Crown Castle reports Q3 AFFO $1.77, consensus $1.79

Reports Q3 revenue $1.67B, consensus $1.71B. “Our third quarter results continue to demonstrate the resiliency of our business, allowing us to keep our full year 2023 outlook consistent with expectations of 5% tower organic revenue growth and delivering on 10,000 small cell nodes,” stated Jay Brown, Crown Castle’s CEO. “Based on our customers’ continued investments to meet increasing data demand, we expect full year 2024 organic growth excluding the impact of Sprint Cancellations of 4.5% from towers, 13% from small cells, based on plans to deliver approximately 14,000 small cell nodes, and 3% from fiber solutions to generate consolidated organic revenue growth of 5%. To achieve this growth, we plan to deploy discretionary capital, net of prepaid rent additions of $430 million, totaling approximately $1.2 billion which we expect to fund without issuing equity in 2024. As we work through discrete headwinds in 2024 and 2025, the strong underlying growth across our business gives us confidence in our ability to grow our dividend beyond 2025 and maintain our current annualized dividend of $6.26 per share. We expect the low-point of AFFO to occur during the first half of 2024, with growth expected in the second half of the year and beyond.”