Lumen Technologies Inc (LUMN) 2010 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CenturyLink's third quarter 2010 earnings conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr.

Tony Davis, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, Sayid.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call today to discuss CenturyLink's third quarter 2010 results released earlier this morning.

For those of you who have access to the internet, the slide presentation we will be reviewing during the prepared remarks portion of today's call is available on CenturyLink's IR website, at IR.CenturyLink.com, or the Investor Relations section of our corporate website at www.CenturyLink.com.

At the conclusion of our prepared remarks today, we will open the call for Q&A.

Turning to Slide two.

Slide two contains our Safe Harbor language for your information.

We will be making certain forward-looking statements today, particularly as they pertain to guidance for fourth quarter and full year 2010, selected information regarding 2011, the Embarq integration and the pending acquisition of Qwest, and other outlooks in our business.

Please review our Safe Harbor language found in our press release and in our SEC filings, which describe factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected by us in our forward-looking statements.

Now, moving to Slide three.

We ask that you note that our earnings release issued earlier this morning and the slide presentation and remarks made during this call contain certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliations between the non-GAAP financial measures and the GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release and on our website at www.CenturyLink.com.

Turning to Slide four, your host for today's call is Glen Post, Chief Executive Officer and President of CenturyLink.

Joining Glen on our call today is Stewart Ewing, CenturyLink's Chief Financial officer.

And also available during the question and answer period of today's call is Karen Puckett, CenturyLink's Chief Operating Officer.

Our call today will be accessible for telephone replay through November 9, 2010 and available for webcast replay through November 23, 2010.

For anyone listening to a taped or webcast replay of this call, or for anyone reviewing a written transcript of today's call, please note that all information presented is current, only as of November 3, 2010, and should be considered valid only as of today, regardless of the date listened to or reviewed.

As you turn to Slide five, I'll now turn the call over to your host, Glen Post.

Glen?

Thank you, Tony.

We appreciate you joining us today as we discuss CenturyLink's third quarter 2010 operating results and selected operational updates, as well as guidance for the remainder of 2010.

We reported solid results for the quarter, achieved operating revenues above the top end of guidance range, and diluted earnings per share that exceeded previous guidance first call consensus for the quarter.

We also achieved solid high speed internet additions and continued to see significant improvement in year-over-year access line losses, primarily driven by improved line loss results from the Legacy Embarq markets.

The integration of Embarq continues to proceed well and we continue to make good progress in obtaining the approvals necessary to complete the pending Qwest transaction, another transformative acquisition for CenturyLink.

Moving to Slide six in the deck, we are pleased to report solid financial and operating results for the third quarter.

Operating revenues were $1.75 billion for the quarter.

Diluted earnings per share, excluding nonrecurring items, is $0.83 per share for the quarter.

A primary contribution to our solid results during the quarter was our employees' ongoing efforts to contain operating costs across our business, while at the same time working on the Embarq integration and preparing for the Qwest transaction.

Our cash flows remain strong as we generated free cash flow of more than $380 million, excluding nonrecurring items during the quarter.

Additionally, we achieved over $80 million of total operating expense synergies associated with the Embarq integration during the third quarter, and we continue to expect to exit 2010 at our current $330 million annualized operating expense synergy run rate.

Turning to Slide seven in the deck, we continue to see an improvement in our year-over-year revenue mix, as the Embarq acquisition and our market-specific marketing strategies are decreasing our reliance on access revenues.

Revenues from data services accounted for 27.5% of third quarter 2010 total operating revenues compared to 24.6% in the third quarter of 2009.

Access service revenues represented only 15.1% of total operating revenues in third quarter 2010, reflecting the Company's lower reliance on network access related revenues during the quarter.

We continue to experience growth in data revenues, driven primarily by the year-over-year growth in high speed internet customers, increased demand by business and wholesale customers for high speed -- for high bandwidth services.

We remain focused on positioning CenturyLink as a broadband provider of choice in our markets.

We continue to enhance our broadband product portfolio through deploying higher speeds in key markets, as well as offering incremental value through broadband features, such as computer support and online backup.

In the business market, we are providing advanced data and IP networks and value-added services to support the needs of our small and mid-size businesses and our enterprise customers.

We continue to position ourselves around our unique capabilities to offer both national reach and tense local focus, leveraging our local operating models.

Now, turning to Slide eight, I'll cover a few additional operating highlights for the quarter.

First, we added more than 29,000 high speed internet customers during the quarter, as demand for broadband remained solid and customers continued to respond well to our broadband offers, our targeting marketing strategy and our local operating model that places sale and service closer to our customers.

We ended the quarter with approximately 2,365,000 high speed internet customers, or approximately 35.7% penetration of total addressable access lines.

We were pleased that we have been able to add more than 175,000 high speed internet customers during those last 12 months, representing approximately 8% year-over-year growth in total high speed internet subscribers.

In third quarter, we maintained the overall go-to-market approach we used in second quarter.

We also launched several new products and promotions to further drive value customer growth, increased share spend with our customer base.

This included our new computer support packs which are packages that provide up to four additional services to our broadband customers.

These include PC security and antivirus, data storage, and overall computer hardware, software, and peripheral device support through our 24/7 call centers.

We're also seeing success with our five-year price lock offer that we launched in some of our most competitive markets.

Our third quarter line loss of approximately 140,000 was better than we had anticipated going into the quarter, and represents a 17.5% improvement over the third quarter 2009 access line loss.

In our top five markets, access line performance and high speed internet customer growth has improved significantly since we closed the Embarq transaction.

In these markets, we've experienced approximately a 33% improvement in access line performance and approximately a 62% improvement in average high speed internet growth during the 15-month period post closing compared to the 15-month period prior to closing.

We believe the implementation of CenturyLink's regional operating model, with local market accountability, and our targeted sales and marketing approach, along with a more stable economy, have been key drivers of this turnaround.

We are pleased that we have been successful in reducing our rate of line loss for the trailing 12 months ended September 30, 2010, to 7.8% compared with a 9.1% trailing 12-month line loss a year ago.

As we discussed with you in August, CenturyLink switched satellite providers to DIRECTV in third quarter 2010 and residential service was launched on August 1.

We're excited to partner with DIRECTV because the leadership in HD, sports programming, and technology such as wholesale -- or whole house DVR.

In transfer program for combined -- the transfer program for combined billing did not start until mid-October and we also experienced a slower sales ramp-up with the new provider.

These two factors negatively impacted our results for third quarter, as we experienced a decline in satellite video subscribers of approximately 7400.

However, we're now able to utilize the transfer program and we are seeing sales beginning to ramp up again.

We currently offer our CenturyLink Prism IPTV service in five markets.

La Crosse, Wisconsin; Columbia, and Jefferson City, Missouri; and newest markets of Las Vegas, Nevada and Fort Myers/Naples, Florida.

We are in the process of scaling our newly developed markets of Las Vegas and Fort Myers, both of which are scheduled for full commercial rollout in the first quarter 2011.

By the end of next year, we expect to have passed close to a million households as we expand service to additional markets.

We launched our Prism service in Jefferson City, Missouri in January and have exceeded 10% penetration of eligible living units in the market in less than one year's time.

Over the past year, we've made incremental investments in addition to our Prism IPTV video architecture to specifically target multiple dwelling units, and we are beginning now to see success in cashing some of the MVU markets, recapturing some of the MVU market share in our service areas.

Now turning to Slide nine, our employees continue to do an excellent job of containing costs which contributed to the generation of strong cash flows during the quarter, in spite of a very competitive marketplace and economic conditions that remain challenging.

Operating cash flow, excluding nonrecurring items of more than $895 million for the quarter, and more than $2.7 billion year-to-date.

Free cash flow is more than $380 million for the quarter, nearly $1.3 billion year-to-date.

Our strong cash flow supported the return of nearly $220 million of free cash flow to shareholders during the quarter and nearly $657 million year-to-date through cash dividends.

Our payout ratio was $0.57, as capital expenditures increased as expected during the third quarter.

The year to date payout ratio is 51%.

Turning to Slide 10, the integration of Embarq continues to progress well.

We have successfully completed our third conversion of Embarq customers to CenturyLink billing and operational systems.

And we now have approximately 50% of Embarq customers on these systems.

We expect to complete a fourth conversion in the first half of 2011 and we remain on track to complete the fifth and final Embarq conversion by the end of the third quarter 2011.

We expect to complete the migration of Embarq long distance customers to the CenturyLink network later this month, eliminating third party carrier costs for this traffic.

Now moving to Slide 11, we continue to move steadily ahead with approval process and integration work for the acquisition of Qwest.

The approval process has completed 12 of the 22 state regulatory jurisdictions.

We received clearance to proceed with the transaction of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

Shareholders of both companies overwhelmingly approved the transaction on August 24.

On October 22, we announced we had reached an agreement with both the CWA and IBEW that the mergers in the public interest and the unions have agreed to withdraw their opposition in any remaining state and federal regulatory proceedings.

We have also outlined the organizational structure and named our top two tiers of leaders and integration teams are in place and working to effect a smooth transition for the combined company.

Now going to Slide 12, while we are making great progress, there's still important work ahead of us.

We remain actively engaged with the 10 remaining commissions that require approval, along with the FCC.

We continue to expect to close the transaction in the first half of 2011.

As a reminder, the combination with Qwest would have resulted in pro forma 2009 revenues of $19.8 billion, and is expected to be immediately accretive to free cash flow per share, excluding integration costs.

The transaction will strengthen the sustainability of CenturyLink's dividend, while materially lowering the company's payout ratio.

As the combined -- the combination creates a robust national 180,000 route mile fiber network.

We expect to generate annual operating costs and capital expenditures synergies of approximately $625 million, which are expected to be fully realized three to five years following closing.

The combination of Qwest and CenturyLink will create a strong, highly skilled employee base and will establish a national industry-leading communications company.

With that, I'll now turn the call over to Stewart for additional financial highlights and review of our fourth quarter and full year 2010 guidance.

Stewart?

Thank you, Glen.

During the next few minutes, I'll review some highlights of our third quarter 2010 operating results and will conclude my comments this morning with a discussion of fourth quarter and full year 2010 guidance provided in our earnings release issued earlier today.

Now, turning to slide 14, since we reported significant nonrecurring one-time items during the third quarter, I want to briefly recap those items for you before I discuss the third quarter normalized results.

First, we incurred approximately $27 million of pretax expenses or $0.06 per share related to integration and severance costs associated with the Embarq integration.

Second, we incurred about $5 million in pretax expenses, or about $0.01 per share related to the Qwest acquisition.

In the aggregate, these items represent the $0.07 per share difference in normalized diluted earnings per share of $0.83, and GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.76.

Now, turning to slide 15, and our results for third quarter 2010 compared to third quarter 2009, excluding nonrecurring items for both periods as outlined in our financial schedules.

For third quarter 2010, operating revenues decreased $127 million to $1.75 billion, from $1.87 billion in third quarter a year ago.

Cash operating expenses decreased from $944.5 million in third quarter 2009 to $851.8 million in third quarter this year, primarily due to synergies achieved from the Embarq integration.

Depreciation and amortization expense decreased from $362 million in third quarter 2009 to $358 million in the third quarter of 2010, primarily due to a reduction in amortization expense associated with the customer life intangible asset established in connection with our Embarq acquisition.

Net income attributed to CenturyLink for the quarter was $251.1 million compared to $269.1 million in third quarter 2009.

And diluted earnings per share for the quarter decreased 7.8% to $0.83 from $0.90 in the third quarter a year ago.

And free cash flow increased 3% from $372.1 million in third quarter 2009 to $383.3 million in the third quarter 2010.

Finally, on slide 16, I would like to discuss the fourth quarter and updated full year 2010 guidance provided in our press release this morning.

As a reminder, cost incurred by CenturyLink during 2010, related to the Embarq integration, and any transaction or integration costs related to the pending Qwest transaction are considered nonrecurring items.

These costs, along with any other nonrecurring items that may occur during 2010 are excluded from the diluted earnings per share guidance provided in our press release, and in my comments regarding third quarter and full year 2010 diluted earnings per share guidance.

For the fourth quarter 2010, we expect operating revenues to be in the range of $1.69 billion to $1.71 billion.

This decline partially results from approximately $5 million of one-time items in the third quarter.

We expect diluted earnings per share for fourth quarter 2010 to be in the range of $0.73 to $0.77.

The sequential decline in earnings per share from third quarter to fourth quarter is due to anticipated declines in access lines and access minutes of use, along with the one-time revenue item mentioned earlier, and increased costs associated with the rollout of IPTV that Glen mentioned, partially offset by lower operating expenses, primarily due to seasonality in outside plant maintenance.

With those points in mind, we are updating our 2010 guidance to reflect our year-to-date results and our expectations for the fourth quarter.

We're also narrowing the range of our diluted earnings per share guidance for full year 2010 from $3.30 to $3.40 to now a range of $3.36 to $3.40.

We also continue to expect 2010 capital expenditures to be between $825 million and $875 million.

In our earnings release, we also outlined a few items that we expect to negatively impact 2011 results when compared to 2010.

We plan to discuss these items further in connection with our fourth quarter 2010 earnings release when we expect to provide additional guidance for 2011.

This concludes our prepared remarks for the day.

At this time, I'll ask the operator to provide further instructions for the question and answer portion of our call.

(Operator Instructions) First question comes from Batya Levi.

Thanks a lot.

One question about the broadband side.

Could you talk about the trends that you're seeing in the marketplace?

Most of the telcos saw a seasonal uptick in the third quarter, but your adds were flattish.

Can you give a sense of what the drivers behind that was?

And just a follow-up, as despite the lower broadband adds, the data revenues were actually stronger than we thought, so if you could talk about the pricing environments and maybe provide sense for what kind of speeds the customers are asking for?

Thanks.

This is Karen.

In terms of the flatness, if you think about last year third quarter, we were ramping up the EQ markets.

We had a new operating model, new go to market.

We've seen good success with that.

We're starting to have consistent results, but ramping down on all those high point opportunities that we had.

If you look at still in the industry terms of flow share and compare it to peers, we're still top of the industry in terms of our performance.

So from an internal standpoint, we hit our objectives and we see that continue to be pretty flat, if you look at it just quarter over quarter.

In terms of competition and speeds, we're really seeing not a lot of new incremental competition from cable.

There's pockets of more aggressive competition, but we have not seen any increase competition really in third quarter, or going into fourth quarter.

So we feel pretty good about where we are at on our high speed penetration.

And with respect to the increase in data revenues being in excess of the percentage increase in DSL customers, we include special access revenues in the data category and we continue to see strong demand from the wireless carriers with respect to needing new bandwidth to their towers, as they -- as their customers, require you know higher and higher speeds and more broadband services.

Okay, thanks.

Our next question comes from Scott Goldman.

Hi, good morning, guys.

So want to touch, Stewart, if I could on the fourth quarter revenue guidance.

Seems to imply a step-up in the rate of both annual and sequential declines.

You just mentioned in your prepared remarks about a $5 million one-time impact in the fourth quarter.

I'm not sure that would necessarily account for the entire change there.

So wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the key drivers of that guidance, You know, are there items such as the wireless traffic migration delays or anything else we should be thinking about in terms of the fourth quarter revenue?

And then secondly, just on the synergies, looks as though you exited third quarter, where you plan to exit for the full year.

You have about $45 million of incremental synergies still to get to your annualized target.

So should we expect the bulk of that to come from the system conversions that take place by the third quarter of next year, or are there other areas, that we can expect some meaningful synergies over the next few quarters?

Yes, Scott, so with respect to the fourth quarter revenue guidance, yes, about $5 million is due to the -- the one-time items favorable items that we had in the third quarter.

Probably about $7 million to $8 million is due to the -- the continued access rehome and long distance migration that we're seeing that's been delayed somewhat.

We thought it would happen a little earlier this year, but it's been delayed some.

But it will continue to occur.

So we're expecting that.

And then the majority of the -- the rest of the decline is really related to expected access line declines and expected continued declines in access minutes of use.

With respect to the, the synergies, yes, we did exit third quarter at about where we expect to exit the year, and you're correct in your rationale there basically.

We completed one of the other conversions, the third conversion of our customer care and billing to the CenturyLink system from Embarq.

We have two of those remaining.

They will be completed hopefully by the end of the third quarter of 2011.

So the majority of the remaining synergies related to Embarq are related to IT and the decommissioning of those systems after the full transition takes place, as well as some in the accounting area related to some folks that we have now.

They are doing billing, managing net billing system and net billing process.

Great.

And could you just quantify what the impact of the IPTV rollout in the fourth quarter would be on EBITDA?

Yes, we expect it to be somewhere probably in the $7 million to $8 million range.

Okay, great.

Thank you very much, guys.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Simon Flannery.

Okay, thanks very much.

Good morning.

You talked quite bit about bringing the Prism IPTV service to Vegas and Fort Myers.

Can you talk about what it requires to roll that out in terms of upgrading the network, installing other equipment.

I'm particularly thinking of how feasible it may be to bring this to the 4.5 million lines that Qwest has now upgraded to high speed.

Perhaps you can go through the sort of technical and timing requirements there.

And given that you're expanding it more broadly, have your views on profitability or the ability to kind of get better results on bundling and ARPU and so forth and starting to turn more positive because up to now, you've been sort of fairly measured in your expansion, but feels like something's changed there.

And then secondly, if you can just provide any more color on specific states and specific time lines around the merger approval process and where we currently stand.

Thanks.

Simon, I'll start on this, your first question on the IPTV and Karen may want to add to this.

First of all, we have our head in Columbia, Missouri.

Today we will probably -- have a second head in with Qwest, they have video capabilities in Denver and Phoenix.

We'll inherit another head in there that's almost ready to go.

So that's a big step.

We always -- in every market, we'll have to have a local head in for the specific broadcast channel, local channels.

That's part of the incremental cost.

But it's really a matter of plant condition and the -- really the majority of the costs as far as plan is concerned is going to be needed eventually in the next three to five years anyway to bring plant to standards that we want and also to bring the high speed -- higher speeds of internet and other services that we expect to provide.

So the incremental plant costs for just the video service, IPTV service is not that large a percentage of the total.

But bottom line is we think the returns remain strong with this product.

We're seeing attach rates of about 90% of high speed internet attachment rates.

We're seeing at least 400 basis points improvement in churn rate, with our prism product, and it's really an outstanding product.

In many ways, better than the cable company has.

And our pricing is comparable to cable, so we feel really good about rollout of prism.

We're in the process of evaluating the Qwest markets.

We don't know yet.

It is a plant condition really, makes a big difference in the timing of the rollout.

So we'll be looking at their markets the further we get into this process of integrating the companies in the weeks and months ahead.

Thank you.

And on the state approval process?

We are in the middle of negotiation in virtually every state.

We have 12 approvals, probably we'll have 13 by the end of the day we think.

Iowa is pretty much there.

So we'll have 13.

If that's true, we heard that this morning.

Then we think it will be -- it's possible we could get all the approvals in early first quarter.

It could be later, but we hope, we're hoping that we can move forward pretty quickly.

The FCC is working with us, had good meetings there and moving forward.

And as I stated, the unions, we settled with the unions, and they are supportive of the transaction now.

So it's moving forward at a good pace.

Great.

That's helpful, thanks.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from David Barden.

Hey, guys.

Thanks for taking the question.

Just two, I guess, if I could, to start.

Glen, just in terms of the Qwest results out today, I think that there was a question actually wondering if the company's margin expansion and performance have been so good that it might be impacting the potential for CenturyLink to extract synergies after the deal was closed and they shared a view that they had shared this kind of performance in their forward outlook.

I was wondering if you could kind of share what you -- your view of their performances relative to the plan that you expected to see.

And then second, I think you have shared in the past that the impact on line loss and other metrics that you've had has been better in big markets like Las Vegas, for instance, with the Embarq merger than maybe even the averages that you report and that's obviously going to be highly relevant to the Qwest transaction.

Can you kind of dig in a little bit more about how the big markets have responded to some of your initiatives?

Thanks.

Okay.

Yes, David.

As far as the margin expansion in Qwest, we're glad to see that.

We were looking at a point in time as far as our synergy anticipation, so it may be that some of the efficiency they are getting are in our synergy numbers.

We don't know exactly.

We don't have all the details at this point, so if you were taking our announced synergy number, we'll just have to see to what extent their reduction in costs are hitting the areas that where we consider -- where we have the synergies.

Some of the IT-related costs and the synergies of combining billing systems and operating -- operational systems, those certainly will not be impacted.

But there may be other synergies in general overhead that they are taking out that could impact the total amount of the synergy that we could really accomplish after the close, but either way, the costs are coming out and it should impact favorable overall margin to the combined company.

Regarding the impact on line loss that we've seen and other metrics at Embarq we think the larger markets have responded well.

With our local market focus, really immediate response type, advertising, the moving, the decision-making closer to the market.

In some ways, more feet on the street in some of these markets.

We think it has been impactful.

And we think it's -- it's made a difference.

Of course that's where the greatest opportunity was in these larger markets as well.

So that's why we're seeing a greater impact there.

But we feel good about where we are with the Embarq markets and we believe we can bring similar impacts to the Qwest market.

So, you never know till you're there, but we're right now in the Las Vegas, Orlando, Fort Myers of the world, we are seeing our go-to-market strategies, our local market position or approach working in these larger markets.

Thanks a lot, guys.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Frank Louthan.

Great, thank you.

Can you give us an idea of your -- you mentioned some of your access exposure, about 15% or so.

Can you give us some ideas about your net exposure once you take out the cost of access -- opposed the Embarq transaction and then possibly your thoughts post the Qwest transaction?

Yes, Frank, we will have to get back to you on that, in terms of what the net exposure might be, I don't have that right now.

Okay.

And then, can you give us an idea sort of the time line for the approval with the Qwest deal and not to put you on the spot or make you try and comment on what regulators might do, but there's always certain set schedules that various states have and when they have meetings and their comment periods and so forth.

Can you give us an idea of when you think the various state approvals, sort of the maximum time that they could be approved, and then just to give us an idea of how far into the second half of the year the deal might close?

So, how far in the first half of the year, I think you meant Frank.

Yes, that is correct, sorry.

Right now, I think that the farthest out meeting we know of is in mid-January, but there have been delays.

So there could be more delays that could push us into February or March, even April.

But, we would hope it's in the, in the first or early second half of the first half of the year.

But it's difficult.

The regulatory process, we can't control it really.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Tim Horan.

Thanks, guys.

Good quarter.

Two questions.

One, on the access line front, can you give us maybe some thought how, what percentage of the market you're at now?

I'm just trying to figure out when do you think we start to see a little bit more stability?

Because your revenue seems to be tracking the access lines a little bit better.

Maybe secondly, maybe you can't comment on it as much, but you've had time to study the NOLs on a combined basis and the synergies.

Could you maybe talk about the timing when you would use up the Qwest NOLs?

Is it kind of similar to the synergy timeframe, three to five years?

Secondly on the synergies, could you maybe give us a little bit more color, what percentage you can hit in the first year and how that spreads out over the next three to five years now that you've had a little more time.

Thanks.

Tim, this is Karen.

Just to clarify, you asked about access lines, right?

Yes, at the beginning, yes.

In terms of access lines percent of market share, we believe we still have in aggregate, overall dominant market share.

What I would tell you, if you just look at cable competition, that we are -- we have not seen, in fact, we have seen a decline in ports out to cable.

So I think the focus on that triple play and getting that video either satellite and/or IPTV as part of the bundle is key.

And if you think about just loss, there's the out, but there's the in.

So we have to continue to work on our distribution and that video product set to attract the new inwards in.

And when you look at your households in your territory, do you think year still serving 60%, 65% of them and where do you think it kind of bottoms out?

You know, yes, we do, and in terms of where it kind of bottoms out, I still think it -- it would still be above 50% in terms of where the bottom is at.

So, hopefully we're getting close, but one should see, again, as we bring these more competitive products like IPTV to the market and begin to take back MDUs, we're having good success there with bulk MDUs, we believe that we can minimize the bottom here.

That's helpful, thanks.

And, Tim, with respect to the NOLs, on a stand-alone basis, Qwest expects to use the NOLs in sometimes the 2014 to 2015 time range.

And we wouldn't really expect anything much different, at least at this point.

And we're still studying that somewhat.

With respect to synergies and utilization, the synergies in year 1 and year 2, I think we'll have to wait and give more guidance on that when we get closer to closing and really, we're going through a process now of working through the synergy numbers to try to clarify those and working through plans as well with respect to, network conversions and things like that and migrations and I think we'll have a much better idea on that probably in the next three to six months.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Robert Schiffman.

Good morning.

As you know, I'm a bond guy, but what I see is the stock is at a 52-week high, yet spreads for CTO continue to lag the rest of the investment grade market.

And wanted to get a sense of a couple things.

One is, do you have an update on where Fitch stands in terms of reviewing the credit since it becomes -- it's pretty clear that Moody's is going to keep you investment grade, and S&P is going to take you down.

And two is, have you determined yet which boxes are going to remain alive in terms of issuance and what are your expectations for issuance over the next 12 months?

Thanks.

Rob, with respect to the rating agencies, we've not really -- we expect to have additional conversations with them, sometime prior to closing.

That's really our obligation to them.

And we don't really have an update on Fitch at this point in time.

With respect to issuances in the next few years, we expect to continue to really follow.

As you know, we'll have very strong free cash flow.

We expect to continue to follow the policy that Qwest has implemented with respect to the regulated debt basically refinancing that, and the debt that's on their parent company, the non-regulated debt, trying to pay that off with free cash flow.

So the issuing entities in the future would be CenturyLink, the parent company, and the current Qwest regulatory subsidiary, Qwest Communications.

Great, thank you so much.

And this concludes our question and answer session for today.

I would now like to hand the conference back over to Mr.

Glen Post for any closing remarks.

In closing, CenturyLink continues to build on the strong operating financial results we've achieved over the last year since closing the Embarq transaction.

We achieved solid results in the third quarter, as we continued to slow the year over year rate of access line loss and drive revenue growth in strategic products and services.

Our local operating model, combined with a strong product portfolio and targeted marketing efforts continues to be effective in driving these results.

Also, we're pleased that we have been able to achieve operating expense synergies from the Embarq merger ahead of schedule and we remain confident we will achieve our $375 million operating expense synergy target.

And finally, work on the Qwest transaction approval process and planning for the Qwest integration are going well.

I want to thank you for participating in our call today.

And we look forward to speaking with you again in the weeks and months ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference.

This concludes our program for today.

You may all disconnect and have a wonderful day.