AT and T trading high today as it says they see sustained profit growth over the next three years, including double digit gains in twenty twenty seven. This is the company is really doubling down on its fiber rollout as well. I'm pleased to say for more. The AT and T CEO John Stankey joins us now from your own named stadium. John, let's talk a little bit about twenty twenty nine. You're expecting to have fifty million plus total locations with fiber.
Why this big fiber focus? How do you get there?
Well, look, we've had great success with what we've built thus far, and we see customers, first of all, love the product, they stay with us longer, they drive better value into the business. We're having great success at selling multiple products into fiber households. Four out of every ten of our fiber subscribers also subscribe to our wireless service today and that's getting higher. And when you think about where technology is going in the future, workloads are only
going to go up. We expect data consumption is going to increase about eighty percent over the next five years. In Fiber is the one that can do that. It's the one that has the symmetrical bandwidth characteristics that will facilitate AI and sending more data up into a network than what comes down, which is traditionally how broadband networks are built today, and we think that's a great investment for the law Hault.
John, Just as you speak, we've got some breaking international news. We've just got to bring our viewers of South Korean lawmakers voting to request lifting martial law. We will bring you up to the moment news. But at South Korean National Assembly Speaker Wo is saying they will protect democracy. John, we return to you and a US focus and a business that you are currently wanting to see, really the bandwidth and the broadband and the infrastructure play that you're offering.
What's interesting is the way that you're fueling investment in fiber in particular is by doing innovative partnerships like the one with Blackrock. Do you need outside investment to commit to this sort of infrastructure rollout?
Look, we have a great portfolio of options. We primary portfolio play is owned and operated where we take one hundred percent of the economics. We fund it, build it, and operate it ourselves. But we also realize we're in kind of a constrained window right now. Fiber is needed now, there isn't going to be a window that's open for
a long period of time to do this work. Capital markets, of course, private capital markets sometimes provide a little bit of insulation that public markets won't, and in order to make sure we keep our lead, will balance that portfolio out and our relationship with Blackrock and our gigapower work has been really effective. What we've proven in the market is that we can operate outside of our traditional operating territory just as effectively as we have in our home territory.
I think Blackrock as a partner, has viewed it as being a really successful investment. They've been willing to put more into it, and we expect we're going to continue to use that as one of the tools to grow our footprint over time to get past that fifty million we're talking about.
And it's really interest and you brought up, of course, AI and the demands there. In many ways, everyone's been ringing the hands of the energy infrastructure needs and black Croc sort of funding that infrastructure build out. But how significant is the AI demand and the strains on what you provide.
It's an interesting issue. I think actually power consumption is going to be really important moving forward. That's one of the things we're talking about today with our analysts and investors, which is how do we shut down our century old copper infrastructure and all the electronics and equipment that support
it that are really power hungry. And that's one of the ways that getting more of this traffic over to fiber, which is passive and uses a lot less power, that we can actually help to offset some of the increase of what data demand and AI will drive moving forward. And we think that's a really important policy dynamic on this look. I think there's going to be a lot of issues that the country has to work through on getting the power grid to support leadership and AI. It's
going to happen. Maybe it gets slowed down a little bit, maybe there's a few bumps in the road, but what we do know is that demand's going to be continuing to go up.
Well, you're also talking to analysts and investors about today, is how you're giving money back big returns investors, whether you're doing it through driven in but also through buybacks as well. Why have you chosen that angle? Now you've paid down debt.
It's a good day when you're giving more back to shareholders. Look, we feel very comfortable with our debt position that we're going to arrive at in the middle of next year, and that's why we're making this announcement today. First of all, we did a really nice job of structuring our balance sheet properly, so we've got really attractive interest rates on our portfolio of debt. We've got it turned out that's
a really, frankly, a strategic asset. And the way it's set up right now, and given that we're largely investing organically in the business, reinvesting in our business like this and getting our leverage structure the way it is, feels very comfortable to us because every year we're reinvesting in capital, reinvesting in assets that we hold. And frankly, when you kind of look at some of the m and A work we've done as we've restructured the business, we spun
out certain non strategic assets. We haven't really gone back after the equity structure and reducing the share count outstanding, and when the dividend yield is still over five percent, we've got fantastic dividends coverage. This is an opportunity for us to maybe balance that out a little bit and bring a little bit of equity back in house.
Okay, let's talk about that changing over your own portfolio of the assets you hold DirecTV moving away. I mean, will we see that being integraled to these financial forecasts.
No, we've actually today as we sit down and talk with the investment community, we'll be providing restated constructs under ex Direct TV. Assuming that we're going to close up by the middle of next year. We still see great improvements in our cash flow. We'll expect that we'll probably grow cash flow by about a billion dollars a year even without direct TV. As we move through this planning process, we see acceleration on our EPs, our ebit is going
to continue to grow. So, you know, Direct TV has been really good. It's provided us a lot of cash coverage. We did a really nice job of managing the asset down to this point. It's time to focus on what we're going to do moving forward, which is build a world class connectivity business. And it's the right decision to make at this point.
A lot of analysts are echoing that, and we are, of course with John Sanky, the eight and TCO to our worldwide radio and TV audiences. Many relieve that you're getting back to what you do best, which is telecoms. Within that though, is you know, some really clear clarity being given on the numbers. You're getting forty billion dollar plus of anticipate anticipated shareholder returns, fifty billion dollars plus
of financial capacity over the next three years. What are the risks we're at this time of a new administration coming in? They are a macro headwinds, global headwinds. Are their risks to these numbers?
Well, I think every time there's an administration change, there's usually a discussion about boy could change his negatively impacted business. I mean a call four years ago, there was a little bit of that narrative going on, and I think we'd done just fine for the last four years. And frankly, some of the things that I hear right now, tax policy, possibly reinstituting accelerated depreciation, those things could be very very
good for our business. And in fact, when they were in place and they weren't lapsing, we were investing at a higher level. And so I think if this administration incoming administration follows through on what they'd like to do, which is to put pro investment policies in place for the nations one of the nation's largest capital investors. That's going to be a really good thing for us. So
we watched that carefully, certainly like everybody else. There's other policies up in the air around tariffs and a few other things that we're all kind of wondering what might occur with that. I think same minds will prevail. I think some of what we're hearing right now is directed to make sure that we negotiate from a position of strength, and we make sure that we respect the US market as strong and as meaningful as it is, that people should play on a fair and level playing field when
they gain access to it. And I'm hopeful that we'll see good policy comes out that drives good investment and good economic returns as a result.
Well, returns are up on your shares you're currently training at the high since twenty twenty one. More broadly, do you think that you can sustain this sort of growth we.
Do, Otherwise we wouldn't be out giving the three year guidance that we're giving. We feel, first of all, strong and the fundamentals consumers need to use more Internet. They
need to get higher performance networks to support that. That's the business we're in, and we're going to talk a little bit this afternoon with our investors about our ability to manage the cost structure in dealing with that accelerating and increased growth so that as customers use more that we can ultimately drop more cash to the bottom line.
And that growth dynamic of us getting more efficient people using more of the product, we think that's going to sustain itself over the next three years, and that's why we gave the guidance that we gave.
We so appreciate you coming live at and T Stadium over in Texas. Johns Thanky at and T cdo