Tag Archives: S

Sprint at Deustche Bank Conference Notes

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Tarek Robbiati – CFO

We are living in fascinating times for our industry

“And even if you look at the MVNO world it’s very active, there is a very active MVNO industry in the U.S. and it’s not powered by small players, Google is very active in this space. And so when you really look at it, we are living incredibly interesting I would say fascinating times in our industry, which are very, very dynamic.”

Competitive intensity has triggered more churn than we thought

“So the rising the competitive intensity has probably triggered a little bit more churn than we thought. We see churn to be relatively stable quarter-over-quarter, we were had foreshadowed before that churn would be coming down quarter-over-quarter. But it’s nothing alarming it’s just the nature of where we stand right now in the market and we feel reasonably good. We think we can still take share, we are the attacker from a price standpoint. We have very aggressive offers that are aimed at family plans with multiple lines.”

Leasing extends the life of a device

“So, you do leasing because you see that you can monetize an asset multiple times over its life. Maybe two lives for a phone, maybe three we don’t know. But those phones have an extended life relative to what we were using in the past. And what’s also interesting is you talk about extending the life of a device that we are seeing that consumers’ upgrade their phones with I would say lower frequency then before.”

Sprint (S) at Goldman Sachs Conference 2016 Notes

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Every employee has been given equity based incentive, that triggers only if the stock price reaches $8

“Every single employee — over 30,000 employees, we did 30,000 grants. So every single employee has the exact copy of what I — of my incentive package, meaning no equity until the stock hits $8”. Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

Prime families are the ideal customer

“Now just putting perspective, a prime customer will stay with you about two and half times more than a subprime customer… And if you could capture that which is what we want, prime families that come more than individuals with a single line, you start seeing the business provide a very different customer life value and profitability changes.” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

Wireless communication industry is aggressively competitive

“I think we’re living in a pretty competitive environment. If you look at Verizon’s advertising, it’s turned a bit aggressive. They hire people to talk about the Sprint network and for also you would be following Verizon, they have not done that I think.” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

iPhone war results in free iPhones

“There is once a year where there is a big launch of iPhones and we all try to basically put up the best offer. I think this year, we are very little creative. I think we all went with a free iPhone. So therefore there is no competitive advantage. So it’s interesting to see Verizon and AT&T react fast” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

Consumers are confused by data plans, and prefer a fixed bill

“And the vast majority say, give me one bill, with a fixed amount that I don’t need to try to figure out how many gigabytes, how many megabyte — maybe you guys are smarter than me, but I don’t know how to use a gigabyte. I don’t know what it really means” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

After years of bashing, PC Magazine gives Sprint some favorable coverage

“I thought the editors of PC Magazine really hated us, they were bashing Sprint for years and if you read PC Magazine today, they have done an awesome piece that basically shows why, yet Sprint is not better than Verizon yet, but we are the story. We’re the comeback story. We’re more reliable than Verizon in certain markets. We’re faster than Verizon in other markets.” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

Sprint believes it has a cost advantage in network structure

“Every single structure comes into a control tower in which we basically figure out what is the most cost efficient and the fastest speed that you can deploy a structure…. We believe that we have a competitive advantage in how we’re deploying our network and what is our cost to basically put a new gear and what’s our cost to operate a network that we feel is not being good but just basically exposing our plan. It’s very different than the way our competitors have deployed networks.” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

Building a network is no longer extremely expensive

“Look at our network today, it’s the lowest CapEx. Now as we densify our network, yes we’re going to increase our CapEx and yes we’re going to increase our OpEx. But never to the tune of the way it’s been done in the past. There is way too many new technologies today. We have way too much spectrum and we’ve been real smart on how we deploy our network.” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

Smaller companies like Sprint favor net neutrality, while its bigger competitors oppose it

“Sprint was the first one that endorsed net neutrality because we believe that when you’re a smaller company, it is not such a bad thing to have the government look over and in many competitive practices that or bigger competitors do.”Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

 

Sprint plans to use its spectrum to get financing

“We have a lot of spectrum and we’re right now — our goal would be that before the end of the year we’re able to potentially basically be able to use spectrum in order to finance the company.” Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

Sprint at Goldman Sachs Conference Notes

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Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

Tremendous difference between prime and subprime customers

“You not only want to attract high quantity of customers, but you want to bring high quality of customers. There is a tremendous difference between prime and subprime customers. Now just putting perspective, a prime customer will stay with you about two and half times more than a subprime customer. A subprime customer goes shopping right after the contract expires. A subprime tends to stay with you averaging five to six years.”

We’re in a pretty competitive environment

“I think we’re living in a pretty competitive environment. If you look at Verizon’s advertising, it’s turned a bit aggressive. They hire people to talk about the Sprint network and for also you would be following Verizon, they have not done that I think. If I remember being a kid and watching Verizon’s commercials, I don’t remember them trying to hit somebody else as hard as they’re trying to hit us. So it’s quite competitive from that angle”

We’re all in the iPhone war

“There is once a year where there is a big launch of iPhones and we all try to basically put up the best offer. I think this year, we are very little creative. I think we all went with a free iPhone. So therefore there is no competitive advantage. So it’s interesting to see Verizon and AT&T react fast. Usually it take them — they’re used to taking a bit longer, perhaps in both T-mobile and ourselves announced a free iPhones obviously with a trading of a device…So that gives you an idea of the competitive environment, but I think it just shows — shows we’re all in the iPhone war who can get more pre-orders and then after that, we all go and we continue with our strategy.”

There’s no longer a big difference between mobile networks

“The important message to take away from this is, Verizon’s marketing hugely gone right. The T-Mobile network is good. Our network is good. AT&T network is good. So we’re all within fighting distance. Now in some places they’re better, we’re better, but that’s gone. Now what comes now is the most exciting part and that is when you have so much capacity, when you have — look at highway lane where you can put 60 cars and it’s half empty, well that’s going to give you two basic things that customers like, capacity and speed.”

You don’t need to spend a crazy amount of money to build an amazing network

“This is an interesting industry. People criticize you when you spend too much and then people criticize you when you spend too little. We’ve proven, you can — you don’t need to spend the crazy amount of building some dollar to build an amazing network.”

No one has stopped investing based on net neutrality

“There was a lot of talk about our competitors saying, hey if net neutrality passes, we’re going to stop investing, nobody has stopped anything. We’re all investing. Everybody is doing best thing investing over the network. So this one is touch issue that as Chairman of CTIA, we have to find a common ground among all carriers in terms of how do we represent the industry going forward.”

We don’t need Dish’s spectrum

“So I don’t have a lot to say about the 600 megahertz spectrum. We decided we don’t need it. We have enough spectrum. We don’t have to participate. So we watch what is going on. It’s quite interesting. Charlie — you can never read them, you have no idea what’s next. So I have no idea what Charlie will do with his spectrum. If we didn’t have a spectrum, we would be looking at this to a lot closer. We have sufficient high quality spectrum network going to work.”

Sprint (S) CFO Tarek Robbiati at JP Morgan Conference 5.25.2016

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Sprint (S) CFO Tarek Robbiati still focused on reducing cost structure

“The priorities ever since I’ve joined were really around, set around cost cutting. So we embarked on a transformation program, which is really around changing – fundamentally changing the cost structure of Sprint.  We set up a transformation office in September, a couple of weeks after I started with Sprint. And that transmission office involves a number of initiatives, several hundreds of them geared at cutting cost across the organization and nothing has left unturned.”

For example, got rid of what they perceived to be marketing inefficiencies 

“So we simply stop doing a number of things that we consider to be inefficient. And one example I can give you is the sponsorships that we’ve got to, as we mentioned, we terminated the agreements with NASDAQ and NBA. This was probably the right thing to do, because those types of marketing dollars were not really resonating with our customer base. In fact, if you look at it year-on-year, we cut it 12% in our marketing dollars without altering our ability to grow customers, in fact, our phone gross additions have grown by 4% over the same period. So there was a fair bit of inefficiency in that space.”

Still trying to figure out how to optimize their distribution and store footprint

“So distribution is probably the area where we are a little bit more cautious about. This is not around generating net cost reductions. Sprint distribution is probably below par. Even though, we did, I would say a very interesting and opportunistic deal with RadioShack. We are still not where we would like to be from a distribution standpoint.   So there would be some stores that we have that would probably shutdown, because in the wrong location they have low traffic, low footfall, other stores that we need to open in the areas there where we see the traffic in the footfall.”

Now using a regional operating structure which gives them more granularity into the profitability or unprofitability of various sub-markets

“So the new operating model is really a major departure from what we used to do. And it’s the first thing that has occurred to me when I arrived was, we needed to change the way we operated, mainly because this is the big country, and it’s not a homogeneous country, you have very different market realities in California in the South, Northeast and in the center of the country.  So you’ve got to be organized in the services business like telco space – like telco space in a way that understands that the go-to-market has to be tuned to the realities that you have in each area. And so we embarked on regionalizing our company. We’ve created four areas that effectively reflected the geography of the country, win in those areas. We have the costs in four areas, 18 regions that we manage.  Now what that does is that, you actually have a much, much more granular view of performance.”

Consumers are increasingly choosing to opt for leasing plans

“We have about in our sales 63% of our sales are financed by way of leasing and installment billing. The proportions of that 63% split is 45% leasing and 18% installment billing.”

Sprint (S) CFO Tarek Robbiati said they’ve dramatically improved the quality of their network

“We’ve made considerable progress. Most of the industry observers would tell you that, we are very, very close in most areas with the top of the industry and in some cases, we’re even better. So in cities like Chicago, like Denver, like Houston, really our network is way above the rest.

 

Miscellaneous Earnings Call Notes 3.10.16

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Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Fireside Chat

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said he is being forced to raise money in order to compete with an irrational competitor

“We’re profitable in the USA, but we’re losing over $1 billion a year in China. We have a fierce competitor that’s unprofitable in every city they exist in, but they’re buying up market share. I wish the world wasn’t that way. I prefer building rather than fundraising. But if I don’t participate in the fundraising bonanza, I’ll get squeezed out by others buying market share.”

Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner Bloomberg Interview

Linkedin (LNKD) CEO Jeff Weiner said turnarounds are hard

“Turnarounds are arguably the most difficult thing you can do in business.”

Sprint’s (S) Management Presents at Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference

Sprint (S) CFO Tarek Robbiati said they are increasing focus on how their marketing dollars are spent

“I can find a lot of things at Sprint that were superfluous. One example is I never liked sponsoring race cars in telephone industry. That makes absolutely no sense. There is no car relations between the branding for the race car and our customers, so there’s no more sponsorships that don’t bring us any sort of result. We are also more targeted in the way we advertise.”

Sprint (S) CFO Tarek Robbiati said the 4G network is already past its prime and they are now focusing on building out the 5G network

“We are not building a network that is 4G, 4G is almost a thing of the past. We are building a 5G network for the future, and 5G networks are funded fundamentally different to 4G networks. They’re all around high capacity, and the more spectrum you have the more capacity you have. The more spectrum you deploy, the more you can connect customers and the more speed you can give customers across your network. And there is a simple engineering law that governs this, the higher frequency spectrum is more efficient to handle very large capacity of traffic and that’s the world we’re moving towards with 5G.”

American Express Investor Day

American Express (AXP) CEO Ken Chenault is confident they have the right business model going forward

“Is the American Express business model fundamentally broken? I can tell you with complete confidence, the answer is no.”

AT&T’s (T) Management Presents at Deutsche Bank 2016 Media, Internet & Telecom Conference

Saw a slowdown in the handset upgrade cycle

“I think you saw in the fourth quarter, it was a slowdown in the handset upgrade cycle or the total sales. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that continue”

The DirecTV assets were as advertised if not better

“The DIRECTV assets were as advertised if not better. Good quality products, good people, a good organization. Two, from a more mundane perspective, we are focused on systems integration, we are focused on everything from general ledger reporting and payrolls and vendor management and so forth. We are going through all of that heavy lifting.”

Enterprise Products Partners’ (EPD) CEO Jim Teague on 2016 Investor Day

Oil and gas markets are being forced to adjust to the staying power of US shale

“Because of U.S. shale and slowing economies much different than President Carter said, now we’ve got too much oil and global markets have another problem. They are being forced to adjust to the magnitude and staying power of U.S. shale. Over the last few years, the largest consumer of hydrocarbon now has enough to production to be a provider to international markets and different from sovereign producing countries, the U.S. producer is a pure capitalist.””

In a crisis you’re trying to survive

“Is this a crisis or is it a cycle? Well they are different. In a crisis you’re trying to survive”

Low prices are the cure for low prices

“So we see this as a challenging year but we see a sunrise with all of the demand growth that’s coming. And I think, Tony, you’re going to speak to that. Really the cure for low prices are low prices, just like price creates supply, guess what? Price creates demand. ”

Bancolombia S.A. (CIB) Q4 2015 Results

Risks to the economy are biased to the downside, but we don’t expect a sharp deceleration

“Risks to economic activity are biased to the downside. And in that sense with today’s information, I think that the likelihood of having the 1.8% growth scenario for this year is becoming more likely. But I would also say that basically what we think is that — I mean if you compare the situation to previous ones, what we think is that, I mean we are not in — I mean it’s not very likely to see a sharper deceleration but instead to have a long period of low growth, basically because first, the external shock that the economy has received has proved to be more prolonged than we expected before; and secondly, because we don’t see that there is a scope for countercyclical policies and/or monetary or fiscal side.”

Vail Resorts’ (MTN) CEO Robert Katz on Q2 2016 Results

People are skiing

“Our Colorado resorts continue to deliver very strong results, with solid growth above our record prior year. Our U.S. destination visitation has remained strong throughout the year at all of our mountain resorts, as we saw the benefited from the appeal of our resorts to high-end leisure travellers; we are reaching through our more sophisticated marketing efforts and the strong U.S. economy.”

International visits have declined, but drop has moderated

“While we have continued to see a decline in international visitation, it has moderated since the Christmas holiday, in large part due to the strength of Australian visitation which is up considerably over last year due to the success we’ve had in driving visitation to the U.S. among our Epic Australia Pass holders. Visits from Mexico have been stable relative to prior year which we view as a strong success given the currency headwinds and as expected we are seeing declines from our U.K. Canadian and Brazilian markets.”

Sprint 3Q15 Earnings Call Notes

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Sprint’s (S) CEO Marcelo Claure on Q3 2015 Results

500k postpaid additions

“Sprint continues to build momentum in subscriber growth as you can see reflected in our third quarter results, we have 491,000 total net additions in the quarter, which bring us to over 2 million total net additions year-to-date, as continued progress in postpaid has offset the pressures of the prepaid business. Postpaid net additions of 501,000 were the highest in four years comparing net additions of only 30,000 in the prior year quarter, which makes five consecutive quarters of postpaid growth.”

Focused on network densification and optimization

“A couple of things to our network, first and foremost, we are focused on a densification and optimization strategy. We’ve been very clear that we’re going to do that without jeopardizing the customer experience. And the way we’re expanding network is we’re utilizing something that we call the lowest cost structure.”

Fundamental value prop is to keep things simple

“So our fundamental value proposition is we like to keep things simple. It’s a great product at a great price. And we are achieving that. As you have seen, our network is performing better than ever. And therefore, I think the best way to validate that is our churn.”

We made it clear that we’re going to be a price leader

“As it relates to prices, we made it very clear that we’re going to be a price leader. We are pretty bold in terms of offering 50% of our competitor rate plans and after they have been with us for 24 months, they are going to go back to a standard rate plan. We can do that, because we see our network getting better every time.”

We have the best churn in our history

“Our existing customers are finding out that they already have the best price and customers had been with us for a while, they are very satisfied with the quality of the network and all the improvements that they are experiencing. I think the best way to measure that is churn. If you look at what we have done in churn, it had been three consecutive quarters in which we have had the best churn in the Sprint’s 20-year wireless history.”

ARPU is an outdated figure

“I think ARPU is an outdated figure. It’s really hard to measure, because as we’re transitioning customers from a traditional subsidy model to a model where they are paying or they are leasing their device, it’s really hard to measure ARPU”

Miscellaneous Earnings Call Notes 12.11.15

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Universal Health Services (UHS) Presents at Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2015 Leveraged Finance Brokers Conference

Steve Filton

Behavioral health business is more recession resistant

“if you’re seeking — and you’re seeking acute care treatment, you need a hip implant or you need some sort of ENT surgery et cetera, you may think about the economics of that; you may choose to postpone that because you don’t want to come out of pocket for a co-pay or deductable or because you don’t want to be out of work frankly during a tough economic climate. But if you try to commit suicide or you overdose on drugs and alcohol, you are not going to be in a position to decide whether you should or shouldn’t be admitted to the hospital. That decision is really being made generally by somebody else who is effectively economically insensitive to what your economics of the situation or concerns might be. So, I think that’s another reason why the behavioral business has generally proved to be more, I’ll call it, recession resistant.”

Optimum occupancy in behavioral care is in the low to mid 70s

“occupancy rates and our behavioral facility peaks in the mid 80s, right around 84% in about 2005-2006. What we started to do at that point because we have a view probably the ideal occupancy rate in this business is somewhere in the low to mid 70s. And so, when we were at 85% in about 10 years ago, we’re turning away a lot of patients at that point because obviously if we’re averaging 85%, it means that there’s a lot of days when we’re at 90 and 95 and even a 100% occupancy. It also means that because of some of the constraints that we have, we have put male and female patients; we don’t put adults and children together, we don’t certain diagnoses together. So, as a consequence, it’s difficult for facilities to really run at something close to full occupancy.”

Silicon Laboratories Presents at Credit Suisse Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Tyson Tuttle

Low power for IoT requires innovation

“if you look at the energy efficiency that’s required. If you’re handset only has 10% battery life left, and I know that when mind says 10% battery life, I’m like looking for a charger. But if you imagine that amount of power needs to power an IoT device for five years. So that’s essentially the amount of energy that’s in the little coin cell and they want that device to sense the environment. Let’s say every few minutes it needs to communicate that when something happens. This type of energy consumption requires a lot of innovation. And if so this is what we are focused on doing.”

From a macro perspective, wireless markets suffering but infrastructure business doing well

“I think a lot of people that we are selling into wireless were suffering, especially in China, we were not exposed to that at least on our infrastructure business, we had a little bit of exposure on the microcontroller side and some of the optical modules that did hold back our growth in IoT in the second half. But on infrastructure we see that it’s pretty solid globally. And this is more of a reflection of core network in data center roll outs.”

Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) CEO Ronald Boire on Q2 2016 Results

Have seen increased traffic so far in Q3

“the challenges were greater than anticipated and reduced traffic as well as conversion. During the second quarter, we implemented a significant number of website fixes to increase traffic, improve the overall user experience and stabilize the site. So far during Q3, we have seen increased traffic and have stabilized the site for the holiday season. We plan to implement additional improvements after the holiday season to further upgrade the overall user experience.”

The Cooper Companies’ (COO) CEO Bob Weiss on Q4 2015 Results

Had a bumpy ride from mid September through the end of November

“August was a good month and things dropped off in October a lot, particularly in the U.S. and some of the problems we ran into in Europe exacerbated the most. We thought we’re in pretty good shape in early September, found out we weren’t in as good shape as we thought by mid-September and had a bumpy ride with our integration if you will in Europe, from mid September until pretty much the end of November. Having said that, we had what we call a very respectable November”

Toronto-Dominion Bank’s (TD) CEO Bharat Masrani On Q4 2015 Results

Mark Chauvin

Are starting to see stress in consumer credit portfolios in energy-impacted provinces, but within expectations

“Next, with respect to our oil and gas exposure, we were not surprised by the level of impaired loan formations this quarter. Ongoing analysis indicates that the oil and gas nonretail credit portfolio continues to perform within expectations, given the current level in near-term outlook for commodity prices in this sector. We are beginning to see signs of deterioration in the oil impacted provinces consumer credit portfolios, which again are well within our earlier expectations. Based on ongoing stress tests conducted against the credit portfolios, I remain comfortable that the potential impact of low energy prices on the bank’s credit losses remains well within the range of a 5% to 10% increase over 2015 levels.”

Seeing a gradual increase in delinquency rates over last 4-5 months in oil impacted provinces

“we have been watching it very closely, especially the impacted provinces, which would be Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. And what we are seeing in two categories, being the indirect auto but the non-prime segment primarily and then in the card segment, we have seen a gradual increase in delinquency rates over the last four or five months.”

Customers affected are early indicator, the type of customer that would be more challenged than the typical customer

“So in many respects we look at that as an early indicator because that would be the customer that maybe would be more challenged than the typical customer. Now, I would stress that these two categories are less than 1% of our total book and that we expected to see losses of this level.”

Sprint’s (S) Management Presents at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Leveraged Finance Brokers Conference

Tarek Robbiati — CFO

Wireless data is much cheaper in some other markets than the US

” I think the – look at the U.S. wireless market, it’s the biggest one in the world by value. And the reason why it is the biggest one in the world by value is because we have 300 million people and you have a very, very high ARPU…when you really look at some of their – the size of their bills, it’s quite extraordinary. I mean you compare this with Hong Kong which is a market that I am very familiar with. In Hong Kong you can get very, very decent data packages on 4G networks for less than $5 postpaid, which is quite extraordinary.”

Comcast’s (CMCSA) Management Presents at UBS Global Media and Communications Conference

Mike Cavanagh–CFO

No new comments on wireless plans. We believe the cheapest way to transmit data is to get it to the hardwire as soon as possible

“we have no news on this topic today. What we have decided is that it’s certainly worth at this point triggering the MVNOs that we can work on exploring what kind of offering we could bring and go deeper to learn and experiment. That’s the state of play on the MVNO. And that sits in the context of having been big believers in WiFi. So, you have seen us invest in and continue to invest in the WiFi as an extension of the value of the broadband pipe, which is still the kind of best and cheapest way to transmit data we believe is to get it to the hardwire as soon as possible. So, with the progress we have made on our WiFi product and broadband, we think it makes complete sense to be exploring on – what possibilities the MVNO offering has to add value to our customer relationships. That’s as much as we know. There is no – it will take time to draw any conclusions from what we are now going through.”

Vail Resorts’ (MTN) CEO Robert Katz on Q1 2016 Results

Our labor markets are tight

“think ensuring that we have enough, ensuring that we are providing the right employee experience, attracting enough of the right labor, retaining labor and then a part of that is obviously being able to have housing for everyone that works here, I think it is probably our number one concern right now in terms of ensuring that we can continue to drive success. And so, I mean that’s led us over the last couple of years to continue to invest to make sure that we can do that. I’d say where we feel right now is that our markets are tight. We think it is a challenge.’

Upper income US remained strong

“Colorado in particular is the strong market, continues to be a strong market given the economy here, Utah, the Bay Area and California so that obviously is the big help right there but then I would say we are seeing pretty broad based strength from all of our major destinations across the United States, I would say even places like Los Angeles, like Seattle which are not typically our strongest markets in terms of size, we’re seeing real strength there too”…

“I would say right now I think the domestic, the U.S. economy on the domestic side is very strong, the upper income portion of that remained strong ‘

AutoZone’s (AZO) CEO Bill Rhodes on Q1 2016 Results

DIY auto spending has benefitted from lower gas prices

“I think clearly we are seeing some industry strength currently. I think a part of that has to do with what’s going on with gas prices. And while gas prices initially went down, you didn’t see the initial correlation with miles driven increasing. But in more recent months, starting really strong in this summer, and continuing through September, the latest date that we have available, it’s showing nice strength. Over long periods of time we’ve seen that has a nice correlation with our DIY industry growth.”

Cisco Systems (CSCO) Presents at Barclays Global Technology Brokers Conference

Hilton Romanski

Customers are looking for a hybrid cloud

“what we’re hearing from customers fundamentally is that they want to see the benefits and the economics of public cloud in their private cloud environment. So that would suggest to us that ultimately there is a hybrid cloud solution out there for enterprises where some of those benefits across multiple types of workloads across their own environments that are private as well as those that are being hosted in a public cloud is going to co-exist.”

Dave & Buster’s (PLAY) CEO Steve King on Q3 2015 Results

Couldn’t be happier with how 2015 is shaping up

“we couldn’t be happier in terms of how 2015 is shaping up, while we’ve achieved so far as we look forward to a strong finish in the fourth quarter.”

Halliburton’s (HAL) Management Presents at Wells Fargo 2015 Energy Symposium Brokers Conference

Christian Garcia — Interim CFO

North America looks like it could be marginally better than expected, but international looks marginally worse

“North America does look like it’s going to be marginally better than what we said in the third quarter call and international looks like it’s marginally worse and in total, we’re in line with our expectations as we left the third quarter.”

2016 is clearly going to be another down year but we don’t know the magnitude yet

“2016 is still opaque. E&P the E&Ps have not announced their budgets, but clearly it’s going to be another down year. The question is the magnitude of the decline.”

Argentina had elections that could lead to positive economic reforms

“Argentina just had elections and we think that new president elect will usher in a new era of economic reforms achieved among that would be probably a potential depreciation of their over valid currency which will in the short term provide some little need to some dislocations but I think in the long term would be actually help that economy boot that economy and would invite for investors.'”

HCA’s Management Presents at Opperheimer 26th Annual Healthcare Broker Conference

Bill Rutherford, Chief Financial Officer

Seeing higher turnover of nurses as demand for nurses strong

“We think you know we are seeing higher turnover of recently than we’ve historically had. And we think there is a lot of other supply in the marketplace and demand for nurses. We’ve got a host of efforts around recruiting. We talked about on our call our efforts to hire nurse graduates and putting them in orientation and onboarding them a little bit differently so that they have — the retention is longer for those new nurses.”

See continued strong economies in the majority of our markets

“We see continued strong economies in the majority of our markets and I think that provides really fundamental momentum for the company and those trends don’t appear quickly, nor do they disappear quickly. So, we are optimistic that our market trends, we are seeing has some durability to it in the future.”

Comerica’s (CMA) CEO Ralph Babb on Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Brokers Conference

Energy reserves at 3% of total energy related loans

“if prices remain low for longer, we expect to see continued negative credit migration and losses to emerge yet we believe they will be manageable. We have increased our reserves for energy loans in each of the past four quarters, as a result of an increase in criticized loans and sustained low energy prices. Because investors have been particularly interested in the size of our energy reserve allocation note that at the end of the third quarter, we had reserves amounting to more than 3% of our total energy and energy related loans.”

U.S. Bancorp (USB) Presents at Goldman Sachs US Financial Services Brokers Conference

CFO, Kathy Rogers

Planning for three interest rate increases in the next 12 months including next week

“as we look out into 2016, I do think that we are seeing an economic environment that is somewhat similar to what we saw this year, may be slightly improved. As we think about the interest environment, we are projecting in our plan, a potential for two interest rate hikes next year, and then December 1 of this year; so a total of three if you look out over the course of the next 12 months.”

Not seeing any deterioration of credit outside of energy

“the simple answer is no. We’re really not. Outside of energy, it’s really relatively benign, no significant change.”

We’ve probably gotten to a point where reserves will start building again (but not necessarily because of credit deterioration)

“I think one of the things that you’re going to see is that we are getting to that point in the cycle where many banks, including ourselves, have enjoyed a nice outcome of reserve releases. And I do think we’re coming to the end of the cycle. And I think that you’ll start to see reserves starting to build as we move out into later quarters.”

Lululemon Athletica’s (LULU) Laurent Potdevin on Q3 2015 Results

Start of Q4 has been mixed

“In line with macroeconomic trends, the start of Q4 has been mixed. We saw lower traffic in the final weeks of Q3 and into the first couple of weeks of Q4, with steady improvement in Thanksgiving. Given the current environment, we’re taking a conservative stance with revenue in Q4, while taking the necessary actions to manage inventory and control expenses.”

Moody (MCO) Barclays Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference

Mark Almeida, who is the Head of the Moody’s Analytics Business

November was a good month from an issuance standpoint and December has gotten off to a strong start as well

“November was a good month from an issuance standpoint, and December has gotten off to a pretty good start as well. So I think things have firmed up a bit, since some of the weakness that we saw in the summer time.”

Korn-Ferry’s (KFY) CEO Gary Burnison on Q2 2016 Results

Even in a digital world, it still pays to have people housed in the same location

“I think that creating connectivity of people and clients in an environment of collaboration is incredibly important and although we live in a virtual world, I fundamentally believe that the people need, to the extent possible, need to be housed in the same location.”

Gregg Kvochak

“global demand for our Executive Recruitment services remained strong in the second quarter.”

McGraw-Hill Companies’ (MHFI) CEO Doug Peterson Presents at Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference

Issuance is down 30% year to date

“we’ve seen a choppier market, issuance is down during the quarter and year to date overall issuance is down globally about 28% and in the quarter its down again over 30%, 35%, 37%, depending on which element of the markets that you look at. So we’ve seen some volatility in the ratings business.”

Avnet (AVT) Presents at Raymond James Technology & Communications Investors Brokers Conference

Kevin Moriarty, CFO

Our product is service

“Avnet’s product is, our product is service, has been and always will be. Models change the way we get compensated for that service. We need to continue to be nimble and agile to be able to move with that”

We feel pretty good about the environment

“I would characterize the current lead times as stable, short. We haven’t really seen any significant changes in push outs, cancelation rates. So we feel pretty good. EM, we continue to experience growth within our European business. I would characterize the Americas as sluggish overall on the component side.”

ConocoPhillips’s (COP) CEO Ryan Lance on 2016 Capital Budget and Operating Plan

We see dividend as highest priority

“Despite the tough market, our dividend remains the highest priority use of our cash. We view the dividend level as a long-term decision. And we’ve been in the current low price cycle for relatively short period of time”

Capital budget down ~25% from last year, -54% from 2014

“We’re announcing a 2016 capital budget of $7.7 billion that’s $2.5 billion lower than 2015 capital guidance and more than $9 billion lower versus 2014. In setting our budget, we’re flexing capital down appropriately for the price environment without losing opportunities or sacrificing the safety or integrity of our operations.”

Sprint at Goldman Sachs Conference Notes

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Marcelo Claure – President and CEO

It must have been a fun industry for my competitors before I got here because everyone took customers away

“when I came this must have been a really fun industry for my three competitors because everybody took customers away from Sprint and it’s good that a year later we’re back at taking customers away from them’

We’re catching up to AT&T and VZ in network performance

“we were last in absolutely everything. It’s good a year later we’re third catching up to Verizon and AT&T in the overall network performance. ”

This was not the original plan

“what happen is as you know when I took over that wasn’t the original plan. The original plan was final talks with T-Mobile he was quite open. We were very sure that the government was going to approve our deal, but I guess the government sent us some pretty interesting messages that made us say hey we cannot do that deal. And I think as Masa has publicly said, you know he was very disappointed. He felt one of the biggest mistakes was to not truly understand the U.S. regulatory system.”

Post paid customers are all that matter

“so one of the things that it took me a little while to learn was that really nothing matters except post-paid as the net adds established on matter and much of AT&T were lost to M2M or cars none of those things matter the only thing that can move profitability in this business is basically your handset customers because that’s where 85% to 90% of the revenue comes.”

We’re the price leader, but there isn’t perception that we are

“when you ask customers why do you select a carrier, why do you choose AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile, they look at three basic factors, network, pricing and handsets. And I think from a network perspective we’re getting better dramatically. From a pricing perspective is we are the price leader we still don’t have the perception that we’re a price leader. And thirdly from a handset perspective, I think you’ve seen us innovate new way for a customer too on this so we feel very good about churn going forward.”

Calling Legere Pink Bat Man

“we take a lot of pride in being the first wireless carrier to offer leasing. I remember my friend the one that thinks he is pink bat man, pink bat man say that was a bad idea. And pink bat man copied the idea later. So that’s quite interesting. [Multiple Speakers] You can let him know that I thought and I think he was pink bat man. And he will probably say something or Tweet something, but anyway.”

AT&T and Verizon want to stretch out the amount of time the customer keeps their handsets

“T-Mobile and ourselves are very happy to do one year upgrades but I think as Lowe has said and as AT&T has said it, they want to go the opposite way they want to stretch the amount of time the customer keeps their handsets, they’re very happy with that.”

Going to cut costs with zero based budgeting

“in order for us to win is we got to take a lot of cost out of Sprint, there is no way around it right. Like I said year two it’s easier for me because I understand the business I understand areas where we can go after. What zero-based budgeting means, it means that you don’t take anything for granted you grab every single dollar that’s going to be spent and every single dollar that’s going to leave Sprint and you basically review it ahead of time. ”

We’re changing the way that we’re building our network

“First is network OpEx, the way we’re building our network is not a traditional way it’s a disruptive way. We are not buying equipment from your traditional OEM and we’re not going to a traditional tower companies so which both are quite expensive. We have found a combination of newer vendors and we are going to many different utility companies, we’re going directly ourselves so we’re doing a lot of that work and we believe that you can basically take out OpEx if you do it that way. It’s a disruptive way. It’s a very different way, but the quarter for spectrum let us do and then I’ll talk a little more about that.”

We have a lot of spectrum and we’re going to deploy it through small cells

“we’re going to embark in what is going to be, I would say the largest deployment in U.S. history. We’re going to put 10s of thousands of small cells. And the reasons why we can do it is that we have a lot of flexibility in our backhaul due to the fact to the large spectrum that we have.”

The size of our pipe is going to be bigger than any other carriers

“our job is going to be to build an amazing network, an amazing rich data rich, video rich network. And you can afford to do that because when you have 200 megahertz of spectrum the size of the pipe is going to be bigger than any of the other carriers. So we’re going to have a capacity reach video enabled network.”

Sprint FY 1Q15 Earnings Call Notes

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Masayoshi Son on the call.

“Hi, this is Masayoshi Son. I’m extremely excited about the turnaround of Sprint.” ”

I had a plan to consolidate but that’s no longer the case.

“So as you might have imagined, when I entered into the U.S. market, I had a plan to have a consolidation in the industry but that’s no longer the case. So I lost the confidence for some time.

Now we’re focused on building a next gen network.

However, the last few months I am totally refocused to help Marcelo and the team have the historical turnaround of the company, and I’ve been working – very, very involved especially on the networks side. I have been involved with my engineers almost every night from 10:00 p.m. up to 2:00 a.m., almost every night and designing the next-generation network and looking at the opportunities to improve the OpEx.

I don’t want to sell the company.

So as a result, Marcelo and I and the total team of Sprint and SoftBank together and now we have a plan to have a big turnaround. I am extremely excited about that and I have a confidence for that especially with a new leader, Marcelo, which I have full confidence. So I am excited. I don’t want to sell the company. I believe Sprint is going to be one of the very, very good companies of which I will be very proud. So I’d like to answer any questions together with Marcelo.”

Going to deploy small cells

“leveraging on the experience of SoftBank in Japan, we plan to deploy tens of thousands of small cells and that obviously is going to further improve coverage and capacity. So we believe that with that and what we’ve shown is that our network is going to be able to have parity or superiority in the next two years. ”

This is not a good quality network

“this is Masa. As you may know, Japan has the best network in the world. To me, every time I come to the States, I say this network in this country is not something that you should be proud of. It is actually very bad. It’s not just Sprint, even Verizon, AT&T and T-Mo, all network is pretty bad. I’m going to say U.S. invented Internet, U.S. invented telephony but network is not something that you should be proud of.”

We know how to create a number one network with less capex

“within Japan, SoftBank spent almost half in CapEx compared to our competitor, but the result of our network coverage, the speed is number one. So what we’re good at is spending less in CapEx and create a number one network.”

You have to use your brain instead of money and muscle

“it’s easy to spend money and get the result, but if you have less money and then still want to achieve the number one network, you have to use brain instead of money and muscle.”

All of the networks in the US are badly congested. You can’t offer a video bundle until you fix that

“I say that in the U.S. all of the four mobile carrier network is congested, all of them, very badly. It’s so bad that you don’t want to even talk about the detail. So in that situation, how would the customer benefit for video bundle? Video bundle, especially through the mobile network is going to even choke the network. The network congestion becomes even worse. So I think before you talk about video bundles, especially through the mobile network, all of the four carriers in the States have to cure the issue of congestion. ”

Verizon’s OTT strategy is something that other operators have tried to do around the world with limited success

“Verizon is trying to do is something that mobile operators around the world have tried many times and that is to try to launch OTT or different services. And unfortunately, the track record of success of carriers around the world in terms of behaving or bringing this over-the-top solutions have not been stellar.”

Sprint FY 4Q14 Earnings Call Notes

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Churn is the most important customer satisfaction metric

“Moving to slide eight, the only way to truly measure customer satisfaction is by churn because churn represents the voice of (10:11) the customer. In order for us to improve our customer trends, we must reduce our churn by fundamentally transforming the customer experience.’

Our network is better than T-Mobile

“In the second half 2014, Sprint overall network score improved to third-place ahead of T-Mobile with notable progress in reliability as well as call and text performance. Further evidence of the continuous improvements can be seen in our testing so far in the first half of 2015 with additional market results coming out every week.”

Everybody says that their network is great

“I find it amusing that T-Mobile claims the fastest network, that AT&T claims the strongest LTE signal or that Verizon claims the most reliable network making you think they have twice the coverage, this just further clouds the consumer’s perception of network experiences.”

Embracing WiFi

“In addition, at Sprint, we’re embracing Wi-Fi as a complementary layer to the network by leveraging the in-building coverage and capacity that it provides where customer spends most of their time, including at work or in their homes.’

Promoting a customer first mentality

Turning to slide 10, we’re continuing to develop a customer-first culture across all touch points. As a result of these efforts, we’re seeing positive feedback from customers based on the sequential improvement in our Net Promoter Scores month after month’

Big jump in people proud to work at Sprint survey

“According to our latest employee survey, the percentage of employees responding favorably to a statement, I’m proud to work at Sprint, improved from 63% in fiscal third quarter to a record high, 81%, in the fourth quarter.”

Copying T-Mobile down to the “pain point” language

“In Sprint’s customer-centric culture, we’re passionate about listening and understanding customers’ pain points and making changes to enhance their experience. One of the main complaints from customers who travel to top destinations in Latin America and Europe and Japan, is how shocked they are when they return home”

Focusing on the Hispanic market

“Sprint is committed to engaging, connecting and providing wireless services to the Hispanic consumer. The Hispanic market is a very important part of our business”

We lost way fewer postpaid subs

“what I want to make sure you understand is, we only lost 201,000, which – that’s a big gain when we compare that to previous quarters. I go back and I was looking at some of the data before and we lost 201,000, but when you compare that to the previous year, at the same time, we were losing 700,000 customers. So this is a gain of 500,000 customers that we feel it’s a great gain and we’re building the right momentum.”

Masa is behind densifying the network

“As it relates to what are SoftBank’s involvement, SoftBank has been very involved, Masa personally himself has been working very hard with their engineers and our engineers basically to define what is that next generation network. And to us, it’s going to be, well we do know is there’s going to be a massive densification of our network and when you massively densify any network the results that you get when you have so much spectrum are spectacular and you can see it already in places where we’ve done some of that, where our network is better than AT&T in many different places.’