Charter Communications Inc

NASDAQ:CHTR

Earnings Call Transcript

[Operator]

Hello, and welcome to Charter Communications' Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time.

I will now turn over to Stefan Anninger.

[Stefan Anninger, executive]

Thanks, operator, and welcome, everyone. The presentation that accompanies this call can be found on our website, ir.charter.com.

I would like to remind you that there are a number of risk factors and other cautionary statements contained in our SEC filings, and we encourage you to read them carefully. Various remarks that we make on this call concerning expectations, predictions, plans and prospects constitute forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from historical or anticipated results.

Any forward-looking statements reflect management's current view only, and Charter undertakes no obligation to revise or update such statements. As a reminder, all growth rates noted on this call and in the presentation are calculated on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise specified.

On today's call, we have Chris Winfrey, our President and CEO; and Jessica Fischer, our CFO. With that, let's turn the call over to Chris.

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

Thanks, Stefan. In 2024, we managed the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program successfully. Outside of normal turn, we kept roughly 90% of former ACP customers connected.

Spectrum Mobile business continued to grow at a rapid rate. We added over 2 million Spectrum Mobile lines in 2024. We're the fastest-growing mobile provider in the U.S. with the fastest connectivity at the best price. Our expansion initiative continued to deliver good passings growth, driven by our subsidized rural initiative and normal construction and fill-in activity.

In 2024, we grew revenue by 1%, while full year EBITDA growth accelerated to 3.1% driven by continued strong mobile growth, our cost efficiency initiatives and political advertising.

Late last year and early this year, we had unexpected natural disasters from Hurricane Helene impacting Florida, the Carolinas and the broader Southeast; with Hurricane Milton across Central Florida; and most recently, to Las Angeles fires. There are, of course, subscriber and financial impacts, which Jessica will cover, but our employees work and live in these communities, so it's also personal.

Stories of our frontline employees commitment about, including employees helping to reestablish connectivity for customers despite losing their own homes and countless employees traveling in from other regions to stay and to help. Really proud of how our frontline employees have responded. And from Stanford, we learned some lessons on how to put customers at center, and we got better for communications along the way. Part of our customer commitment is to always improve and we are.

As we look to 2025 and beyond, the environment for broadband, mobile and video remains competitive, but we had better visibility than this time last year. The impact of the elimination of the ACP is now behind us. cellphone Internet net additions appear to have peaked or be stabilized, and we continue to do well against new fiber overlap.

In the meantime, we haven't stayed still, sets us up well for the future. Our multiyear investment initiatives, including network evolution, network expansion and execution, including the investment to employees and tenure to benefit our service, are all delivering tangible results. And last September, we relaunched the Spectrum brand and its promise to customers through Life Unlimited.

With our first -- our market first, customer service commitment and making better use of our unique assets through converged seamless connectivity across 100% of our network, and now seamless entertainment and video. The positive impacts from our customer commitment and brand refresh investments take time to be recognized, but you can already see the positive effect from our new pricing and packaging in video results.

In late 2022, we launched a number of strategic initiatives and communicated a significant onetime capital investment to enhance our growth potential long term. While the investments put temporary pressure on our near-term free cash flow growth, these were a unique set of nonrecurring and generational industry investments, and they include the largest broadband expansion since the 1980s, the largest physical upgrade of the network since the 1990s. Market-leading convergence of our wireline and wireless capabilities and an exciting video transformation, which will help drive our connectivity business.

2025 will have a slightly higher level of investment than 2024, but this year will also be our key capital investment. So this is a fitting time to highlight where our strategy leaves us competitively, operationally and financially for the coming years.

We have a unique set of assets and in scale as shown on Slide 4. Spectrum has the fastest Internet, the best WiFi, the fastest mobile product and is the leading video provider in the U.S. with over 900,000 miles of network infrastructure, 57 million residential and SMB passings, and over 300,000 fiber-lit buildings. Of course, we have significant competition from wireline overbuild, cellphone Internet and satellite across all of our products.

The power of our network, though, continues to improve with symmetrical and multi-gig feeds, allowing product developers to create applications and use cases that require high capacity, low latency, high reliability and edge compute. Product and software developers can rely on the ubiquitous deployment across all the major cable networks in the U.S. So we're very well positioned. In fact, it's always been the U.S. cable companies that have built the fully deployed platforms that have enabled the development of next-generation products and services, despite the handicap of being regional operators competing against national and now global competitors.

The ability to provide the very best of our products across our entire footprint is unique. That includes new features we're developing for seamless connectivity and seamless entertainment. Convergence is a popular phrase amongst our competitors now. And while it's flattering to hear our own wording adopted by others, Slide 5 of our presentation today speaks for itself. We are very underpenetrated relative to our converged connectivity capabilities.

Having the best network and product capabilities by itself isn't enough, and that's why we've always focused on the ability to have the most value in our packages, combining the best products with ways for customers to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year, whether a promotion or retail prices. By the time you have new entrants, consumers can be enticed to try to provider even at lower quality and higher all-in prices. But in the long term, we believe the best products and best pricing across a package of those services will win.

And Slide 6 of our presentation is an example of that advantage across typical broadband and mobile packages. Together with our upcoming seamless entertainment offers, highlighting this value is the goal of our recent pricing and packaging under the Life Unlimited brand refresh.

I spoke about the sequencing of our seamless entertainment launches on last quarter's call, and that timing in 2025 hasn't changed, so I won't repeat the steps and priorities. But we look forward to fully rolling that out in the first half of this year and delivering even more value to consumers, up to $80 of retail app value when subscribing to our video packages.

That customer proposition is shown on Slide 7 of our presentation. Similar to mobile, taking video as part of the package now ensures a lower price for Internet, both at promotion and retail. And of course, we couple all that with high-quality service. We've always believed that investing in customer service and satisfaction creates a virtuous cycle in our business. Better customer service translates to fewer customer transactions. Fewer transactions produces higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. Lower churn reduces cost and increases in penetration. And lower cost gives us the ability to offer better pricing, which works for customer acquisition, search and satisfaction and positions us for growth.

Our sales and service is 100% U.S.-based, made in America, if you will, using our own employees with good paying jobs and benefits. Employees are also Spectrum customers committed to developing their local communities and their career at this company. That is a competitive advantage. An investment we already made in wages, benefits in real estate that's difficult to replicate. And that existing investment is also why it was so easy for us to make our marketing customer commitments. We stand behind our commitments to service credits when we missed the mark. As a reminder, we've provided a summary of those commitments on Slide 8.

For years, we've been investing in machine learning and now AI, and much of our effort is making front live work easier and more efficient, which drives higher customer and employee satisfaction. Some of those examples include full service, network, CPE and billing telemetry on the account, which is automatically presented to an agent now when answering the phone.

In addition, AI is also listening to the conversation, providing proactive optimized solutions, customer sentiment, ChatGPT style technical support, call summarization, and flagging post-call trading opportunities. AI call summarization also helps the field technician assess the issue before they even get to the door, improving the customer interaction. And that's in addition to rolling out our own ChatGPT on their handheld devices to more accurately pinpoint issues and recommend the best fix to the field tech.

We do have millions of transactions every year. And honestly, there aren't millions of best outcomes. So transactions can be more effective, it can be shortened and reduced, driving higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. But also higher employee satisfaction, which drives lower attrition or tenure, and therefore, better service, which, of course, produces less transactions as a result.

Taken together, that is our strategy and competitive positioning: the best network, best products, the most value with unmatched service, having more household penetration, higher product penetration for household, lower service transactions and churn, and lower operating and capital cost per customer, which allows us to have the lowest pricing a virtuous cycle.

The financial output is high-quality revenue per home passed with free cash flow growth and high return on investment. But we're not perfect and we've always got room for better execution and speed, but I believe we have a great recipe for growth of our existing products with the investments we've already made. And we have strategic assets in our network, in our fully U.S.-based sales and service employees. Those will enable future products and revenue streams and operational efficiencies that aren't even considered in our financial plans today.

In the meantime, we positioned the company for customer profitability growth, clear visibility to free cash flow growth and improving capital allocation and return philosophy. This is a winning formula. It's with a fully dedicated and a hungry team. So we're excited about 2025 and beyond.

And with that, let me hand it over to Jessica.

[Jessica Fischer, executive]

Thanks, Chris. Before discussing our fourth quarter results, I want to mention that today's results include a number of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton impacts, which hit the Southeast U.S. in late September and early October. Our fourth quarter customer results include over 20,000 additional disconnects related to the storms.

Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was reduced by approximately $35 million, primarily driven by hurricane-related customer credits and revenue, and the storms drove approximately $125 million in total incremental capital expenditures in the fourth quarter. Today's results do not include any related to the wildfires that hit Southern California in January. Our first quarter results will include some lost customers and passings related to the fires. We're still assessing impacted area, and we expect to incur capital expenditures to recover and rebuild loss passings.

We've been providing bill credits to customers in impacted areas, and those onetime credits will offset some first quarter revenue. We may also have some incremental operating expense, although we expect that to be relatively small. And we'll isolate the impact of the fires when we report our first quarter results.

Unrelated, we recently completed an extensive review of our serviceable passings to clean up duplicate acne and other data and to identify new passings. As a result, we reduced total estimated passings in our trending schedule for all periods presented by 1.7 million passings. Additionally, because of the GAAP requirement, our cost to service customers expense line has been divided into 2 new cost lines, field and technology operations and customer operations.

The best way to forecast these 2 allied items is to combine them into 1 figure as presented in the past as cost to service customers, and that's how I will refer to them today when reviewing our expense results.

Let's please turn to our customer results on Slide 10. Including residential and SMB, we lost 177,000 Internet customers in the fourth quarter. In mobile, we added 529,000 lines. Video customers declined by 123,000, with the improvement driven by the rebundling we launched in September, along with our Life Unlimited brand refresh. Video performance does not yet reflect the benefits of incorporating seamless entertainment apps in our product. Voice customers declined by 270,000.

In addition to the 20,000 Internet disconnects driven by the hurricanes, the end of the ACP program drove higher fourth quarter nonpay and voluntary churn among former ACP customers. For a total estimated fourth quarter ACP impact of approximately 140,000 Internet losses, primarily nonpay and some voluntary churn. Looking forward, we believe we are past the onetime ACP-related impacts to our customers.

Beyond ACP and hurricane impacts, we were generally pleased with our fourth quarter customer results and core Internet results, which exclude ACP and storm-related losses were better than last year. We continue to compete well across our footprint.

As Chris discussed, we continue to pursue initiatives that are intended to drive customer and financial growth, including network evolution, new pricing and packaging, converged connectivity product development and footprint expansion, including our subsidized roll initiatives. As of year-end, we have launched symmetrical 1-gigabit speeds in all 8 of our step 1 markets. Earlier this year, we launched 2 x 1 gigabit service in 2 of these markets, Lexington, Kentucky and Cincinnati. And we plan to launch 2-by-1service in additional markets later this year.

Demand for faster Internet speeds continues to grow as data usage grows. In the fourth quarter, monthly data usage by our residential Internet customers who don't have our traditional video product, reached over 100 gigabytes. Our WiFi also continues to improve, driven by our advanced WiFi product and our new WiFi 7 router. Our WiFi supports our converged connectivity product, including Spectrum Mobile, which is only at about 8% of passings but remains the fastest-growing mobile service in the United States and offers the fastest overall speeds.

Turning to rural. We ended the quarter with a total of 813,000 subsidized rural passings. We grew those passings by 117,000 in the fourth quarter and by nearly 400,000 over the last 12 months. And we generated 41,000 net customer additions in our subsidized rural footprint in the quarter. 2025 customer growth should benefit from 2024 rural passings growth as well as passing growth in 2025. We expect rural passings growth of approximately $450,000 in 2025, our biggest year so far, in addition to continued nonrural construction and fill-in activity.

Moving to fourth quarter revenue results on Slide 11. Over the last year, residential customers declined by 2.2%, while residential revenue per customer relationship grew by 1.7% year-over-year given promotional rate step-ups, rate adjustments and the growth of Spectrum Mobile. Those factors were partly offset by a higher mix of nonvideo customers, growth of lower-priced video packages within our base, $34 million of hurricane-related residential customer credits and $37 million of costs, which accounting principles required to be allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue.

As Slide 11 shows, in total, residential revenue declined 5.4%. Turning to commercial. Total commercial revenue grew by 1.9% year-over-year, with SMB revenue growth of 0.3%, reflecting higher monthly SMB revenue per SMB customer primarily due to rate adjustments. Enterprise revenue grew by 4.4%, driven by enterprise PSU growth of 5.2%. And when excluding wholesale revenue, enterprise revenue grew by 5.2%.

Fourth quarter advertising revenue grew by 26%, given political revenue growth. Excluding political, advertising revenue decreased by 8.2% due to a more challenged national and local advertising market. Other revenue grew by 14.6%, primarily driven by higher mobile device sales. And in total, consolidated fourth quarter revenue was up 1.6% year-over-year, and 1% when excluding advertising revenue and hurricane-related customer credits.

Moving to operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA on Slide 12. In the fourth quarter, total operating expenses grew by 0.3% year-over-year. Programming costs declined by 9.1% due to an 8.7% decline in video customers year-over-year and a higher mix of lighter video packages, along with $37 million cost, which accounting principles required to be allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue, partly offset by higher programming rates.

Other costs of revenue increased by 16.2%, primarily driven by higher mobile device sales, mobile service direct costs as well as higher advertising sales expense related to higher political revenue. Cost to service customers, which combine field and technology operations and customer operations, declined 0.5% year-over-year given productivity from our 10-year investments, including lower labor costs.

Sales and marketing costs grew by 3.2% as we remain focused on driving customer acquisition and given our Life Unlimited brand relaunch in September. Finally, other expenses declined by 0.7%.

Adjusted EBITDA grew by 3.4% year-over-year in the quarter and by 1.8% when excluding advertising. As we look ahead to the full year 2025, we faced headwinds that we didn't last year, including the lack of political advertisement and the full year impact from the prior year Internet customer losses, primarily due to the end of ACP, but our plan is to grow adjusted EBITDA in this year.

Turning to net income. We generated $1.5 billion of net income attributable to Charter shareholders in the fourth quarter compared to $1.1 billion last year, given this quarter's higher adjusted EBITDA and a larger pension remeasurement loss in the prior year period.

Turning to Slide 13. Capital expenditures totaled $3.1 billion in the fourth quarter, up about $200 million from last year's fourth quarter. Line extension spend totaled $1.1 billion, driven by our subsidized rural construction initiatives and continued network expansion across residential and commercial greenfield and market fill-in opportunities.

Fourth quarter capital expenditures, excluding line extensions, totaled $2 billion, about $130 million higher than last year. The increase was mostly driven by CPE due to purchase timing and higher scalable infrastructure spend. 2024 capital expenditures totaled $11.3 billion, less than our original expectation for $12.2 billion to $12.4 billion, given lower network evolution and line extension spending, both due to timing.

We expect total 2025 capital expenditures to reach approximately $12 billion, including line extension spend of approximately $4.2 billion and network evolution spend of approximately $1.5 billion. On Slide 14, we've provided our current expectations for capital spending through the year 2028, excluding any line extension spending associated with the beat program as we are still in the early stages of bidding, and we have a lower appetite to bid due to regulatory conditions.

Our current multiyear CapEx outlook is largely unchanged in total versus our prior outlook, with retiming across years and slight changes across categories. We expect total line extension capital expenditures to decline after 2025, even inclusive of beat. You wouldn't expect to be more than a few hundred million dollars per year 4 years starting in 2026. And our RTO build is still expected to be completed by the end of 2026, 2 years ahead of schedule.

We now expect our total network evolution initiative capital to reach $5.4 billion over the period 2024 to 2027 versus $4.6 million previously, given our full plant walk out and the finalization of more detailed project plans. Looking beyond 2025, we expect total capital spending in dollar terms to be on a meaningful downward trajectory, even inclusive of beat spending. And after our evolution and expansion capital initiatives conclude, our run rate capital expenditures should be below $8 billion per year.

Just to highlight, that reduction in capital expenditures on its own from approximately $12 billion in 2025 to less than $8 billion in 2028, is equivalent to $25 of annual free cash flow per share based on today's share count. And while we always prioritize our free cash flow for organic opportunities first and then accretive M&A and buybacks, there are currently no organic capital expenditure opportunities on the horizon that give us concern with that capital expenditures outlook.

Fourth quarter free cash flow totaled $984 million, a decrease of approximately $80 million compared to last year's fourth quarter. The decline was primarily driven by higher capital expenditures, cash taxes and cash interest, partly offset by a larger cable working capital benefit driven by the implementation of our supply chain financing program and higher EBITDA in this year's fourth quarter.

Just a brief comment on 2025 cash taxes. We currently expect under existing tax legislation that our calendar year 2025 cash tax payments will total between $1.6 billion and $2 billion.

We finished the quarter with $93.8 billion in debt principal. In December, we financed -- we refinanced most of our 2027 maturity tower, extending about $13 billion of our credit facilities to 2030 and 2031. After that refinancing, our maturities in each of the next 3 years are less than $4 billion per year. Our weighted average cost of debt remains very attractive at 5.2%, partly driven by our long-dated fixed rate profile.

Our current run rate annualized cash interest is $4.9 billion. In the fourth quarter, we repurchased 292,000 Charter shares and Charter Holdings common units, totaling $113 million at an average price of $384 per share. As of the end of the fourth quarter, our ratio of net debt to last 12-month adjusted EBITDA moved down to 4.13x and stood at 4.24x pro forma for the pending Liberty Broadband transaction.

Our leverage ratio may decline further given our pause and buybacks, but we are still targeting the midpoint of our 4 to 4.5x target leverage range, though now pro forma for the pending Liberty Broadband transaction. We look forward to resuming our open market buyback program following the shareholder vote for the Liberty Broadband transaction scheduled for February '26.

As laid out, we've invested in a strong platform for growth, which we expect to see materialize across the business over the last -- over the next several years. And as our capital spending peaks this year, we are poised for strong free cash flow growth and shareholder returns.

And with that, I will turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Jonathan Chaplin with New Street Research.

[Jonathan Chaplin, analyst]

A question on CapEx. So I'm wondering if you can just remind us what the end state is for the network upgrade in terms of -- I think it's 100% of the footprint will have a high split and then a portion of the footprint will be upgraded to DOCSIS 4.0 by the end of 2027. Can you remind us how that -- what that is changed based on the new guidance? And then for line extension CapEx, I see that the total spend is down, but the number of rural locations is up. Have you reduced the pace of line extensions that you expect to build in nonrural locations?

[Jessica Fischer, executive]

Yes. So Jonathan, I'll start with the line extension one. Two things happened inside of that. We've pulled back a bit on our proactive commercial build. And our expectations are a bit lower for greenfield given that the housing market remains sluggish, though even that, I would say, hasn't meaningfully reduced our passings growth outlook. So I think what you see is correct. We do have a few more rural passings than we had before, but it's offset there, the total number down.

As far as the network upgrade goes, our plan for the split across the 3 steps hasn't changed. So we're still 15%, that will be gigahertz, 15% that moves to distributed access architecture, but still at 1.2 gigahertz, 35% that then moves up to 1.8 gigahertz. And really is, I guess, the way that you would think of it in DOCSIS 4.0. I don't know, Chris, if you have a follow-up on that, that you want to talk about other ones.

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

Well, look, it will be 100% high split, the mix hasn't changed in terms of where we're going. And the ability from there to use a combination of DOCSIS 4 and DOCSIS 3.1 extended on the increment is very low, if any incremental real capital expenditure. So we feel really good about the plan. The one thing I would add is, keep in mind, as we go through on these notes, we're putting in OLTs as well, which allows us to do fiber demand or a fiber drop on demand, although similar to an enterprise group, but to be able to do that in residential and SMB as well.

And so the network is very much capable in terms of wherever things go. You still maintain all the benefits that you have through power in the network, which allows you to hang radios through our CBRS deployment, which is going very well.

[Jonathan Chaplin, analyst]

And Chris, I assume that 35% ultimately goes to 100% at 1.8 over time. The assumption is that, that all happens within business as usual CapEx of less than $8 billion.

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

Yes. And what you have over time -- one, I'm not sure if and when the need is going to take place. But two, when you get into that less than $8 billion capital expenditure environment, the benefit that you'll have is the amount of node splits and CMTS upgrades that historically took place that will be nonexistent. You can reallocate capital to the extent you want, that would have been spent into those segmentation areas to doing drop-ins and to the actives, but that's all that we've really required. And so it's it could be done within the [indiscernible].

[Operator]

Our next question will come from Benjamin Swinburne with Morgan Stanley.

[Benjamin Swinburne, analyst]

You had -- I think it's about 450,000 ACP-related subscriber losses or impact in '24, I'm just wondering if you guys are thinking you can grow -- you can improve your broadband results in '25 versus '24 when you consider no ACP, obviously storms are a wildcard, but you'll have more and more rural footprint behind you.

And then, Chris, I can't remember the last time your video subscriber numbers outperformed both customer metrics and broadband metrics. It sounds like you guys are maybe selling into the base a bit and subsidizing that with some broadband. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what's happening inside of your offers and inside the business that's creating this kind of mix shift and how we might think about that as we move forward.

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

Sure. Look, Ben, from an outlook perspective, we're really confident about the midterm our ability to grow Internet. But we're also sensitive to the fact that there's [indiscernible] cost in particular periods of time between net loss versus net gain. And so I'm not going to comment on short-term small impacts to gross adds or disconnection of big back. But we won't have the ACP losses this year, and so that's a huge benefit.

And still competitive in terms of fiber and cellphone Internet overlap, but that gives a little better visibility, as I mentioned that we had last year. The peak cellphone Internet impact, we seem to have gotten there and there will be a declining base of fiber overbuild. So you then add on to that in terms of growth rate over time, rural passings, the fact that data consumption continues to increase. The investments we've made in network evolution to outpace the capabilities of our competitors and then using, in a more effective way than we already are, the wireless convergence and then what's coming seamless entertainment.

I ask people to just step back and think about it from a consumer perspective. We have faster connectivity, a unique set of products. Those products are available everywhere we sell, which is the point I was making with the slide that we showed today. And we save customers hundreds and thousands of dollars of Internet when similarly combined with mobile. So I like where we sit, and I expect our seamless connectivity product and its value to really win in the marketplace over time.

In the meantime, we're pushing through for all these things, but not having ACP losses inside this year is huge. And I'm not going to give a short-term outlook other than to say we better be better this year than we were next year -- or last year. So -- and then on video, the benefit that you saw to our net additions in the fourth quarter are simply a function of rebundling video and -- with our connectivity sales.

And we had moved away from actively attaching video to our broadband sales because we were unconvinced that, over time, that would be an asset to the customer relationship because of the value equation that existed in selling a video product that had been commoditized, had a high price and was able to be repackaged elsewhere through direct-to-consumer apps and otherwise at a lower cost. And so for years, we had moved away from attaching video to our broadband sales because what used to be a benefit was concerning us as maybe not being a benefit.

That being said, once we had moved to an environment where we had more flexibility to use packaging in a way that created packages that were valuable to a customer and then attach the direct-to-consumer apps to our expanded packages in a way that allowed customers to take advantage of the full retail value of the apps as a way to save money, and the introduction of Xumo, which allows you to have unified search and discovery, and combine all of those services that you now get as part of your expanded service as well as any other DTC you take separately in a single place, we thought the combination of that actually did provide the value and utility that we're looking for.

That's only going to get better. And so that's just the beginning. We haven't rolled out the full set of seamless entertainment packages and marketing yet. But we felt confident enough beginning in late September to start selling video again actively together with our broadband subscriptions as a way to create new utility in the overall package, not just for video, but really to add value back into the broadband relationship.

And what we did with our Spectrum pricing and packaging that we offered in September as it allowed us to -- when you take 2 or 3 sets of products between really broadband, mobile and video, allowed us to offer Internet at a lower price, both at promotional and retail value and to offer a price lock based on the bundle that you were taking and offer lower roll-offs on the move from promotion to retail passing, all of which has both long and short-term impact on our abilities from a acquisition standpoint as well as from a retention standpoint.

So we feel good about where it's going. It's only going to get better. And that doesn't mean -- that's not a quarterly outlook on video, don't get me wrong. It's just saying that over time, as our capabilities increased our selling capabilities and training to rebundle these services, is enhanced. I think it gives us real benefits, not just to video but also into broadband. And hence, the [indiscernible].

[Operator]

Next question will come from Craig Moffett with MoffetNathanson.

[Craig Moffett, analyst]

I'm going to try to squeeze in 2 questions. First, just given the importance of your wireless bundling strategy -- I'm going to leave aside the comments that you just had about video, can you point to real evidence of what wireless is doing for your broadband business? And the way that you think about whether it's through churn or something else, that suggests that the convergent strategy is having a meaningful impact. It's obviously topical because Comcast essentially said they're going to try to emulate the strategy that you've already been pursuing for a couple of years.

And then also on the topic of Comcast, you mentioned organic growth opportunities. I have to ask because we get the question so often. How do you think about inorganic growth opportunities? And with the commentary so frequently being discussed about the possibility of combining with Comcast, how do you think about getting bigger as a cable operator?

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

There's a lot in there, Craig. But they're good questions. So from a wireless standpoint and the benefits to convergence, if you think back to what we were doing -- and we continue to do it the Spectrum one offer was really using the broadband relationship and offering at time of acquisition or retention of free mobile line. And what that was driving is additional attach, obviously, the mobile line, which is actively used, but additional mobile lines that were attached. And so we were using broadband really for the benefit of mobile.

And what we had seen along the way, some of it due to the convergence benefits and the seamless connectivity, and some of it, obviously, was self-selection that takes place, and there's bias there, so that's why we've been careful, is that we saw a much lower churn rate in those broadband customers when they had mobile versus when not. Some of that is clearly self-selection. And we've always recognized that, and that's why we've been careful not to report out on that too heavily. But it's not all self-selection and there's a clear benefit, and it's a better product, and it saves customers tremendous amounts of money.

What we did with the new pricing and packaging is we recognize that we now have a brand recognition in the marketplace of Spectrum Mobile, which is the fastest mobile product. It's now widely recognized, both from a brand and capability standpoint. It does have superior speed and it has better connectivity through the Spectrum Mobile SSID attach as well as, Speedboost. And we decided when at acquisition or retention, we can use mobile and doesn't need to be always priced at $0 for the first line for free, and we can use it to drive improved acquisition and retail pricing for Internet and flip it a little bit.

It doesn't mean that we've stopped using Spectrum 1, but still have Spectrum 1 active in the marketplace and it works well. But we can also use the Life unlimited bundles, as I'd like to call them, to enhance our capabilities for Internet sell-in. That's early stages, but I think it's clearly going to have benefits.

So I think the conversion strategy works. The point I was making in the slide that we showed in today's presentation as we have a unique capability to deliver that where nobody else really does across their entire footprint. And so to the extent that convergence matters, which we think it does, we think we're in the best position to do that.

[Jessica Fischer, executive]

And I just want to make sure that we address there as well that not only does mobile but the broadband subscriber, but mobile also has financial benefits all on its own. It drives additional margin at the customer level. By attaching it to more customers, we drive sort of additional margin across the business. And really, it's one of the key sort of cornerstones to how we get comfortable with the plan for EBITDA growth inside of 2025 because we have that mobile revenue, and therefore, mobile margin as a driver of growth in the business.

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

It's become significant. And just to add on to that, it's not just you mentioned convergence, you could think about convergence as really the wireline and wireless capabilities together. But also with video, and that hasn't been the case. What I was mentioning to Ben, I think video can become an asset again. And it doesn't mean that we're going to grow video, I'm not saying that. But I think we can use it as a significant asset that's also unique to us compared to most of our competitors together with mobile to find -- to drive growth to a unique set of products and to save customers a lot of money.

On the M&A front, I know there's a lot of chatter out there. Our strategy, Craig, it's really to create value has never been dependent on M&A. In fact, it's really been moving in purely from an organic growth perspective and how do we put value for shareholders from that perspective. And you do that by being a great operator. You do it by saving customers lots of money, providing great service, doing that with in-sourced onshore employees and being hopefully a good allocator of capital.

But by being a good operator that also, I think, opens acquisition opportunities over time. And the rest of the cable industry, when you sit back and think about it, it's all family owned or family controlled and they'll decide. This is not like Time Warner Cable, where there's another large publicly traded company out there. And so it's really in the these families or family-controlled businesses who get to decide when the time that they'd like to combine.

And the other thing I would tell you is that the door for M&A, I think there's a lot of chatter that it's also wider, I don't think it's wide open. I think any M&A transaction that you have to do in any administration anytime, it has to be good for customers and it has to be good for jobs. And when you think about our organic operating strategy that drives growth, that's been helpful in that respect in the past in terms of our ability to get things done as well. But it's not -- it's a potential add-on to our strategy, it's not the core of our strategy. It's not the only way that we can create value.

[Operator]

Our next question will come from the line of Sebastiano Petti from JPMorgan.

[Sebastiano Petti, analyst]

If perhaps, Jessica, you could comment just around EBITDA, you do expect growth for the year. Any color perhaps OpEx level across the different buckets that we should be assuming? Obviously, as Spectrum Life Unlimited ramps and what you and Chris have talked about, creates more attach opportunities, there's probably sales and market costs that come with that. So just maybe trying to frame that a little bit would be helpful against the backdrop as well of improving costs that you implemented in 2024.

And then maybe just thinking about the CapEx guide. Obviously, it was helpful, does not include bead -- limited bead appetite per se. But maybe how you're thinking about any changes to tax policy should we get an extension of bonus depreciation? How would you perhaps maybe think about that across the buckets of shareholder returns versus maybe improving or accelerating some of your network efforts?

[Jessica Fischer, executive]

Yes. So I can -- I'll start on EBITDA growth. You said we plan to grow EBITDA growth in 2025. I think we do that through a combination of growth in the mobile business, customer benefits from the new pricing and packaging, there's Spectrum 1 promotional roll-off and some other rate benefits that we'll see. And then continued efficiencies in the business, particularly in cost to serve. As you heard Chris sort of talk about with some of the benefits that we see from machine learning and AI, and just driving around the customer commitments to have fewer transactions with customers.

But also the continuing benefits of our -- of what we've done on the expense side. In that respect, I think across programming and cost to service customers, I generally expect that we'll be flat to slightly down, acknowledging that we think about programming on per video customer basis and that mix does matter there a lot. And so to the extent that the mix of products that customers take changes as a result of the inclusion of the seamless connectivity app or the seamless entertainment apps, I think that one ultimately will be dependent on results, but that's what we expect.

In sales and marketing, as you point out there, I think there's a little more growth, maybe low to mid-single digits, given what we're doing to drive and grow customers and to roll out or continue the rollout of the Life Limited brand. And so that's where I'm sitting on the expense side. And I don't know, Chris, do you want to talk about...

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

Taxes usually where Jessica -- so if we're talking about capital allocation, maybe we tag team this one but if needed. Look, we don't know where tax legislation is going to go, but if it was enacted, it is obvious that we'd have potentially a very sizable reduction in our cash taxes versus the outlook that Jessica has been talking about. And whether that's rate or interest deductibility or bonus depreciation, actually, all 3 of those are really important to an infrastructure builder.

And that's what we do, is we build the infrastructure here in the U.S., the highway the pipeline for all of these applications and traffic. And so any of those 3 things, and hopefully it's all 3, which is rate interest deductibility and bonus depreciation, would make the return on all of our capital projects that might have been less attractive to be much more attractive. I don't think that means that you should be say it's 1 for 1 in terms of dollar for dollar terms of incremental, but to projects that are very good for customers and very good for our communities that might have been on the edge from a returns profile suddenly can get really enhanced. And I think that's good for the economy and for jobs and for shareholders all in one.

[Operator]

Our next question will come from Jessica Reif Ehrlich from Bank of America.

[Jessica Reif Cohen, analyst]

I guess on L.A., I know you said you'd be more specific on the first quarter call. But is there any early read that you can give -- I don't know what you're assuming for homes coming back, but it is a step -- a multiyear step down? And then a follow-up for both video and M&A, the video seems to be working before you were even marketing. Can you give us some color on what your marketing plans are for what is clear value for customers?

And then on M&A, Chris, you made a remark at the beginning about national and global competition. So can you just talk about like how you would compete with more national competitors, what you -- what benefits you would get? Is it cost or revenue? Any color you can give.

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

Sure. So from an L.A. perspective, what's widely reported is there's roughly 15,000, 16,000 passings that have earned and no longer inhabitable. And you should assume that the entirety of OA is really our footprint, and so that reflects passing for us. In the grand scheme of overall Charter at 57 million passing, that's not that large.

But it's near and dear to home. And so it's, like I said, personal to us.

So there's a penetration read on that. That will be the subscriber impact that's immediate. Those homes, over time, so we'll be taking out of passings, we'll take them out of customer relationships. And over time, if you know that area, and I know you do, it will get rebuilt and those will become new passings and new homes inside of our footprint. And we're already looking at the exact plans for rebuilding starting in many cases to do so.

That will drive, as Jessica mentioned, clear leasing capital, which we'll be able to highlight. And there will be a subscriber impact, which we'll highlight definitively once that's in our next earnings call. There will be credits along the way for customers who are impacted through -- obviously, if they lost their home. But in addition to that, throughout [indiscernible]. And otherwise, we've got policies in place to do that. And so there will be a number of onetime financial impacts and similar to other times. We'll just go through that list and Jessica will do that on the next call.

The video from, a marketing perspective, look, from a competitive standpoint, I'm not going to sit here and articulate everything that we're doing. But I think strategically positioning our video product and our package of services in a way that allows customers to have more product than they'd be able to afford otherwise and to save significant amounts of money, when you look at that slide, the things that we concluded, not all of those apps are yet deployed, including, for example, Peacock, which will come within the next month or so.

But once we've got all the apps fully activated for inclusion, once we have a consumer-friendly way for them to upgrade into the ad-free version, which is for the benefit of us, the programmer and the consumer, and we have that in a store that allows customers to go through at least the perception of a unified authentication process that's customer-friendly, then you'll start to see us push more and more into driving that not just for video sales, but as a way to contribute to the broadband connectivity and the mobile relationship.

One of the key features that we've had as part of our negotiations with the programmers along the way is to say, we need to cooperate. This is a partnership. And it shouldn't be that every 4 or 5 years, we're going to go to battle and try to find a net zero gain, this is really about -- because that hasn't worked. The net zero game actually left to -- led to significant losses for everyone, including the customer, but as well as, obviously, programmers even us.

So the idea here is to form a true partnership where we can get behind each other's products that we can co-market together. They have fantastic brands. They have fantastic IP. The way that Spectrum as good as our brand is, it would be difficult to replicate. And we're out there selling their product every single day with 25,000 frontline sales and retention people. And we are very good at distribution, but I think having them get behind and help us advertise the value that's here can work well for the programmer, but also work well for us.

And obviously, it works very well for the customer because they save money, they are able to take more product and they can actually upgrade to the ad-free version, which creates additional revenue for the programmers and for us over time, in a way that works as a much better ecosystem. So without getting into any tactics around marketing, I think you can see where we're trying to make sure that the incentives are very much aligned between the programmers, us and the customer in a way that, from our perspective, really works to sell more connectivity relationships.

From a scale perspective, which is what you asked, if we, as Charter, if we had more scale, I think the brand recognition of our mobile services -- Internet tends to be a little bit more local. But clearly, when you think about us competing against national mobile operators, when you think about us in the video space, there's Amazon, there's Google. And so across really all of our products, you can think about where there's marketing advantage, to having some additional scale. We have scale today and it's sufficient. I'm not saying that we're approved to that, but I think we could do better for customers.

By having that scale, I think we could save comers additional money. I think we could in-source jobs the way that we did with Time Warner Cable and Bright House and bring more U.S. jobs back from offshore call centers on to onshore environments that create good-paying jobs, as well as bringing contract labor into in-house as well. So I think we can be good for ourselves in terms of scale, for consumers in terms of scale, I think we can be good for jobs.

And then finally, if you think about an environment that we've talked a lot about, AI development to actually enhance our service capabilities to make these onshore in-house jobs better for our employees. AI is not cheap. And the more scale you have for that, to the extent you could become less regional and closer to a national operator to compete, it allow you to invest more into AI and to actually have lower cost per customer to do so and to drive additional benefits for customers that way.

Look, I could go on and on. We have enough scale to operate well today, and doing it. But having additional scale, of course, is always beneficial when you operate a large, fixed network, high capital business.

[Stefan Anninger, executive]

Yes. Thanks, Jessica. Leila will take our last question, please.

[Operator]

Our final question will come from Kutgun Maral with Evercore ISI.

[Kutgun Maral, analyst]

Just a follow-up on the M&A discussion from a different lens and maybe focus on wireless. You've scaled their mobile efforts quite meaningfully. And I know that you've had a lot of success with migrating traffic onto your own network. But as that business grows and perhaps Comcast also ramped, is there a change to your view on whether owners' economics would make more sense on a stand-alone basis or through a partnership?

I just wanted to revisit the pie the coming pushback that we get on your mobile and convergence efforts is that your margins there and the opportunity more broadly are naturally limited because of the MVNO relationship, and therefore, you just don't get as much credit on the success that you've had. So would appreciate your perspective.

And just a quick one on rural. New passings have continued to pick up sequentially, but customer and ads were flattish. Can you just help us think about penetration trends over there? And as your [indiscernible] accelerates around 450,000 in 2025, should we still assume that rural sub net adds will also accelerate? Or are there other nuances that we should be mindful of?

[Christopher Winfrey, executive]

Trying to think the best way to answer your question on the mobile business. We -- when we got into the mobile business, it really was because it is an extension of our broadband business. And so when you think about our mobile business today or 87% of the traffic is really are in our network already today. We've deployed thousands of radios for CBRS. We'll be deploying that nation across our entire footprint, deploying thousands more this year, radios for CBRS, in a multitude of markets. And so that number, the 87%, is only going to increase through CBRS deployment.

But as well as our WiFi capabilities and the cooperation amongst these regional cable operators to enable WiFi auto authentication across these networks as we compete against national MNOs. So the offload can continue to increase. Already, our margins are very good on the product. And so there's no driving force for us to say that we need to have owner's economics. We don't look at the product as a stand-alone basis. We have the capability to get EBITDA growth that way, which we do just for really more from a capital markets perspective and it's significant contribution this year in 2025 to our growth rate.

But it's really a combined product. For us, mobile is an extension broadband product. It ties into our seamless connectivity capabilities. And so there's no pressure from our perspective to feel like we need to have owner's -- additional owner's economics beyond the 87% that we already have today. I don't know if you want to comment on...

[Jessica Fischer, executive]

Yes. On the rural piece, so there are a couple of things going on. First off, if you think about where a preponderance of our rural business, there's a large amount in the Carolinas and in Florida. And so from a sales perspective, I think there was a bit of impact there from the hurricanes inside of Q4. I do also think from a timing perspective, so the second one, you have passings sometimes they get placed in service very late in the quarter. And so some of those past things might not have aged quite as much as you would think if you sort of assume that they're coming in at a steady rate.

And the last one is there's a little bit of competition in those rural markets on the cellphone Internet side. I don't think that, that changes where we end up sort of from a terminal penetration in those markets person because the desire in those spaces for wired broadband is still quite high. But as to the speed with which we terminate some of -- we penetrate some of those passings very early on, there's a little less jump at the very beginning than what we had seen previously.

[Stefan Anninger, executive]

And that's good to know. Leila, that concludes our call. Right back to you.

[Operator]

Thank you all for joining the call today. The session is now concluded, and you may now disconnect.