With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

The cable television company delivers TV, internet access, phone services, and original TV content to approximately 4.9 million residential and business customers in 21 states.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-327-Altice

This New York cable television provider operator delivers TV, Internet, telephone, and content services to about 5 million residential and business customers in 21 states.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.7 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

Fortune Global 500

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

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Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

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Founded in 2015, Altice USA is a telecommunications and media company offering broadband, video, mobile, and voice services under the Optimum brand. The company serves residential and business customers across the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Altice provides a wide range of services, including high-speed internet, digital TV, mobile plans, and enterprise connectivity solutions. It also delivers local news and advertising services through its News 12 Networks and i24NEWS channels.

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Q4 2024

Optimum Communications (OPTU): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Optimum Communications

optimum communications

Good day, everyone. Welcome to the Optimum Communications conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session begins. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Sarah Freedman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. Welcome to Optimum's second quarter 2026 earnings call. I am joined today by Optimum's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dennis Mathew, and Chief Financial Officer, Marc Sirota. Dennis and Marc will walk you through our second quarter results. Then be available for a question-and-answer session. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements. Please take a moment to review the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements included on slide two of our presentation. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures today. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, I will turn the call over to Dennis.

Thank you, Sarah. Good morning, everyone. Our second quarter results reflect disciplined execution. We generated total revenue of approximately $2 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $786 million. Broadband subscriber net losses improved sequentially to 40,000. We added approximately 50,000 mobile lines and convergence ARPU grew year-over-year. We expanded gross margin and adjusted EBITDA margin, including operating expense improvement of approximately $30 million year-over-year. We continue to operate in a challenging environment. We are encouraged by our progress and remain focused on what we can control, maintaining disciplined cost management while continuing to invest in initiatives that support long-term growth and position the business for sustained success.

As we disclosed in our Form 8-K in June, we have a clear strategy in our long-range plan to do exactly that. The transformation will take time and will require a meaningful reset of our balance sheet. We are actively executing against the strategic pillars that we believe will improve performance. Delivering simple, broader offers with clear value propositions, richer customer experience, simplifying service delivery through operational improvements, and investing thoughtfully in our network and capabilities.

In the second quarter, we delivered against these pillars. We continued to execute on a simplified go-to-market strategy, strengthen customer retention efforts, and sharpen base management to build high-value customer relationships and compete more effectively in the current environment. We advanced our customer experience transformation as we continued our rollout of Google CES, AI-powered network management, frontline tools, and new billing solutions. We improved productivity through stronger cross-functional execution, disciplined cost management, deeper use of data and AI-powered performance management, and workforce optimization.

Finally, we continue to invest in fiber expansion and network modernization across our footprint. Alongside these actions, we took steps to enhance our financial flexibility and strengthen our capital structure. Last month, we successfully completed the previously announced tender offer, representing another important milestone in that process, which Marc will discuss in greater detail shortly. We also published our long-range plan, providing stakeholders with greater transparency into our strategic priorities, operating objectives, and long-term financial outlook. Collectively, these actions reinforce our commitment to strengthening the business, advancing our capital structure, and increasing flexibility to continue investing in long-term value creation.

In addition, we simplified our operations by divesting non-core businesses. In early Q2, we completed the divestiture of an advertising agency services business that generated approximately $100 million of revenue in full year 2025 and had an immaterial impact to adjusted EBITDA. We made the decision to exit a small number of low-density, non-core markets within our West footprint, and we expect those customers to transition to other service providers during the third quarter. Additionally, in the coming months, we expect to wind down operations of New York Interconnect, an advanced advertising joint venture that allows marketers to purchase TV and digital ad space across multiple MVPDs in the New York DMA.

Going forward, Spectrum will expand their advertising business to provide many of the products and services of New York Interconnect, including continued representation of portions of Optimum's advertising inventory. Taken together, these actions support our strategy to simplify the business and focus on our highest priority growth opportunities. Next, I'll turn to our focus on strengthening high-value customer relationships on slide four.

Our strategy is centered on strengthening customer relationships by delivering a more integrated and converged experience across broadband, mobile, video, and value-added services. By leveraging the breadth of our portfolio, we're making it easier for customers to choose, connect, and stay with us while driving stronger acquisition, retention, and engagement, which creates a stronger foundation for long-term value and growth. Broadband remains the cornerstone of the strategy. While the competitive landscape continues to evolve with the expansion of fiber overbuilders and fixed wireless providers across our footprint, we are executing targeted initiatives to improve performance and reinforce our competitive position.

These efforts are helping improve customer acquisition rates and gross ad performance while providing insights that are shaping a broader evolution of our go-to-market approach. As we scale these learnings, we are delivering simpler, more compelling offers that better reflect market dynamics and evolving customer needs.

Demand for our broadband product remains healthy. More than half of new broadband customers continue to choose our 1 Gb or higher offerings, reinforcing the value customers place on higher speed connectivity and the quality of our network. We also see encouraging signs in several of our larger markets where our execution and competitive positioning continue to improve. This drove improved win share and year-over-year growth in gross ad performance in the second quarter in key markets. At the same time, we remain focused on reducing churn across our footprint, particularly in our West footprint, where competitive pressure remains the most intense. Our base management and acquisition strategy is centered on multi-product relationships, which drive stronger, healthier, and longer tenured subscribers.

Leveraging our converged and data-driven approach, we are seeing a higher percentage of new customer additions taking multiple products and services compared to the portion of customers taking only broadband. On mobile, we saw our best ever second quarter mobile trends, which increased mobile and broadband convergence penetration to approximately 9% at the end of the second quarter. Mobile is central to how we manage and grow our base. We are driving higher penetration through targeted upsell and cross-sell, simplifying our offers and expanding multi-line adoption, taking a customer first data-driven approach to streamline device financing, improve quality of sale, and strengthen network quality.

This week we advanced that strategy further, expanding our multi-year agreement with T-Mobile to access its 5G standalone network, delivering faster, more reliable service, a broader device lineup including wearables, and stronger roaming business and rural connectivity. By extending mobile connectivity beyond smartphones to wearables and a growing universe of connected devices, this capability substantially expands our addressable market, multiplying the number of devices and revenue streams we can serve per household and business, and positioning us to capture a greater share of connectivity spend over time. Paired with our fiber network, this converged offering is expected to be a durable competitive advantage and a meaningful driver of long-term profitable growth.

Similarly, we are increasing the penetration of our newer and more profitable E-tier video offerings as customers respond to their simpler and more compelling value proposition. The E-tier offerings now represent approximately 18% of our residential video base, up from 10% a year ago. Importantly, customers of these newer packages continue to demonstrate meaningfully lower churn than legacy offerings, reinforcing the role video plays in strengthening customer relationships and broadband retention.

We are also continuing to thoughtfully expand our streaming offerings, giving customers direct access to popular streamers like Netflix and HBO Max, alongside targeted promotions like our Disney+ Hulu offer. The majority of customers who take these services keep them well past the promotional period, pointing to durable engagement and a growing base of recurring value. Beyond à la carte, we continue to enhance the value of our TV subscriptions, giving subscribers direct-to-consumer app access to services like FOX One, Paramount+, and STARZ when those channels are in their packages. Moving to slide five.

Throughout the organization, we continue to identify opportunities to simplify processes, enhance productivity, leverage AI and automation, and expand digital capabilities so that we can execute efficiently while providing a better experience for our customers. Operating expenses, excluding share-based compensation, declined approximately 5% year-over-year in the year-to-date period and by 4% year-over-year in the second quarter. This reflects our continued focus on improving operational efficiency across the business and was driven in part by a few key areas.

First, we lowered sales acquisition costs by approximately 10% by optimizing our channel mix, managing media more efficiently, and improving sales yield, allowing us to acquire customers more efficiently. Second, we reduced customer activity with fewer truck rolls and lower call volumes as we continued to improve network reliability, expand digital self-service, and simplify the end-to-end customer journey and experience. The total volume of truck rolls and service calls collectively declined by over 20% year-over-year in the second quarter. Many of these improvements are enabled by AI capabilities embedded throughout our organization.

As I mentioned earlier, one example is our deployment of Google CES, Google's Customer Engagement Suite, an AI-powered customer service platform that provides agents with real-time assistance during customer interactions alongside AI virtual agents powered by Google Gemini. Together, these capabilities help improve the customer journey, deliver a more personalized experience, and resolve issues more efficiently. This work directly influences point number three. By operating more efficiently, we have optimized our workforce and reduced both internal and external resources. These structural and sustainable efficiencies have improved our operating expense profile while we maintain strong operational execution and deliver a consistent customer experience.

In conclusion, we remain pragmatic about where the business stands. Broadband continues to face pressure. The competitive environment remains intense, but our focus is on the areas we can control and execute against every day. Importantly, we did what we said we were going to do. We delivered on our commitments by growing mobile, improving efficiency, expanding margins, and simplifying the business. Those results demonstrate our ability to execute consistently, even in a challenging environment. They have strengthened the foundation of the business. That same disciplined approach gives us confidence in the path ahead. We are applying the same focus and execution to stabilizing broadband and strengthening the overall business.

We believe we can make meaningful progress. We also recognize that these improvements will take time and will not happen overnight. We are building a simpler, more efficient, and more customer-focused company for the long term. Our team remains committed to executing that strategy every day. With that, let me turn the call over to Marc, who will walk through our second quarter subscriber and financial results.

Thank you, Dennis. Starting on slide six, I'll review our subscriber trends. First on broadband, net subscriber losses were 40,000 in the quarter. We ended with approximately 4 million broadband subscribers. Our MDU or multi-dwelling unit property footprint represents about 20% of our total footprint. We have remained focused on strengthening our MDU subscriber business by shifting from individual customer relationships to more bulk agreements with property owners under long-term contracts. From these efforts, in the second quarter, we saw an additional 9,000 broadband connects and 8,000 video connects, driven by a bulk relationship portfolio conversion. Including this bulk deal, overall broadband subscriber gross adds were broadly stable year-over-year, reflecting our ability to attract new customers and reinforce the strength of the Optimum brand.

At the same time, we continue to experience elevated churn, primarily driven by heightened promotional activity from competitors. While the competitive environment remains intense, we are focused on the levers within our control, staying agile with our go-to-market strategies, ensuring our offers remain compelling, continuously improving the customer value proposition, and accelerating our base management initiatives to deepen customer relationships.

In mobile, we continued to build momentum in the second quarter. We added 50,000 net lines, marking our best second quarter results to date and growing mobile lines by approximately 33% year-over-year. In the second quarter, we surpassed the 700,000 milestone, ending the quarter with 724,000 mobile lines.

Looking ahead, we plan to build on this momentum through ongoing targeted incentives and simplified offers while further supporting mobile customer retention. Video subscriber net losses were 46,000 in the second quarter. Included in this is a benefit from the bulk agreement I just mentioned. The second quarter represented our best quarterly video subscriber performance in six years. We continue to see encouraging underlying trends demonstrating the impact of our enhanced customer choice and flexibility. Finally, on fiber, we added 20,000 customers in the quarter, bringing our totals to 749,000 fiber customers, up over 13% year-over-year.

As expected, net addition trends moderated compared to the prior year, reflecting our intentional and disciplined approach to customer migrations over the last few quarters. Sequentially, however, fiber net additions increased modestly, driven by incremental net new customer growth on our fiber network. We continue to view fiber as a meaningful long-term value driver and remain focused on deploying capital where we see the strongest returns.

Overall, while competitive conditions remain challenging, the quarter reflected momentum across several of our key subscriber metrics, including sequential broadband trend improvement, continued mobile growth, strong video results, and improving fiber additions. Moving to slide seven, I will review our Q2 financial performance.

Total revenue of approximately $2 billion, declined 5.8% year-over-year. Excluding the previously mentioned advertising agency services business divestment, revenue would have declined 5.1% year-over-year. Consistent with recent quarters, residential video and our video-related news and advertising business remain the largest driver of year-over-year revenue declines. Those businesses accounted for $92 million, or approximately 75% of our revenue decline. Our focus with these businesses continues to be on improving profitability while looking to slow the rate of secular declines. Despite revenue pressure, we delivered an all-time high gross margin of 71% in the quarter, up 180 basis points year-over-year. This improvement was driven by the concentration of revenue declines in lower margin areas of the business, helping to mitigate the revenue impact of declining video volumes.

Residential connectivity and all other, which includes residential broadband, mobile and telephony, as well as other revenue, declined year-over-year by 3.6%, reflecting broadband subscriber pressure partially offset by mobile revenue growth. Business services revenue of $366 million grew 1.2% year-over-year, driven by Lightpath revenue growth of 7%. Excluding the divestment of the advertising agency services business, news and advertising revenue would have declined 4.7% year-over-year, reflecting an underlying softer advertising environment driven by the macroeconomic uncertainty. As we expect total subscriber volumes to continue to impact our top-line performance, we continue to anticipate total revenue to decline mid-single digits in the full year when excluding the divestiture in news and advertising.

Turning to ARPU. Residential ARPU declined by 1.1% year-over-year, or by $1.46, driven primarily by product mix shift away from video. Video's contribution to year-over-year decline was just over $3, which was partially offset by non-video ARPU growth of $1.57, mainly tied to convergence. As Dennis mentioned, convergence remains central to our strategy. Convergence ARPU, a metric we introduced last quarter, grew 2.4% year-over-year to $79.80. Convergence ARPU is calculated by dividing the average monthly revenue from broadband and mobile services by the average number of residential broadband relationships and excludes mobile-only customers. We expect convergence ARPU to become an increasingly important metric on how we evaluate the business, providing a more meaningful view of customer value by capturing the combined economics of the relationship and the impact of bundling on unit economics.

As we look to the second half of the year, we expect tougher ARPU comparisons, particularly in the fourth quarter, as promotional pricing held relatively steady as we benefited from rate actions at the end of 2025. That said, we will continue to evaluate our go-to-market and promotional strategies and the opportunities to optimize pricing and rates while remaining agile as market conditions evolve throughout the second half of the year.

Continuing on slide eight, our results this quarter reflect operational improvement and cost discipline Dennis mentioned earlier. Gross margin reached 71%, expanding 180 basis points year-over-year. As I just discussed, this reflects both product mix shift towards higher margin products such as broadband, as well as disciplined execution to improve all product margins. Adjusted EBITDA of $786 million, declined 2.2% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 140 basis points to 38.8%.

Margin expansion reflects disciplined cost management, including lower programming and direct costs, as well as continued operating expense efficiencies that partially offset lower revenue. Programming and direct costs declined by over 11%, driven by programming costs down over 14% year-over-year. Other operating expense, excluding share-based compensation, was down over 4% year-over-year in the second quarter. Underlying OpEx efficiencies are driven by continued call volume declines, fewer service visits, and salary cost reduction driven by workforce optimization.

As we continue to advance these efforts, we are deploying additional tools and initiatives to further optimize operating expenses over time with a continued focus on enhancing the customer experience. Given the expected declines in revenues, partially offset by continued discipline on both direct costs and OpEx, we continue to expect adjusted EBITDA to decline low- to mid-single digits in the full year 2026.

Turning to slide nine, I'll walk through our capital expenditures and the progress we were making across our network. Similar to last quarter, we've broken out our capital expenditures between growth, maintenance, and Lightpath capital to provide greater transparency into how we are allocating capital. In the second quarter, capital expenditures of $320 million represented an approximately 16% capital intensity and declined almost 17% year-over-year, tied to timing of capital spent.

We continue to expect total capital expenditure between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion in the full year of 2026, with higher second half spend compared to the first half. We ended the second quarter with approximately 10.1 million total passings and 3.2 million fiber passings, with over 220,000 total new passings added over the last 12 months. We continue to expect total passings expansion in the full year 2026 to be consistent with prior year trends of 150,000-175,000 passing additions. This excludes decommissioned passings, which are expected to slightly reduce our total passings count in the third quarter.

Looking ahead, our growth capital envelope will remain focused on building fiber in new markets, simultaneously growing our fiber footprint and our total footprint, as well as upgrading our HFC networks. Over the coming years, we plan to upgrade the majority of our network to multi-gig capabilities, enabling us to support growing bandwidth demand and the increased network usage driven by expanding adoption of AI-powered applications and connected devices.

Today, our fiber network offers up to 8 Gb symmetrical speeds. We began launching multi-gig capabilities to select HFC communities late last year, now offering download speeds of up to 2 Gbps in parts of our West Virginia HFC markets. Last month, Lightpath announced new fiber builds to support two hyperscale data center campuses in Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as announced a second infrastructure tenant on its Pennsylvania AI-grade fiber infrastructure build. These projects further extend Lightpath's AI-grade network to meet the growing capacity demand driven by artificial intelligence. To support this growth, we continue to expect annual Lightpath capital expenditures in the range of $200 million-$300 million, primarily supporting construction tied to these recently announced hyperscale contracts.

Overall, we are taking a disciplined and return-focused approach to growth capital, making strategic investments to support long-term top-line performance, while retaining flexibility to adjust the pace of investment as operating conditions evolve. Last, turning to our capital structure. We have no remaining maturities in 2026, and our next significant maturities will begin in 2027. Addressing those maturities remain a top priority. As we have said previously, we believe that a meaningful debt reduction and a balance sheet reset are essential to continuing our transformation, competing effectively, and investing thoughtfully to maximize long-term value for all stakeholders. Our weighted average cost of debt is 6.8%, our weighted average life of debt is 2.8 years, and approximately 81% of our debt stack is fixed rate. As of June 30th, ending cash available for operations includes approximately $880 million within the Restricted and UnSub Group debt silos and $90 million at Lightpath.

Total ending cash includes $28 million at other non-debt silo subsidiaries and $300 million, which was earmarked for the settlement of the previously announced tender offer. Through the successful tender offer completion, we repurchased 120 million Class A shares at $2.50 per share for an aggregate purchase price of $300 million. Following the completion of the tender offer, we had approximately 273 million shares outstanding and 206 million shares held in treasury. At the end of the quarter, our leverage is 8x the last two quarters' annualized adjusted EBITDA. As Dennis mentioned, in June, we published a long-range plan providing stakeholders with greater transparency into management's long-term strategy and financial outlook. A core premise of that plan is a stronger balance sheet is foundational to everything we are working to achieve.

The actions we announced in June reflect another important step toward our objectives. Our goal is to pursue a consensual comprehensive restructuring of the CSC Holdings debt through negotiations with our lenders. We believe that the measures we have taken increase the likelihood of a consensual comprehensive deal and mitigate the potential adverse impact of failing to achieve such a resolution. That work is ongoing. We are approaching it deliberately, with a goal of reaching an outcome that supports the long-term health of the business. Overall, this quarter reflects continued progress. We are improving execution, strengthening our financial foundation, and continuing to invest in the capabilities that will support stronger operational and financial performance over the long term. With that, we will now take questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question and have joined via the webinar, please use the raise hand icon, which can be found in the black bar at the bottom of your webinar application screen. When you hear your name called, you'll be prompted to unmute your line and ask a question. We'll now pause a moment to allow the queue to form. Our first question will come from Sam McHugh with BNP. Please unmute your line and go ahead.

Yeah, morning, guys. Thank you. I have three questions, if you don't mind. The first one on the footprint decommissioning. It sounded like it could be maybe 30,000, 40,000 passings. I wonder if you'd just help us on subscriber penetration and what kind of impact we should expect for Q3. That's one. Second question on the bulk agreement. Just wondering if the 9K is like a net new number. Was that MDU footprint already on net? How should we think about the ARPU for those customers? The third question was on the share repurchases tender offer. You didn't cancel the shares. I just wonder if you give us some context on why. On the shares outstanding, I think they only went down about 84 million. Can you just help us technically understand why it's only an 84 million reduction in shares outstanding and what that definition is maybe? Thanks.

Thanks, Sam. On the footprint, it was 48,000 passings, very nominal penetration. We've been laser-focused on making sure we're honed in on the core business and where we can drive maximum impact. Our focus this year is to deliver Get back to broadband growth, we are prioritizing the initiatives and the efforts that are going to help us as a team focus and execute operationally at the highest level. Over this next quarter, we will be going through that process, but we are confident that ultimately this will help us really accelerate our ability to execute and drive growth and prioritize the geographies and the initiatives to really help us get there.

On the bulk agreement, MDU is a meaningful opportunity for us. Since I joined, this is an area that we have been focused on and really making sure we have got the right team, the right structure. One of the big issues, obviously 30% of our footprint, and so meaningful opportunity. One of the big issues that we had when I joined was that we were signing agreements that were non-exclusive. We had no protection, no real ability to drive long-term value through these arrangements. Starting about 12, 18 months ago, we started to prioritize redoing existing agreements as well as all new agreements and converting them from non-exclusive and retail to bulk. This is a meaningful opportunity for us as I look at the next 18-24 months.

This was a relationship we had that the team did an outstanding job in terms of working with the building and converting that from retail to bulk, and this is a funnel that we are laser-focused on as we optimize our products, as we optimize our go-to-market in MDU. Clearly, the bulk ARPUs are a bit different than retail ARPUs. Ultimately, we think we can deliver much better long-term value by having these bulk agreements, and that is what we are prioritizing as we move forward. I will pass it over to Marc to talk a little bit about your last question.

Yeah, Sam. We really will not comment beyond what we published back in June related to the transactions we completed, the shares that were purchased by CSC Investments II. They are held in treasury, but we will not comment beyond that.

Can I just ask you a, I don't know if you still have me open, a follow-up?

Yeah. On the rural passings, you say it's nominal penetration. Was it always nominal, or has it come down in the last five years due to competition? I just don't understand if this was always just rural low opportunity, or whether it's changed in the last four or five years.

No, it's always been nominal. These are our markets that are just quite frankly very challenging to service relative to our core footprint. We have to prioritize where we can deliver maximum impact, where we can maximize awareness, consideration, provide the best service. Since I joined, we've done this a bit where we've looked at the footprint and looked at where we can show up best in terms of delivering great products, great service, great network.

We are committed to that. We remain committed to serving rural footprints where we're able to do that in a highly effective fashion, particularly across our Optimum West. As we think about new build and growing our passings, we're going to continue to do that in a thoughtful fashion. These have been always low and just been challenging. We want to make sure that we're showing up the right way in the markets that we are servicing.

Our next question will come from Vikash Harlalka with New Street Research. Please unmute your line and go ahead.

Hi. Thanks so much for taking the questions. Three, if I may. Two sort of near-term questions and one on your long-term forecast. In the near term, when I look at broadband losses for the year, losses have been higher by about 30,000 this year so far. You had a big step-up in subscriber losses in the back half of last year. When you think about the subscriber losses for the year, do you think you can improve upon last year's subscriber losses?

Yeah. On broadband, I'm optimistic in terms of the initiatives that we're putting in place to prioritize our path back to growth. Earlier this year, as you know, we took some actions to evolve our pricing and our packaging and our go-to-market strategy. This was all about simplifying the offers across our footprint. We had a couple of very specific goals and objectives. One is we wanted to improve our ability to execute operationally across the footprint. We're seeing that. We're seeing improved sales channel productivity. We were particularly focused on inbound sales in e-com, door-to-door, and even in retail with mobile. We are seeing, in some of those channels, all-time highs in terms of driving yield and driving productivity. It's really exciting for us to see. We're also focused on improving call volumes into the center, improving shoppers into e-com.

Just really right-sizing and accelerating top of the funnel. The good news is we're seeing that happen across large portions of our footprint. So we're excited that that strategy is working. We're continuing to optimize it and really make sure that we're showing up the right way. We think that these offers help us compete most effectively and will continue to optimize as we go forward. The reality is that there are certain markets where it's not just the offer. We need to do a better job in terms of improving customer service, the quality, the billing experience, and really drive up awareness and consideration. So we have a whole host of initiatives specifically focused on that are going to help us improve customer experience, help us improve base management, which will ultimately help us reduce churn.

Because there are some markets, as we know, we're seeing more fierce competition than ever, and customer expectations are high. So we're in the early innings, but we're seeing strong. We're optimistic as we implement solutions like Google CES that will help us elevate our customer experience, really help us solve problems, customer issues faster, deliver self-service capabilities. We have a roadmap over the next couple of quarters to launch a new MarTech platform, which we don't have today.

Today, everything is manual in terms of how we drive acquisition, how we drive our base management. A lot of manual intervention and emails, this will allow us to do a much better job communicating to our customers, upselling products. We have other solutions that we are just in the early innings of launching, like BriteBill, to help us ensure that we provide the highest level of experience as it relates to billing accuracy and completeness and answer customer questions. So all of these things together are helping us just improve our performance, both in terms of acquisition and then ultimately in terms of churn, so that we can stabilize broadband.

This is a journey. This is something that's going to take us a couple of quarters. Many of these initiatives will take a couple of quarters for us to implement, we're seeing a direct improvement as we implement these solutions. For example, we implemented Cresta to help us improve our frontline performance and sales channels. We're seeing that benefit, and we're going to be rolling that out into care and retention as well. So all these initiatives will help us drive performance and get us back to broadband growth.

Very helpful. On broadband ARPU, it's been sort of flattish in the first two quarters of the year. How are you thinking about the rest of the year? Can you grow ARPU this year? [inaudible]?

Yeah, let me just talk at a high level on our strategy for ARPU, and then I'll pass it on to Marc. As you've heard us talk about in the past, we're really focused on convergence ARPU, this new pricing and packaging is helping us do a couple things. It's helping us sell in gig and multi-gig, really at the highest levels ever. Almost 60% of our new customers are taking gig and multi-gig, which we're really excited about. It's also helping us drive mobile at the point of sale, we're seeing some of the highest yield that we've seen ever in our channels in terms of being able to attach mobile. We're really still in the early innings of some of our value-added services.

As you've heard me say in the past, we've launched some new products like Total Care, like Whole Home Wi-Fi, now we're really just getting into a rhythm of attaching these products and providing customers with a much more whole home solution that meets all of their needs. We didn't even get to our new E-tiers. Our new E-tiers are providing incredible value, we're seeing great success, strong attach at the point of sale for our packages like Entertainment TV, Extra TV, and everything. We're really focused on convergence ARPU and making sure that we're providing customers with maximum value, leveraging this robust product portfolio that we've launched in the past 18 months. Marc?

Yeah, Vikash, I would just add, I'm really pleased on how we're managing ARPU. You saw that we simplified our offer strategy that Dennis just mentioned, despite that, we were able to continue to upsell customers. We were getting the consideration, the phones ringing, when we got the customers on the phone, we were able to show them the value of our services. Again, 60%+ taking 1 Gb services or above. Pleased to see the stability of our broadband ARPU, given the offer set that we have in the marketplace. In fact, each of our product lines, broadband, video, mobile, convergence ARPU actually all grew in the quarter. Again, we'll take a very disciplined approach in how we manage rate and volume here.

Just for a full-year outlook perspective, we have mentioned, we will continue to reiterate that we do expect overall ARPUs to decline the full year, just particularly as we comp against a pretty strong fourth quarter, if you recall. Really pleased on how the team is managing rate, and we will continue to be nimble and react to market conditions as they arise.

Got it. One question on your long-term forecast. When I look at the forecast that you put out for the Optimum West footprint, it suggested that broadband penetration will reach 26% in the long term. How are you thinking about market structure in that footprint in the long term that leads to penetration of only 26%? That just seems a bit low to us.

The plan that we issued is aggressive but achievable, and we have looked at the entire footprint and really made sure that we have a thoughtful strategy as we think about where we want to drive maximum impact, leveraging our new offers, driving customer experience, making it more simple to work with us as a company, driving digital, driving our network investments as well. Look, the reality is that there is more competition in the West. We see now that the footprint is a little over 50% of fiber overbuilt. That has grown tremendously since I have started here. We also have fixed wireless competition across the footprint at over 80%. We are going to be taking a very surgical approach of making sure we identify where we can make maximum impact, where we can drive win-back.

There is certain markets where we have lost a tremendous amount of share, 10%, 15%, 20% of share. We are going to be going hard after those markets and making sure that we are showing up the right way, driving awareness, driving consideration. At the same time, we are not fooling ourselves, that 50% will likely grow to levels similar to where we are in the East, where East is a little over 70% now. I can see the West growing to 70% or 80%. We are going to take a balanced approach where we are going to drive broadband stabilization and growth, but at the same time, do that in a financially, fiscally responsible manner. That is part of the strategy that is reflected in the LRP.

...will come from Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson. Please unmute your line and go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you. I wonder if we could stay on the topic of your broadband ARPU for a second. If you could just talk about the impact that your five-year price lock offers have had. Are they mostly getting the phone to ring and you're selling customers into different price plans, or are those largely the plans that customers are ending up in? Is it new customers or the existing base that's moving into those plans? Then you also talked about in your prepared remarks, you're starting to upgrade a lot of your HFC plant in places like West Virginia. Can you just talk about the differences that you're seeing in places where you have upgraded HFC versus where you have gone all the way to FTTH and how you're competing differently in those markets?

Absolutely, Craig. As I mentioned, part of the pricing and the packaging was helping us simplify the way we execute and also driving top of the funnel, and we're seeing exactly that. We're really happy to see that the channels are performing at a very high level, and this is allowing our channels to spend more time solution selling. Over almost 60% of our new connects are now taking gig and multi-gig services, and they're purchasing additional products like Mobile, like Total Care, like Whole Home Wi-Fi. It's a really great message that we're able to blanket our footprint with, and it really drives efficiency when we talk about marketing and how we're going to market and our messaging on digital, in social, across all the different channels.

We're able to really focus, get folks on our website, get folks to call, make it easier for our door-to-door teams, make it easier for our outbound teams to really just have a conversation, not just about broadband, but our full portfolio of products. We are seeing, it's still early days, but we're still seeing really strong uptick of these products like mobile, like the value-added services, like the video tiers even, and having great conversations. We're excited about the early results, and we're going to continue to lean in into convergence and multi-product sell-in. Honestly, this is a great conversation we're having with our base as well, and we're able to now reach out to our base.

Unfortunately, it's in a very manual fashion today. We do need to, as I mentioned really get with the times and launch our MarTech platform that will allow us to do this in a much more efficient, automated, scalable fashion. Every time we have an interaction with our customers now, we're talking about getting them into our new packages, getting them into converged packages. Our care and retention channels are actually some of our best-selling channels for mobile. We're still in the early innings, but they performed at their best in Q2, and they still have a long way to go. Every time we have an interaction with our existing customers. In retail's mobile yield is the highest it's ever been, and it's only going to get better as we introduce wearables, as we introduce a broader product portfolio with our evolution of our T-Mobile deal.

We're super excited about the fact that we can have a new conversation with the base that we just never could before. Historically, it was just once a year, give them a rate event and aggravate them and piss them off. Now we can have a much more interesting conversation about, "Hey, let's get you the right products. Let's get you the right services, the best value." We have the best value, bar none, for broadband and mobile, stop, period, done. We have the best value. We're going to lean into that at acquisition and in the base, drive convergence, drive our multi-product sell-in, and get customers, existing customers as well, into just very robust, valuable packages, much more value than what they have today, and that's the journey that we're on.

On the HFC plans, we're excited about the multi-year network strategy that we've put in place. It's still early days. I'm optimistic over the next six to 12 months, as we really scale that up and really bring alongside the network investments, a holistic go-to-market strategy in these areas like West Virginia, that our ability to compete is going to elevate significantly.

We've been really operating with one hand tied behind our back in terms of being able to go to market and message and really put our best foot forward. With these investments that we have planned, it will take up our ability to compete, and we'll absolutely keep you posted. That's something that I'm laser-focused on. As we make these investments, we have to see a return. We have to see improved performance, both in terms of growth adds and churn, that's something that we'll be reporting back on in future calls.

Thank you. If I could squeeze in one more, I haven't heard the obligatory Starlink question yet in the Western markets. I'm wondering just what impact you're seeing from Starlink.

Yeah. Of course. Yeah, of course. Nominal impact in Q2, but we're keeping a close eye. Obviously, they're expanding their availability, particularly in the rural markets. They're getting more aggressive with their pricing. It's up to us to compete at the highest level. Since I started in this industry, even today, the customers want two things. They want great value, they want great quality. It's up to us to show up, whether it's Starlink, whether it's fixed wireless, whether it's a fiber overbuilder, whether it's a telco, to provide great value and great quality, great quality network, great quality product, great quality service. I'm confident in our ability to compete. Nominal impact in Q2, but I know that they're ramping up, and we're going to keep a close eye and make sure that we are evolving our go-to-market strategy to compete at the highest level, no matter the competitor.

will come from Michael Rollins with Citi. Please unmute your line and go ahead.

Thanks, and good morning. Two follow-ups if I could. First, you're just describing the success you have with customer engagement. I'm curious, for the churn that you experience, let's say for every 100 customers that churn from your platform, what percent of those give you the proactive opportunity to retain them? They call in, they express their concern or what they're thinking about, and gives you that opportunity to hold on to them.

Secondly, you've been competing with fiber on average probably longer and broader than most of the cable companies. Curious, as you look at markets at the micro level, are you seeing a certain number of those markets where the performance is fundamentally different or better just because they've gotten to a maturity point with competition that maybe the whole portfolio hasn't gotten to yet? It gives you some insight into the light at the end of the tunnel and maybe the% of those homes passed, just to think about how many have crossed that threshold for you of being in fundamentally a different place. Thanks.

Yeah. Thank you, Michael. I'll take that last question first, actually. That's exactly what we're seeing. As I mentioned earlier, as we implemented our new pricing and packaging strategy, we are seeing stabilization and meaningfully improved performance in large parts of our footprint, particularly where we have been competing head-to-head with certain fiber providers for years and in some cases decades. We are really understanding the levers that are required to be able to stabilize and then ultimately get back to growth. We're going to continue to lean in there. There's work that we need to do to continue to accelerate our go-to-market strategies, leveraging our MarTech solutions, leveraging continued improvements in our marketing effectiveness and efficiency. We are confident that we've got the right pricing, the right packaging, the right portfolio.

As you get into a bit more granular, particularly where we have new fiber entrants, there's work that we need to do with our base to be able to make sure that we are able to compete at the highest level as these new providers. Whether it's fiber, whether it's fixed wireless, whether it's Starlink, whoever that is coming in with very aggressive offers, really just trying to dislodge our customers. That goes back to your earlier question in terms of, okay, well, how do we stabilize? Yes, we have some percentage of customers where we're able to have a conversation, right-size them, and get them into the right packages. More and more, we have customers that have already made up their minds.

We have to get much earlier into the customer life cycle, and that's where this MarTech capability and base management capabilities are so important. Right now it's all manual. We are laser-focused over the next couple of quarters, implementing automation, implementing AI, so that we can get up much earlier into the process. We have churn propensity models now that are more robust than ever to help us identify who these customers are. We know that when they call us X number of times into care, they have X number of service visits. They've gone onto our website to check their bill a couple of times. We're starting to have the indicators that will allow us to take proactive steps to get them much earlier before they call, because there is a growing percentage of folks that call.

They've already made up their decision in their mind. They have options. They've had alternatives. They've been with us for a long time. We haven't had an opportunity to engage them in a productive fashion, but we will. We are on that path. We will absolutely be doing that, and that will change our ability to engage with our customers in a much more effective fashion and allow us to drive a reduction in call volumes into retention, allow us to stabilize broadband, and ultimately get back to broadband growth.

Those are all initiatives that we are prioritizing for this next couple of quarters so that we can actually engage with our customers in an even more effective and efficient manner digitally, leveraging My Optimum app, leveraging our online portals, messaging our customers on a regular basis in a productive, constructive fashion, so that we can mitigate any risks or issues that they're experiencing and ensure that we have the right engagement, right relationship with our customers.

I will now turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining. Please reach out to Investor Relations or media relations with any additional questions.

Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

Optimum Communications (OPTU) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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