Lumen provides strategic, financial updates at 2025 Industry Analyst Forum

Lumen (LUMN) Technologies shared highlights from its 2025 Industry Analyst Forum. Highlights included keynote remarks from CEO Kate Johnson, who outlined the three pillars of the company’s strategy: “Building the backbone for the AI economy with a physical network designed for scale, speed, and security – delivering connectivity anywhere and for everything customers want to do. Cloudifying and agentifying telecom to reduce complexity and simplify the network for customers as an intelligent, on-demand, consumption-based digital platform. Creating a connected ecosystem with partnerships that extend Lumen’s reach, accelerate customer-first, AI-driven innovation, and unlock new opportunities across industries.” The company also outlined progress to reset its financial foundation. Following the anticipated 1H 2026 close of Lumen’s mass-market fiber sale to AT&T, in just over two years the company is projected to have: fully funded its future strategic plans, reduced gross debt by over 35% to $13.2B, reduced gross leverage to below 4x, and reduced annual interest expense by nearly 50% to approximately $700M; reduced approximately $1B in capex associated with the fiber-to-the-home buildout of divested consumer assets; delivered $350M in annualized cost savings by the end of 2025 and $1B by year end 2027 through the company’s modernization program.