Earnings Call Transcript - TMUS Q4 2022

Operator, Operator

Good morning. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jud Henry, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations for T-Mobile US. Please go ahead, sir.

Jud Henry, Senior VP, Head of Investor Relations

All right. Welcome to T-Mobile's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Earnings Call. Joining me on the call today are Mike Sievert, our President and CEO; Peter Osvaldik, our CFO; as well as other members of the senior leadership team. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. We provide a comprehensive list of risk factors in our SEC filings, which I encourage you to review. Our earnings release, investor fact book, and other documents related to our results as well as reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP results discussed on this call can be found in the Quarterly Results section of the Investor Relations website. With that, let me turn the call over to Mike.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

Okay. Thanks, Jud. Hi, everybody. As you can see, we're here in New York City with the whole senior team. I am very much looking forward to talking about 2022 and a look ahead to what I think is going to be an even more exciting future. 2022 was a record year for our company. It was our best year ever. We welcomed more customers to the un-carrier than ever before in our history, and we translated this customer growth to industry-leading financial growth, finishing with a strong Q4. Our T-Mobile team delivered at or above the high end of our guidance across the board. 2022 was also the biggest investment year in our history. By accelerating these investments, we rewrote the competitive dynamic on network competition for good and laid the foundation for a highly capital-efficient run rate business beginning this year. When I took responsibility as CEO almost three years ago, I spoke to you about an opportunity we saw that if we could execute well, we can position T-Mobile to be the first company in our space to simultaneously offer the best network and the best value, breaking a decade-long forced choice on consumers and businesses. While the results are in, with the latest network awards, and we've done it. T-Mobile is not only the 5G leader, but now the overall network leader. This opens big growth pathways for our future. Along the way, we successfully completed the customer migration and network shutdown faster than planned, while also delivering industry-leading growth in both customers and cash flows through our differentiated and profitable growth strategy. We launched our most ambitious ESG initiatives ever. Our financial outcomes allowed us to accelerate our network deployments and begin share repurchases earlier than planned. Looking ahead to 2023, we're very confident in our differentiated strategy. In fact, we're on track to meet or exceed all of the aspirations for this year that we shared with you way back at our Analyst Day in early 2021. I'm excited to talk more about all this today, and let's start with our merger integration. Back when we closed the merger, a few people would have thought that we could shut down the Sprint network faster than planned and deliver the lowest churn in our history at the same time, that's exactly what our team did. We moved all Sprint customers off the network and completed the DCOM of Sprint sites, all within 2.5 years. We had our best postpaid phone churn year in the Company's history at just 0.88, and we were the only one in the industry to deliver year-over-year improvement for full year 2022. Diving into network, while T-Mobile has been the clear 5G leader for years, we can now say that T-Mobile has the best overall network in the United States. That is a big statement. For the first time ever, T-Mobile won a clean sweep across every single overall network category in Ookla's recent report. Recent data from Opensignal and umlaut also show T-Mobile as the clear leader with over 12 billion data points across these network coverage and performance tests; the facts show T-Mobile is the new network leader. This brings with it an exciting new opportunity: convincing people that this 30-year forced choice between network and value is gone when you choose T-Mobile. This is no small task. Other results show that more and more people are beginning to notice and they're choosing T-Mobile. In fact, our results in '22 demonstrated how differentiated and effective our growth strategy really is. Kind of feels like deja vu. When I think back to this time last year, everyone was worried about what would happen when industry growth began to normalize. Well, we showed up immediately last year. The industry did see lower year growth in the second half. Our unique ability to offer customers both the best network and the best value across multiple new and underpenetrated segments of the market led to T-Mobile's SaaS growth year ever, with two of our best core system merger coming in the second half, even as market growth began to normalize. We posted a record 1.4 million postpaid account net adds, the highest in company history and the highest reported in the industry once again. We're winning the highest share of switching decisions in the industry through our clear growth strategies. We delivered our highest-ever postpaid net adds of over 6.4 million, above the high end of our recently raised guidance. This included our highest postpaid phone net adds since the merger, with an industry-leading 3.1 million. Our strategy is differentiated and durable because it's driven by taking share in places where we're massively underpenetrated relative to the competition, and where we now have the winning hand. Including T-Mobile for Business, where we just delivered one of our highest-ever phone net adds quarters in Q4. We’re clearly having an impact on the incumbents. As you can see in Verizon's highest-ever business churn in 2022. In the top 100 markets for consumer, we're winning with prime network seekers who increasingly recognize that T-Mobile offers the best combination of network coverage and capacity for their needs at a lower cost. We're only beginning to tap into this new opportunity. In smaller markets and rural areas, where we're bringing a better value proposition and a better network to new geographies, we really didn't play in before, we're capturing a win share of switchers in the high 30s, which says a lot because in many of these places, we're only just getting started. In addition, we added 2 million high-speed Internet customers in our first full year since our commercial launch. In fact, T-Mobile had more broadband net adds in '22 than AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter combined. This is a powerful new phenomenon for our brand in addition to being a good business. Not only did we deliver industry-leading customer growth, but our focus on profitable growth translated into industry-best financial performance with core adjusted EBITDA up 12% year-over-year and free cash flow up 36%. The investments we've made in 2022, including in our cybersecurity capabilities, showed up in a critical way a few weeks ago. I want to take a moment to address the recent cyber incident. After identifying a criminal attempt to access our data through an API, we shut it down within 24 hours. More importantly, our systems and policies protected the most sensitive kinds of customer data from being accessed. We take this issue very seriously. I'm disappointed that the crime actor was able to obtain any customer information, but we are confident that our aggressive cybersecurity plan working with the support of some of the world's experts will allow us to achieve our goal of becoming second-to-none in this area. Before I wrap up, I want to touch on some of the ways we're building a more connected and sustainable future. Nearly three years ago, we launched our digital divide initiative called Project 10Million to bring connectivity to underserved students nationwide with free or highly subsidized service. I am proud to say we're now more than halfway to achieving our goal. To date, we've provided $4.8 billion in services and connected more than 5.3 million students, and we're not slowing down. We're also working hard to create a more sustainable future, recently committing to our most ambitious sustainability goal yet: to achieve net-zero emissions across our entire carbon footprint by 2040. This makes T-Mobile one of the only four Fortune 100 companies to do so. Our work in this space is being recognized, including being named in the top 20 of JUST Capital's 2023 rankings, which measures companies against metrics that matter to our communities, including environmental impact, where we ranked number one in our industry. Okay. Let me wrap up with some comments on 2023 and what's ahead. With these record results, we've clearly shown that our differentiated strategy has lots of room to run. I strongly believe that this will prove to be the case even as the industry as a whole is seeing moderating growth and potentially a challenging macroeconomic environment. In fact, it may be especially true in that case, as our unique high-quality positioning is proving remarkably well suited to the times. We believe 2023 will also be a year in which we begin to see the payoff in terms of EBITDA and massive cash flow expansion of years of work on merger integration, synergy attainment, and the most ambitious network build in U.S. history, all of which are mostly behind us now. And ongoing differentiated profitable growth, which is the durable result in front of us. I could not be more proud of this team and our employees, and I am so excited for all that's ahead in 2023 and beyond. Okay, Peter, over to you to talk about our key financial highlights and our guidance for 2023.

Peter Osvaldik, CFO

Awesome. Thanks, Mike. As you can see, our 2022 results highlighted our strong execution in accelerating the moderation while leveraging our network leadership to deliver industry-leading growth in both traditional postpaid and broadband customers. This translated into industry-leading postpaid service revenue growth of 8% in 2022. We delivered core adjusted EBITDA of $26.4 billion, up 12% and reaching a record high and at the high end of our recently raised guidance. We realized approximately $6 billion of synergies in 2022 or roughly the total run rate synergies expected in our original merger plan in 2018. Our strong margin expansion also unlocked rapid free cash flow growth, which grew at an industry-best 36% year-over-year to $7.7 billion; that's even after funding our peak CapEx year in 2022. This strong financial performance allowed us to commence our share buybacks ahead of our original 2023 timeline. We repurchased 16.5 million shares for $2.3 billion in Q4, bringing the cumulative total repurchases to 21.4 million shares for $3 billion in 2022. This is such an exciting start to this opportunity to deliver significant shareholder value. So let's talk about how our great execution and investments in '22 set us up for another strong year of growth in 2023. We expect total postpaid net additions to be between 5 million and 5.5 million, reflecting continued focus on profitable growth as we execute our differentiated growth strategy even while expecting total industry net additions to be down versus 2022. This guidance assumes roughly half of postpaid net adds coming from fans. That profitable growth leads to core adjusted EBITDA expected to be between $28.7 billion and $29.2 billion, or up 10% midpoint based on continued growth in service revenues and merger synergies, above our Analyst Day guidance for 2023. This excludes leasing revenues of approximately $300 million as we transition substantially all remaining customers off device leasing by year-end. Our merger synergies are expected to further ramp to between $7.2 billion to $7.5 billion in 2023, approaching a full run rate synergy target from our Analyst Day a year ahead of schedule. Thanks to great execution by the teams, we've not only delivered accelerated synergies but now also expect higher run rate synergies of approximately $8 billion in 2024, of which approximately $2 billion is avoided cost, consistent with the amount expected at our Analyst Day. With the major integration work now behind us, we expect merger-related costs, which are not included in adjusted or core adjusted EBITDA, to be approximately $1 billion before taxes, and is expected to be front-end loaded with roughly 40% expected in Q1. This is expected to be the last year of material margin-related costs from a P&L perspective. Just as we have highlighted at Analyst Day, cash payments related to merger costs have undergone the P&L recognition to date and are expected to be between $1.5 billion to $2 billion for 2023, with almost half of that total heading in Q1. Net cash provided by operating activities, including these payments for merger-related costs, is expected to be in the range of $17.8 billion to $18.3 billion. We expect cash CapEx to be between $9.4 billion and $9.7 billion as we deliver capital efficiency unmatched in our industry, on the back of our network integration and 5G leadership. I would expect this to be a bit more weighted towards the first half of the year. Our capital efficiency and data-informed, customer-driven coverage approach guides us as we continue to enhance and further expand our network. Together, this results in expected free cash flow, including payments for merger-related costs, to be in the range of $13.1 billion to $13.6 billion. This is up approximately 75% over last year, thanks to our large tension and capital efficiency and does not assume any material net cash inflows from securitization. This also represents a free cash flow service revenue margin multiple percentage points higher than peers. Turning now to taxes, we expect our full-year effective tax rate to be between 24% and 26%. Finally, as we continue to execute our strategy of winning and expanding account relationships, we expect full-year postpaid ARPA to be up approximately 1% in 2023 as we continuously win and then deepen our cap relationships. Altogether, we expect 2023 to be another year of profitable growth and even greater free cash flow expansion as we continue to extend our network leadership and further scale our differentiated growth opportunities. And with that, I will now turn the call back to Jud to begin the Q&A. Jud?

Jud Henry, Senior VP, Head of Investor Relations

All right. Let's get to your questions. Operator?

Operator, Operator

Our first question comes from Craig Moffett with SVB Moffett. You may proceed with your question.

Craig Moffett, Analyst

Two questions, if I could. One is, you've now had a number of announcements about dabbling in the wireline market. I wonder if you could just talk about your wireline ambitions. And maybe bridge from that into the role that you think WA plays in making bundled offers. Is that something that you need to have nationally? And if so, how do you think you get there on the wireline side? And then second, just a financial question for Peter. I wonder if you could talk about the pacing of share repurchases. I understand that there's some debt paydown that we always expected the first, now that we're sort of well into the repurchase segment. What does the pace of that look like over the next couple of years?

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

Well, I'll start, Craig. Let me start by telling you a little bit about how we view the convergence space. To the premise of your question, we are competing very ambitiously in this space with more new broadband net additions in 2022 than the rest of the industry combined. So we're very happy with our position, and it has lots of room to run for years to come. On the other hand, the larger question is whether or not we're doing this for offensive reasons or defensive reasons. Our view is that the market has shown that customers will accept bundles, but it's far from certain whether bundles are something that they will require. We're interested in convergence because we have a lot to offer. We have a great brand, a great capability, a great team, great distribution, and the ability to add value to the space as you're seeing in our present success in home broadband through 5G. So we're very interested in the space. But I can tell you a few things that we've decided not to do, and I think that's important for people to understand. I personally have no interest in having some kind of major change to our strategy as a company or the financial outcomes that will go from that strategy or the shareholder remuneration that flows from our financial outcomes. We're on a mission to become the best in the world at wireless. We're pursuing that mission ambitiously, and so far, very successfully. That is the place where the future lies and where we want to be. I'm interested in delivering all of the financial outcomes that we promised you that flow from that business plan and the shareholder remuneration and share buybacks that flow from that, and we're not interested in something that would cause a material change in any of that. Secondly, because of that, I think we've looked at it and said if we got involved, we would do it most likely with partners. It would just be smart to do it with partners versus by ourselves. That means it would be either purely through a partnership or if we have an ownership stake of some type, it would be off balance sheet and again, would not be at a level that would have a material change in terms of who we are. As I said, we'd be interested in it if it's something that we could add value and make the market better for customers and make some money doing it, directly for the merits of the business, not necessarily for the merits of how it would attribute to wireless. Consumers are voting with their feet. So far, we haven't seen a benefit to convergence that really translates into consumer value beyond just a discount. There are plenty of ways to deliver customers' discounts when you have the superior assets in wireless: a superior balance sheet, the best overall network, and a tradition of a brand that delivers outstanding value. Hopefully, that helps clear that one up.

Peter Osvaldik, CFO

Yes. And then on share buybacks, Craig, the important thing is that the strategy hasn't changed, other than, of course, the ability, with the financial performance of the Company to initiate those earlier. We couldn't have been more excited to get that first $14 billion through Q3 approved, and you saw we delivered $3 billion of that in 2022. We continue to have line of sight to the up to $60 billion. Nothing's changed with regards to the strategy. We're very excited about the cash flow generation of the business, and the flexibility that provides. If you think about shaping, of course, I'm not going to talk about day-to-day or week-to-week shaping for natural reasons. But of course, you've got the growth of core EBITDA coming throughout the year, which gives you financial flexibility. We're very prudent in just the leverage target that we've set overall. But again, nothing has changed with respect to the strategy; very excited about the free cash flow generation and the shareholder remuneration it affords.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from Philip Cusick with JPMorgan. You may proceed with your question.

Philip Cusick, Analyst

Could you elaborate on the business growth? What types of contracts are you signing? What is the mix between enterprise and SMB? Also, where do these customers tend to fall in terms of ARPU? We've heard about some significant discounts you've offered to secure large contracts. As we consider our projected growth of 1% this year, should we view ARPU as remaining stable, or is it more likely to decrease slightly year over year?

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

We'll start with Callie on what we're seeing and then switch over to Peter on ARPA and ARPU.

Callie Field, Executive Vice-President of Sales

Okay. Thanks Mike. So in T-Mobile for Business, as Mike mentioned earlier, we continue to build very strong momentum, driven by our 5G network leadership combined with our winning customer service model. In Q4, we continued to grow our service revenue. We delivered one of our highest ever postpaid net add performances. We recorded our lowest postpaid phone churn since the merger with Sprint, and we grew our voice ARPU. In fact, we grew strong net adds every quarter in '22, and it's having an impact, as you can see in Verizon's business trend, which was its highest ever levels in '22, and their business net adds declined sequentially for the last three quarters. We've also achieved five consecutive quarters of business Internet growth. Some of our key wins in strategic verticals include the airline industry, where we've won nine out of 10 major airlines, growing our base with these customers by 15% in Q4 alone. In the healthcare industry, we welcomed Ensign, a company deploying our mobility of a service solution to their 25,000 employees. In banking, large financial institutions are fast adopting multiline solutions. We won three new logos in Q4 for a total of 24 accounts. In the public sector, we welcomed Chicago PD, Head County, and Dallas IST. Even in our Advanced Network Solutions category, we signed on Formula 1, where we're on the last Vegas, providing operations and ensuring top performance fees. We know why we're winning; it's not a race to the bottom, a bid for the lowest rate of pricing down. In the modern workplace where CIS, we are focused on productivity digital transformation, even more than considered sales. It matters that we have a two-year head start in IT network leadership. It matters that we deploy customer-driven coverage, and we're differentiated as a superior network with an unparalleled service model. I’ll turn it over to you, Peter.

Peter Osvaldik, CFO

Yes. Let me just add to that. I think what you heard Callie say is we're competing on quality, by and large, and ARPUs are rising. They rose in 2022 in the business space and the premise of your question, they're lower than consumer, but they rose in 2022 because CIOs are picking us because we have the best network and the best solutions, and they're interested in what we can bring in 5G that our competitors are behind on. As we go forward, one of the things to keep in mind is that even though business ARPUs are lower than consumer and always have been, and there's no structural change happening there, they are very good. The cost to sell in that area is lower longevity. There are plenty of reasons to like that business that are different for ARPU. That's why you got to be careful about ARPU as a guiding metric for the profitability of the business because it's not.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

Yes. Absolutely. We’re definitely not anticipating ARPU to be down on a year-over-year basis. Probably our guide right now would be generally stable. That’s primarily the mix-driven metric as we just had continued success in T-Mobile for Business, for example, being a mix-driven metric responders or segmentation approach. But there's been a tremendous amount of tailwind as we continue to see strength in Magenta MAX take rates in Q4. So as you get further into the year, there's potential opportunity for increases over that. But I’d say right now, generally stable with potential upside later in the year, and we'll see how that develops.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from John Hodulik with UBS. You may proceed with your question.

John Hodulik, Analyst

Great. Two quick ones, if I could. First, I guess, following up on the business market question. Could you give some details on the rural market strategy? In the past, you've talked about where you are from a sort of spectrum deployment and distribution standpoint and sort of how well you're doing in terms of penetrating that market? And then on the CapEx guide, about $9.5 billion, is this sustainable level? For Neville, maybe could you give us a sense for sort of what you have in store for the network in '23? Maybe update us on sort of the spectrum deployment at 2.5 where you're thinking for C-band and the other spectrum deployments as we look out to 2030 and beyond would be great.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

Thanks, John. Those are two great ones. First, on smart markets in the rural areas, I’ll hand it to Jon. I am so pleased with what's happening here. We set out to do something we hadn't done at scale before a couple of years ago, and 2022 was pivotal year due to all of that at scale. We moved from 30% to 60% of the marketplaces where we're competing. I think we've explained to you before, what we call internally license to play or better. In those places, the numbers have been placed. So, maybe, Jon, if you can give a little bit of color on how that's going and maybe some numbers to back it up, and then we'll switch and talk about what's going on in the network.

Jon Freier, Executive Vice President of Consumer Group

Yes. Like Mike said, from 30% one year ago to 60% where we’re competing at scale. Just to remind you about the size of this market, it’s 140 million people across the entire country. It's 50 million households—40% in the U.S. in terms of how we define small markets and rural areas, which is everything outside of the top 100 markets. This overall business has been fun. My heritage is I started out 25 years ago selling into a market bringing cell phone service into rural markets. I got to tell you, our switching is up 350 basis points on a year-over-year basis. When you look at where we're competing, 60% of the markets across all small markets areas, we're competing against Verizon, peaking over the leadership position in share of porters across the entire market. When you look at what's happening with high-speed Internet, that's a new opportunity for us in smaller markets. About one third of our total high-speed Internet net adds came out of smaller markets, catalyzing significant growth opportunities. The key takeaway is we have a great value and network that’s never been more important, particularly in these underserved areas.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

To see shares switching well into the 30s given that many of these places we really just started, shows that our experience is resonating with consumers. So, we're very pleased about the rural markets and the response we're getting from consumers. Terrific, let's go back - sorry.

Peter Osvaldik, CFO

The second part of John’s question was about CapEx.

John Hodulik, Analyst

I almost forgot about network.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

The CapEx fees where the answer is yes, $9 billion to $10 billion run rate. We're getting done with that line in '23 and beyond.

Peter Osvaldik, CFO

Thanks for the question, John. We're coming off what has been a historic year for network investment in this company. We had an accelerated spend in 2022, and you can see the results that are coming from it. Our 5G leadership is just not disputed in the marketplace. This translates to overall network leadership, leading to tremendous progress for the business, and I think a series of great growth opportunities as Jon just outlined working in many other parts of the country. As we look at a sustainable level in '23, we're in a great place because we got the integration effectively complete last year. That was a massive effort, but we're ahead of schedule there. As we look at the build program on 5G and overall network, we just took great strides. Today, we announced 265 million people now covered with our ultra-capacity footprint in the U.S. That number will be 300 million by the end of this year. We continue to expand that powerful 5G service across the country. That’s a number that neither of our major competitors have stated a goal to reach or achieve yet. In addition, we continue to pay spectrum assets on 5G. We’re a 5G business. We’re trying to commit our spectrum, our entire portfolio to 5G as fast as we can because it's delivering just a tremendous experience to our customers. We're targeting 200 megahertz just on the mid-band spectrum by the end of this year. C-band is on a 2024 deployment plan for us, cleaned up with the FAA, etc. But 200 megahertz on mid-band is going to be an industry-leading proposition as we extend our network and ensure our customers get the best service.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

One of the things to take away from what Neville just said is that this network leadership story that has emerged has lots of room to run. We said three years ago that we had jumped out in front on 5G, and we'd at least be two years ahead of our competitors. This is indeed what has unfolded if you listen to Neville's statistics. We’re already at 265 million people covered by ultra-capacity. Neither of our competitors has made a goal to reach a two-year timeline. We're not stopping there; we’re on our way to 300 million people this year. The more exciting part about what Neville mentioned is the massive capacity expansion that’s currently underway. Our medium speeds are 5x faster than just three years ago. The value we’re bringing to broadband is significant, and we expect to see continued growth in this space.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from Simon Flannery with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed with your question.

Simon Flannery, Analyst

Mike, you teed up my question. You said you've got lots of room to run on fixed wireless. Some of the competitors critique the product around limitations on capacity, on speed. Now that you've got a base of customers, you've seen behavior over a couple of years now—what are the learnings? How much market share do you think this product can take? And what's your ability to expand and continue to increase the footprint and capacity of the network? Just a quick word on the macro; you talked about some concerns you've seen—anything on payment patterns or any other cautious behavior yet?

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

First on broadband, it’s kind of stating the obvious. When somebody who is a fiber provider critiques our product, it's clear that our product is an undoubtedly superior value for customers. It’s not as good as a fiber product, but it's radically simple and lower cost. It's transparent, portable—with tens of millions of households experiencing it. The net promoter scores are the industry’s highest—10 points higher than fiber and 30 points higher than cable. Most of our customers come from cable, demonstrating that we've got a product here with the right mix of services to meet people's needs, lots of room to run. When we launched this product, we talked about 7 million to 8 million homes; tracking beautifully to that goal. The question is where do we go from here? We are looking at opportunities to augment the strategy because we have a winning product and massively expanding capacity to support it. The dynamics of our product, which is not burdened like traditional broadband, helps us capture customers and reduce early churn significantly.

Peter Osvaldik, CFO

I can speak to the macro environment from a consumer perspective. No, we’re not seeing any alarming trends. We’ve actually seen a little improvement in voluntary churn from Q3 to Q4. Bad debt rates were stable and lower than AT&T or Verizon metrics, showing the quality of our customer base, something that was in question after the Sprint merger. We could see this period of economic pressure as an opportunity for us because consumers are evaluating their expenses carefully. In that context, T-Mobile, with its value proposition, is uniquely positioned to serve customers who may be seeking to save money while ensuring high-quality service.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

We are prepared to provide the necessary service even during stressful times. Everything we've seen shows our customer base remains solid. We are ready to serve customers who might be looking for better value, not just in wireless, but over various categories. It’s a unique time for us, and we’re seeing our brand resonate during this economic scrutiny.

Simon Flannery, Analyst

Thanks for the color.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

So Jud, should we go in between here, should we go up to—you guys can't see this, but we always have screens pointing at us with Twitter—Twitter questions, and we like to open it up. I was going to have you call out a couple, but there's one question from a Twitter user that is really interesting. What's T-Mobile doing to maintain its industry-leading growth, considering the momentum cable is building in the telco space? We talked about convergence earlier. Interestingly, we keep getting this question. I mentioned cables' results. T-Mobile was able to deliver 17% more postpaid net additions in the second half versus last year while the rest of the industry delivered 19% less postpaid phone net adds. This should illustrate how we’re strategically faring against competitors.

Jud Henry, Senior VP, Head of Investor Relations

Not yet. Let's go back to the line and we'll keep watching. Great.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from Jonathan Chaplin with New Street Research. You may proceed with your question.

Jonathan Chaplin, Analyst

Thanks for taking the question. You gave really great context on the market size for rural and small markets and the fact that you've gone from 30% of that market to 60%. I'm curious about the business market; can you give us insight into how your market shares have progressed over the course of this year and what the overall market size looks like?

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

What you heard from Callie before is that Q4 was one of the best net add quarters ever for us. We’re comfortable with our position. In the market, businesses are increasingly looking to partner with us as the 5G narrative grows more compelling with CIOs interested in collaborating strategically. In terms of the mix of business in fixed wireless broadband, we continue to focus on consumer; however, we see a steady increase in business growth as Callie mentioned. We have opportunities in both segments moving forward.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from Brett Feldman with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed with your question.

Brett Feldman, Analyst

You’ve sustained strong postpaid net adds throughout the merger integration despite heightened churn related to that; I’m curious about levers to drive churn lower from here. What residual benefits from the integration might still take effect? How important is the remaining billing migration to churn? What type of churn outlook is embedded in your postpaid phone net add estimates for this year?

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

Yes, there's more room to run on integration. However, much of this room relates to our network, service, and brand. Our goal is to move T-Mobile blended postpaid to having the lowest churn in the industry. Yes, we've seen improvements, but we’re determined to push this forward and provide the best customer experience possible. In terms of fixed wireless churn, we're really happy. We track customer behavior over time, watching different cohorts and their retention patterns. Although our base is new, the majority of our subscribers are sticking with us, significantly lowering churn from traditional broadband experiences. We’re encouraging customer trials while easing the financial impact of having these new customers by optimizing cost structures.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from David Barden with Bank of America. You may proceed with your question.

David Barden, Analyst

For Peter, can you outline guidance adjustments from Analyst Day? What caused the midpoint expectations to shift up? Also, about the free cash flow guidance change; what's the rationale behind that?

Peter Osvaldik, CFO

Certainly. If we consider the changes since Analyst Day, there’s been tremendous profitable growth. The ARPA trajectory has grown, and high-speed Internet growth is also a major positive. Inflation has impacted overall markets, certainly added some pressure but has not made a significant change to our fundamentals. Looking ahead, our core EBITDA is expected to continue growing, which is vital for our financial flexibility.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

The guidance change reflects our increasing outlook for free cash flow, projected at 75% growth over the previous year. We anticipate favorability due to our high conversion of service revenue to free cash flow amidst some one-time expenses. As for SoftBank and the ongoing share buybacks, we’re in constant communication and dialogue. While there’s no imminent deal, both sides believe in the potential for higher stock prices, warranting patience. To summarize, our brand resonating well across all platforms allows us to keep pursuing growth unabated. By focusing specifically on consumer trends, we are adapting as the market shifts while delivering on our promise of superior service at competitive prices.

Jud Henry, Senior VP, Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. Again, I look forward to catching up with you again soon. If you have any other questions, please reach out to the Investor Relations and Media Relations team, and have a great day.

Mike Sievert, President and CEO

Thanks, everybody.

Operator, Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the T-Mobile fourth quarter earnings call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect and have a pleasant day.