Telephone and Data Systems Earnings Call Insights: the Baja Acquisition and Billing System Migration

Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. (NYSE:TDS) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

The Baja Acquisition

Richard Prentiss – Raymond James: Couple questions. First on the Baja acquisition on Slide 25, it kind of points out the 212,000 home passed, 74,000 video, 56,000 broadband, talk to us a little bit about why you think that the market has such low penetration, what you think you’ll be able to institute how quickly to kind of take those up and what kind of margins are we looking at there today?

Dave Wittwer – President and CEO, TDS Telecom: I think when you look at the video penetration, what makes Baja unique is there is a high penetration of customers that are in homeowners associations. So, excluding that we think there’s room to increase video penetration, but quite frankly we haven’t been overly aggressive in our planning in terms of that. We understand all the fundamentals relative to satellite competition et cetera. What we’re more excited about is the data penetration. Baja most recently rolled out DOCSIS 3.0 and so that broadband investment and that capability we believe has significant upside depending on whether you believe that ultimate 80% adoption or 85% adoption whatever it is we believe there is a significant opportunity there as well as they’ve been late with voice and we believe there’s a great opportunity to improve that at a reasonable level as well as commercial penetration.

Richard Prentiss – Raymond James: So it sounds like it’s more that you are not trying to go after satellite TV in those areas or homeowner associations, but take somewhat advantage of satellite TV’s lack of real data offering?

Dave Wittwer – President and CEO, TDS Telecom: I think that’s there.