Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) Q3 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Great. Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the first company sessions of the Goldman Sachs Communicopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing and hosting Hans Vestberg, who's the chairman and CEO of Verizon. Prior to becoming the CEO in 2018, Hans worked as Verizon's chief technology officer and president of global networks. Prior to joining Verizon in 2017, he served as Ericsson's CEO. My name is Mike Ng, and I cover U.S. telecom here at Goldman Sachs. We have about 35 minutes for today's presentation. Thank you so much for being here this morning, Hans. Thank you for having me. Hans, around this time last year, you announced the frontier acquisition. Verizon's targeting 30-plus million fiber passings by 2028, 35 to 40 million over time. Could you just talk a little bit about how Frontier fits into the broader Verizon strategy and some of the opportunities that you see as you think about the integration of Frontier? Yeah, and I guess my team has posted my safe harbor behind me, so the phone is calling as well. Yes, I will. So safe harbor statement, I might say something that is forward-looking, so just be aware of that. Let me talk about Frontier. So, yeah, one year ago, we basically announced the acquisition of Frontier. It was based on that we did a strategy how we're going to continue to roll out fiber outside our ILEC footprint. And, of course, when we had done that strategy, we realized that the footprint on Frontier were very good buy versus build for us, timing-wise and even value-wise as we closed it. And so that was the first. The second one is, of course, that then we're going through all the regulatory approvals. We have all the federal approvals. We're now working down the last couple of states here that we believe is g...