Uniti (UNIT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Motley Fool Transcribing, The Motley Fool Tue, May 12, 2026 at 12:37 AM GMT+7 33 min read ALUNT.PA Image source: The Motley Fool. President & Chief Executive Officer — Kenneth Gunderman Chief Financial Officer — Paul Bullington President of Consumer & SMB — John Harrobin Kenneth Gunderman: Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. Uniti is off to a great start in 2026 and we re executing well on our strategy as the premier insurgent fiber provider. We have a terrific embedded fiber base and are aggressively building more fiber to future-proof our network. We re continuously elevating our game from an operational excellence perspective and we re putting the customer first by being customer obsessed. For many years and continuing through today, we ve been building fiber first or early into Tier 2 and 3 markets and that strategy has proven successful. We are consistently growing traditional wholesale and enterprise fiber revenue at 10% to 15% and now consumer fiber revenue at over 20% with an insurgent share taker mentality. Having fiber in unique locations is also advantageous from a long-haul wholesale perspective as we ve been selling less competitive, but increasingly desired routes. Sometimes it s better to be fortunate than smart and our footprint happens to be located in or near markets that have power and land availability, which is giving us an outsized opportunity to build for the AI revolution. Fiber is clearly viewed as a mission-critical asset in a way that it has never been before. Plus in an increasingly converged world where there is less and less white space to build fiber first, our footprint and network grow in strategic significance every day. Our business is being fueled by twin engines, including the fiber-to-the-home build at Kinetic and the hyperscaler AI build at Fiber Infrastructure. We are well positioned strategically and we have the right assets, plan and team in place going forward. We demonstrated strong results in the first quarter by executing on that strategy. Total fiber revenue grew 15% year-over-year. Fiber revenue at Fiber Infrastructure grew 13% and we had the third highest quarter of bookings ever at Fiber Infrastructure. At Kinetic, we had the strongest quarter ever of gross adds and the highest number of homes constructed in nearly 4 years. Importantly, and back to my comments about being customer obsessed, we had the best quarter of consumer fiber churn ever at Kinetic. As highlighted on Slide 5, our priorities have not changed for the year. Despite some unprecedented winter storm activity during the first quarter, we re well on our way to ramping our fiber-to-the-home build at Kinetic targeting 450,000 to 500,000 new homes with fiber in 2026. In fact we built 45,000 new homes in March and another 45,000 new homes in April. In Fiber Infrastructure, we re continuing to benefit from all of the tailwinds driving wholesale fiber, including fiber-to-the-home, mobile wireless, satellite and of course hyperscaler and generative AI demand. For the hyperscalers, we foreshadowed even more activity in 2026 than last year and thus far, our expectations have been exceeded. Importantly, we are continuing to show solid lease-up on our new hyperscaler builds demonstrating our discipline in making investments in this space. At Uniti Solutions, we re seeing growing success in cross-selling products into our on-net fiber base at Uniti Fiber and Kinetic. Today, we estimate our managed services attachment rate to be below 0.1x at Uniti Fiber and we think it could be materially higher over time. Lastly, as Paul will comment on later, the ABS opportunity to fund our business cost efficiently also continues to grow. 2026 is an important inflection year for Uniti and in particular is a critical investment year at Kinetic. As such, showing progress towards key goals is critical and we previously committed to some milestones as highlighted on Slide 6 to demonstrate that progress. We achieved our first milestone during the fourth quarter of greater than 50% of Kinetic subs now on fiber. And in April, we achieved our second milestone of greater than 50% of Kinetic s consumer revenues on fiber. We remain very confident in the remainder of our milestones, including achieving consolidated revenue and EBITDA growth in 2027. Slide 7 shows we re well on our way to 3.5 million homes passed with fiber and 1.25 million fiber subs by the end of 2029 and we re also closer to 90% of our revenue coming from our core business. We are laser-focused on operational excellence, customer obsession, intensely growing our fiber business and executing on our strategy of building fiber into unique locations, including overbuilding legacy networks and moving customers on to our own fiber. All of this combined with aggressively managing out of legacy services will lead to growth. As I mentioned earlier, Kinetic consumer fiber churn was a bright spot for the quarter as highlighted on Slide

Uniti (UNIT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Uniti (UNIT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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