Bloomberg TalksAT&T CEO, John Stankey says that new AI driven services will drive demand for the company's network with this weeks Nvidia earnings underscoring this. He discusses this with Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde.
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Let's just shift our attention to telecoms.
Now.
There's the news out of billionaires Avier Neil. He's exploring a bid to buy out other shareholders the Latin American telecom provider Millicom, which will value that carried about four point one billion dollars. Neil's holding company that's at this invested estimate says it is exploring financing options to support an offer price of about twenty four dollars per Minicon common share, though it cannot guarantee and offer will materialize, and there's already the biggest shareholder in the company with the twenty nine per cent stake. We want to dive deeper, though, into this industry group right now. We want to talk about it from the US perspective and globally. One of the biggest telecom providers here is AT and T. And I'm pleased to say that the CEO, John Sankey, joins us now fresh off comments from a company's multi year growth strategy over at the JP Morgan Technology Conference, And I just want to weave in the era that we're sitting in at the moment, the fact that we just hear from Johnson Wang and Ai, and we're talking about open versus clothes. We're talking about infrastructure needs a quip and needs to talk about energy efficiency. And in many ways you're having a very similar conversation over in the world of telecoms at the moment innovation, the needs for open and in particularly Gone and Ericsson fourteen billion dollars spend revamp wireless network focus. You want to have an open platform?
Why we do?
And we're pretty excited about what I heard before because the more workloads that Jensen produces that you have to go somewhere and we like carrying those around on our networks, whether they're wireless or fixed. So it's an exciting time to be in telecom. And our point of view is if you're going to scale at the level we're talking about, you need to have more cost efficiency and you need to be able to scale more dramatically, and so open separating hardware and software and our infrastructure starts to give us that cost curve and that flexibility, and that's going to be critical to have the agility to move forward in this.
Environment agile at a time why wireless demand is plateauing, maybe slowing no, not at all.
Wireless demands up thirty percent a year and it's not slowing down. And I think as you start to look at where we are with what's occurring from a usage perspective, you start getting workloads that come out of AI, it's going to continue to fuel that. And really it's one of the key things that this country needs to deal with is if you're going to continue to see usage go up thirty thirty five percent a year, you've got to build bigger highways to take that. And that all comes on the foundation of spectrum, and we need to make sure we got policy right in this country to get more spectrum out there to deal with the rising workloads. So, yeah, a handset demand might be coming down a little bit. We're not seeing quite the growth we saw ten years ago, but the utility of connected devices, how people are using those handsets, and the demand for the traffic that they generate isn't coming down at all.
John good Morning is ed in San Francisco. Look, my head is often outside the bounds of our atmosphere and up in space, and I was really interested to see your deal with AST. You know, Starlink is doing a lot with the other carriers. I just wanted in the first sense, if you have a really clear view of what the addressable market is for Constellation direct to sell.
I think we have a view of it.
ED.
I don't know whether or not we're going to all understand exactly how consumers are going to use this, but we've done a lot of work to not only understand who's the segment of the population that truly needs always on connectivity. I mean, that's really what we want to do here. Most people wake up in the morning they say, I can't afford to be off the internet. And some folks have a lifestyle that take them to places where they do, unfortunately get to the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a rafting trip and can't continue to post to their website about what's going on with their family and it's really important to them, or they have an important business call. There's others who do it incidentally. Maybe they're on a road trip and they're out on an interstate somewhere and they drive off the network and they need it for a day. So we know those kind of behaviors in our customer base because we run the networks and we know what our customers are doing. We think there's a good application for this, just like when somebody leaves the United States and needs the roam on a network outside the US to make sure that they're they're connected when they're.
In Europe or Asia or wherever they're going.
So this is just the next step and simplifying connectivity and ensuring customers be connected wherever they.
Go, John YaST and not starling in SpaceX well.
As you pointed out at it's a nascent area where the technology is starting to develop. We think AST has done a remarkable job of getting the technology right where it's consumer centric. The customer doesn't have to change any equipment and doesn't have to change anything they're doing with their handset, and they can still avail themselves of the service. That's really important in our view. And so what we have going on in other parts of the industry is we're kind of taking satellites and services that we're fit for fixed wireless connections or fixed satellite connections and now trying to make the mobile and it's a little.
More clunky as a result of that.
And so I think what we're looking at is cost performance, how do we make it easy for the consumer and I don't think there's going to be one winner. I think there's going to be multiple opportunities going forward or providers, and we think that's good for us, especially when we have partnerships that ultimately we can have the right kind of relationships to satisfy the needs of our customers.
Satisfying the needs of a customer, you articulated very well why we as customers are going to need yet more and more data, more and more wareless. But the actual business is selling wyness has kind of been slowing for you and competitors. How do you stand apart, how do you make sure people reach the AT and T versus Verizon T Mobile when you have had some hits perhaps too worries about data security for example.
First of all, you know, despite the fact that customer net ads are slowing, utility and use is continuing to grow.
And so we had a very good year.
When you think about what happened from a service revenue growth perspective, we led the industry. We're still seeing healthy growth. It's a bit higher than what the GDP levels are and an infrastructure business like ours, that's kind of what you want to see happen. And so it's not a bad thing, but in terms of what we do going forward on this is It's what I just talked about. Customers want to be connected everywhere. Customers want to make a simple decision of how they get on the internet. They don't wake up in the morning relishing having two or three relationships to be able to use my phone when I'm on the go, or my phone at home or my computer at home. They want to call somebody say just get me on the internet. And I think our position at AT and T is about doing that better than anybody else. And our focus is on making sure we take our great fiber assets, we take our wireless business, bring it together, start to do things like add value to a customer to ensure that their privacy is protected, their traffic is secure. They only have to call one place to get it done at a great value. They can use it in the Grand Canyon, they can use it at home. That's the race were on right now, and that's what we're focused on doing tod AT and T.
John, thank you. I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for talking us through the focus and of course some of those commitments to the financial goals that were reinstated yesterday and restated and at the JP Morgan event we thank him so much. John Thanky of eighty
