband network slide where you talked about CMTS licensing being strong. We've seen this same exact bullet point or at least this comment come up a couple of times over the last year and a half. Could you just elaborate on what your customers are doing with the CMTS license sales versus actually buying the equipment itself, which was the historic case? Can you just unpack this for us, what's going on at each of your customers? Let me start, and then it's actually fortunate Morgan's in here because he runs that portion of the business, so I'll let him pile on. Effectively what we saw at the early part of COVID was there was a desire by the network operators to not physically intervene in the network because there was so much pressure on the network. The easiest way to do that would be to add capacity virtually, basically by adding licenses to the existing E6000 infrastructure that they had in the head end. As we've gotten towards the latter part of the year, what we're seeing is there is some license activity with some of the operators, but a number of the operators having basically exhausted the capacity of their DOCSIS 3.1 investments in their head end. Rather than invest in the head end infrastructure, they're pushing the investments into the nodes. There's a mix shift from the CMTS piece of the business to the node piece of the business, which is where we were talking about the more physical interventions in the network as we look out sort of this part of the year and then into 2021. That's kind of the dynamic that's been going on, but I'll let Morgan talk at a more technical level. Alex is exactly correct. The network spend moves between hardware and software, depending on what you have in your network and what your needs are. COVID has driven us to the point of breaking, particularly in the uplink. There's so much less spectrum allocated to the uplink at this point that our operator customers have had to split nodes and make smaller user groups that are sharing that uplink capacity. That's node splitting, and that's largely hardware. More of the capital has been pushed toward that physical equipment. In addition, there's a dance that goes on between adding more licenses, adding additional capacity to hardware that you have, and buying new hardware in the head end. That goes on, and you'll see this going back and forth over the years as they continue to invest in the network. One of the things that they're doing to invest in the network now is they're going to what's called a high-split. They're allocating more spectrum to the uplink to try to solve this problem. Of course, once they've upgraded the hardware, there will be software upgrades as well. Maybe just so we understand some of the dynamics here is there is almost like a built-in expectation at CommScope that these same customers are going to probably come back to you guys a few times with CMTS related licenses, right? As they continue to densify and harmonize their infrastructure. Is that a safe assumption from an industry outlook perspective? They come back to us when they need more capacity in their network. They buy physical cards, and then they add additional capacity to those cards in effect. It's a software related capacity add over time. They do that until they exhaust the amount of bandwidth that's available to them. It is an opportunity to continue to sell additional licenses to them until they reach a certain point, and then they go back to buying hardware to increase that available capacity again. That's the dance that's going on. Of course, there is also the upgrade to the network, whether it is to go to DOCSIS 4.0, which expands the amount of spectrum available, and thus the amount of both hardware and software that they can buy from us. Also the change in architecture from the centralized, the CCAP, to Distributed Access Architecture, whether it's Remote MAC-PHY or Remote PHY, which puts more of this equipment out toward the edge of the network to reduce some costs on the headends and to increase the capacity of the backhaul network and to reduce latency. All of those things will be going on for the next decade. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Your next response is from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking the question. Just want to see first if you could offer us just quick metrics of head count, where it was this quarter versus last. The longer-term question I wanted to see if you could maybe unpack C-band comments a little bit. I appreciate the indication around the second half waiting. What I wanted to ask about was how you see the trajectory and timing and scope, because you mentioned spending on macro towers this year. I assume we see that expand off the towers in 2022. If we could get some idea how to size this opportunity beyond second half 2021, and maybe help us understand how it gets funded given the amount they're paying Spectrum. Thank you. I'll take a swing at that and then I'll ask Morgan to chime in as well. In terms of, I think you're asking about headcount. It's a bit of a tough question to answer. In general, we have in the order of 30,000 employees globally. The vast majority of those are in our manufacturing facilities, it's one of the ways we manage our cost structure is by eliminating essentially labor when demand is soft. That number can move between, call it 28,000, 29,000 and 32,000. I think really what you're asking is what have we done on period overhead? I think we mentioned we've achieved our $150 million synergy target more than a year ahead of schedule. A significant piece of that was headcount-related costs. In addition, in the Home Networks segment, we took out significant costs, particularly in the video side and the video R&D side. A large portion of that was headcount related as well. A significant piece of the improvement you've seen in period overhead is headcount related. I think the total number year-over-year is something like $100 million. I think that's what you were getting at, Simon, and if not, happy to clarify either in a follow-up question or after the call. As it relates to C-band, we mentioned that two large operators bid substantially higher than at least our original expectation. I think the total award was $80 million versus the original expectation of something like $60 million. They will be using the first part of the year to basically design their networks, and there's some choices that they have to make around what type of antenna configuration they want to use. That will carry with it implications for wind loading and shear on the towers. It will carry with it implications for power going up the tower. All that will benefit us, but that will take through likely the first part of the year before they're ready to move into actual physical tower climbs, which begins in the latter part of the year and then will ramp as we get into 2022. The other piece which you mentioned, which is absolutely right, is the importance of densifying the network. We talked about in the prepared remarks that the integrated solutions piece of that business, the metro cell piece of that business, has been weak in 2020, largely related to permitting delays and crew delays, largely COVID related. As those densification investments return, we expect to see that business return to its normal growth trajectory. I think, to bring all that together, 2021 feels like a modest growth opportunity with the real opportunity as we get out into 2022 and some of these competitive dynamics begin to unfold. Morgan, what did I miss? Alex, you only missed one thing, which was that it was billions of dollars that they spent. You said millions, and if they only spent $80 million, I think all of our carrier customers would be a lot happier. Clearly, the reason that the carriers have bought this large amount of spectrum is because it is going to make their networks a lot more efficient. They're going to want to put this into play as quickly as they can. They have a competitive dynamic where one of the operators is already putting mid-band spectrum into play. This takes time. It takes time to do the planning, and it takes time with new technologies like Massive MIMO. It takes planning because it really is a big network upgrade. One of our customers that has been dealing with this in Europe said, "This is as big an upgrade as we've seen since 2G," which is a massive upgrade. It's an upgrade to power on the tower. It's an upgrade to potentially architecture in some places. It takes time to do it. We expect because there is this competitive dynamic and because this will make the network so much more efficient, that the build as it starts to ramp up, will be positive for us. It will take a little bit longer to ramp up than immediate, which is what everybody would like. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your next response is from Rod Hall of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, thanks for taking the question. I guess I wanted to come back to the cost structure and the R&D reduction that we saw in the quarter. I know you had alluded to maybe reduce outsourcing things and so on. I wonder if you could dig a little bit more into how you've reduced that R&D number so much. I guess the color on this is typically when we see R&D reductions like that, it's not always a good thing. Admittedly, there could be a lot of inefficiency in there we're unaware of. Just wonder if you could dig into that a little bit more. I've got a follow-up. Yeah, sure. There's been a lot of action on costs and period overhead. A lot of that's just natural synergy capture, which is elimination of redundancies. A lot of that is, I would say, moving to a next-generation operating model. The third part of that is R&D optimization. I think the elimination of redundancies is an obvious one. I won't spend any time on that. In terms of moving to a next-generation operating model, we've been looking very aggressively at how we leverage low-cost country sourcing across both the back office as well as the R&D function. We recently completed a large system conversion. We ramped our shared service activities in Goa, India, as well as in Taiwan, and Ireland, and Mexico. A lot of that has allowed us to just run the finance and IT and HR functions more efficiently. There's been substantial activity going there. As Chuck talked about, CommScope Next, that will be a big unlock for us as well as we drive further system consolidation. On the R&D side, this has been a pool of money, call it $700 million or so, that historically has not been very actively managed. It's been sort of a very bespoke management style. I think as we've gotten into it, what we've found is really two things. One, we're making investments in essentially low ROI or no ROI areas, so there's an opportunity to harvest those investments that aren't yielding the returns that we want and redirect those funds to areas like cloud and analytics and virtualization technologies that we really think are the tickets to the future. We've also found that historically, just by the nature of the way these two companies have grown up, a substantial amount of the R&D spending happens in very high-cost regions. We've been deploying a playbook that really the CommScope team has developed over years of how do we build up R&D capability in lower-cost regions like, again, China, India, Ireland, places like that, where we can just get a lot more bang for our buck. That work has only really just begun. Again, as we start talking about CommScope Next, that's one big area of opportunity for us to dig in. I'll just add one more thing. I want to be crystal clear that we will not be cutting anything that will hurt our future. I'm working very closely with the segment leaders and Morgan to look at every single thing we're working on in the company, and anything that's critical to our future, we're either keeping as it is or doubling down on that. I don't want you to get any impression that we're in any way looking at this in the short- term. This is a long-term play. This is going to be about investing where we see it making sense. This is getting closer to our customers and understanding what they need, getting that information back to our R&D teams, and developing exactly what we need to take us to the next level. I don't want you to take anything away from this, that we're going to be cutting anything that we don't need. We will be doing everything we can to protect our future. Just one last point, and I'm sorry to keep piling on, but it's an important one. When you look at the year-over-year decline in R&D, that is driven by home video. Really that was the actions that Joe Chow and the team took to scale the R&D appropriate with the size of that business, which I think everybody could understand given how dramatic the top-line declines were. To Chuck's point, there was not R&D spending harvested from the growth areas. Could you repeat that last part? You broke up when you said what drove that R&D reduction. It came out of the Home Networks segment and in particular the video piece of that business, which is down 30% year-over-year. Does that sound right? Great. Okay, that's helpful. My follow-up was on C-band again. Maybe Morgan, I guess this one's aimed at you, but I know they're in the process of replanning spectrum now, but how confident are you that spectrum's going to be allocated to macro towers where you guys would benefit more versus smaller cells in metro densification kind of projects? Is that a wrong perception? If you go into densification and smaller cell sort of deployments for that spectrum, do you guys benefit just as much there? Maybe just talk us through that a little bit. Sure. I am very confident that this will be used on the macro layer. It is an enormous both capacity add to the network and also an efficiency play, and the output power and the technology is certainly available to blanket your network from the macro tower will be the most efficient way for the operator, so they're certainly going to do this. I believe they're also going to do a metro layer to add additional capacity in cities because just doubling your amount of available spectrum, which is roughly what C-band does to the operators, is probably not enough to last through more than a first couple of years. I expect them to do a metro layer as well, and we do benefit from both. There are a lot more metro cells than there would be macro cells per square kilometer. Our benefit per area would likely remain very similar. Although the types of products that we sell are different, the costs of the products are different, the margin profile would be similar, regardless of where it is in the network. Great. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Your next response is from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks for taking the question. I had a couple. Chuck, I just wanted to ask you one more on the strategic direction here. I think if we rewind to the time of the ARRIS acquisition, there was an argument made for a broader portfolio and more end-to-end solutions, particularly for cable and broadband customers. How are you thinking about the value in terms of that strategic direction? Do you see value in having an end-to-end solution for certain customers? That was really the argument behind the ARRIS acquisition. I have a follow-up. I think we absolutely are seeing the value of having end-to-end solutions. What we're going to be doing as we think about our portfolio, there could be some things that we remove, there could be also opportunities for us to make acquisitions that are lined up with exactly where we want to play. I just say that we do feel there's an end-to-end play here, and we also think that there's opportunities to add on where we need, and we're going to be diligent on what we think is really not creating value. I'll add in here an example just so that everybody can make it real. One of the real network challenges that will go on in this next decade, one of the ways you measure the quality of a network will be based on latency and jitter. In other words, how snappy your network feels and how reliable it is in that snappiness. By providing a complete end-to-end solution all the way through the network from, let's say, the core of the network, all the way through that access layer and even through and into the home, through the Wi-Fi access point, all the way to the edge, is one of the ways that an integrated CommScope can really add value beyond that which somebody who just makes a point source could do. We think these are the types of areas where it really benefits by having this tight integration. Okay. A follow for Alex, if I may. Alex, I think you mentioned weaker 1Q. Just wanted to clarify, you mean weaker year-over-year? I think seasonally, we all understand 1Q is weaker. Just in terms of where consensus expectations are, it looks like consensus expects you to grow top line for most part of the year. I know you're not guiding here, just based on visibility and the constraints that you talked about, do you think that's realistic? Yeah, you kind of answered your own question. We're not guiding. It's a tough question for me to answer. The commentary that I did give was sequential, and I was trying to help you understand what the sequential kind of velocity looks like as we think about normal seasonality patterns, as well as some of the costs that we see coming back into the business in 2021. I tried to give you some commentary, some qualitative commentary, on how we see the markets unfolding, particularly with some of these tailwinds related to RDOF spending, C-band and the like. Beyond that, I don't think I can really comment on consensus numbers or what our point of view is on those. Okay. Yeah, thanks for the clarification there. Thank you. Thank you. Your final question is from Jeff Kvaal with Wolfe Research. Yes. Thank you, gentlemen. I have a couple. I guess first of all, I was hoping that you could add a little bit of color to the leverage reduction story that hasn't been as much of a theme on the call as it has been in others. What can you tell us about how we should expect leverage to decline, either through 2021 or over a broader time frame if you prefer? I thought you were going to ask two questions, Jeff. Is that the question you have? Jeff? I'm sorry, Alex? I misunderstood. I thought you were going to ask two questions, so I didn't want to cut you off. Oh, okay. I'll ask them at the same time. Okay, that's fine. I guess my second question would be on the Broadband Networks margins. My sense is that some of that is a little bit one time, but if you could let us know how much is sustainable improvement, and how much you expect to give back to some of the factors you mentioned before, I'd appreciate that. Thank you. Sure. Let me take the leverage one first. We are absolutely committed to aggressively de-leveraging the balance sheet. I think there's obviously two ways to do that. One is by paying down the debt, which we've been doing, and the other is by growing EBITDA, which we aspire to do certainly through CommScope Next. Really that priority hasn't changed. Again, I'm not at liberty to provide guidance, so I can't give you an outlook for what 2021 will look like, unfortunately, which is I know what you were asking for, but that's sort of not part of our guidance philosophy at this point. As it relates to Broadband margins, I actually would say that the margin improvement is absolutely not one time in nature, but it is transitory in nature. What I mean by that is, as mix shifts and the issues that Morgan was talking about previously, as mix shifts between a software type of solution for adding capacity or upgrading the network to a hardware type of solution with physical node interventions and the high-split activity that Morgan described, you will see a negative mix trend. As we look into 2021 and we see more of the activity in the Broadband Networks segment trending towards physical node splitting activity, you will see the margin compression. That's not to say that as the cycle matures and there's a next level of investment in more virtualized solutions, that you won't see that trend reverse. It's just there's sort of specificities between whether it's physical activity or software-based activity. Hopefully, that helps you get a sense for what we see in 2021 as it relates to broadband margins. Okay. Thank you, Alex. Yes. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to Chuck Treadway. Well, we appreciate your support of CommScope, and we hope you have a great day. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. Have a great day, and you all may disconnect.