Mike Sievert, Chief Executive Officer of T-Mobile.

[Music] mike siebert who is the ceo of t-mobile is our guest and just briefly for those who don't know his background he's a native of canton ohio a graduate of wharton school at university of pennsylvania has had a series of jobs with lots of different employers after wharton uh procter and gamble ibm at t among others and then eventually he was recruited to be the chief uh marketing officer for t-mobile and quickly rose up to become the chief operating officer the president and in 2020 became the ceo and since he's been the ceo the market capitalization of the company is up 57 and the stock is up 55 and he's assured us this will continue right so very impressive he is the father of two sons one of whom is a mountaineer and if anybody wants to go mountain climbing your son will arrange it for him and um i'm just curious before we start how many people here have a cell phone anybody okay and how many people think they could live without their cell phone these days anybody okay so uh they've been good people that's good all right so uh let me comment and ask you first about your outfit um usually uh people wear coat and ties sometimes but you don't you know we have new socks you got i put my big boys on you know okay what is that i've said like a part a sport coat and then it got a zipper and what is that it's like a rebellious sport coat okay so okay so let's talk about the company today um there are essentially three big cellular telephone companies united states and when i was doing the researches i was surprised to read that you actually are the second biggest uh verizon's the biggest right now your second and then a t um is third so is your aspiration to become the biggest or the most profitable what is your aspiration for uh t-mobile that's to be the best you know and um i think a company has got to take its mission seriously and and when we wrote ours down we created the new company after the merger it's very simply to be the best in the world at connecting customers to their world and you know we are we're a pure play mobile internet company and our aspirations to be the best and if we're the best we have a long way to go if we're the best in the world um maybe number being number one in the u.s will take care of itself okay so um you're not gonna go buy time warner or anything like that right i mean you know are they available okay uh so uh you'd have to get take discovery with it these days yeah okay so on cellular telephones um you are the biggest in 5g right right how did that happen i mean why do you have more spectrum from 5g than anybody else well part of it was that our company saw early that 5g would really unfold in what the industry calls mid-band spectrum and these are the these are the goldilocks airwaves right in the middle of the spectrum where it's not the real low ones but it's also not what was called millimeter wave spectrum which is what the whole industry had equated to 5g before and our competitors were absolutely dedicated to the idea that 5g would unfold there when we made a bet that it would unfold in mid-band sprint had absolutely a treasure trove of mid-band spectrum but was a struggling company financially strained but with incredible assets for what we knew would be the place where 5g would really unfold and so we began pursuing a merger with sprint it was off and on for many years i mean we had a merger talks in 14 and other years but finally in 18 we announced a merger with sprint under the idea that if we could complete this merger we could transform not only our company but the american wireless industry and we would have an uh absolutely uh incredible lead in five so the u.s government moving with great speed approved it after two years right that's right two full years yeah so they approved there for two years but for to review the history um t-mobile was started by what company yeah so t-mobile started in the 90s as western wireless john stanton who's the current owner of the seattle mariners started the company he was with macaw cellular so most of the u.s cellular industry that we know today uh stemmed from either the either the bell ma bell or from entrepreneurship in in the seattle area macau cellular started in the seattle area that's that's the corpus of what's now at t and western wireless began in the 90s by a macaw guy john stanton and western um spawned voice stream which became t-mobile in 2002. and then deutsche telekom ultimately bought control of the company yeah in 2002 that's what gave us our t-mobile name um deutsche telekom fully controlled the company as it was a subsidiary until we became a u.s public company in 2013. so we merged with metro pcs now metro by t-mobile in 13 and became again an american company with deutsche telekoma shareholder so who owned sprint sprint was controlled by softbank big uh global technology and telecom conglomerate and um softbank took control of uh sprint in the 2000s and um this was essentially their exit you know they they at day one they had 20 something percent of the new t-mobile but then quickly as we expected they might monetize that position and now they they own a single digit so in the end uh they own four or five percent now of t-mobile softbank and who is the majority shareholder well deutsche telecom has about 48 but they also can vote those softbank shares so they can vote just past 50 so they're able to consolidate the results okay so um why do i want 5g i'm happy with 4g why do i need 5g what am i going to do with 5g that i can't do with 4g david it's 25 more g really yeah right don't you want you don't want that but what am i going to do with it i'm paying i'd have to pay more for it don't i have to pay more for 5g than 4g it's interesting you know this industry every decade or so a new technology comes about 4g came about in about 2010 verizon was the lead then you saw verizon because of their early lead in 4g they really led in network fame throughout the you know the the 2010 decade um we've jumped out in in the 5g era with the lead in 5g and it really is exciting for us as a company that 10 years ago was a distant number four and shrinking i mean a distant number four with negative revenue and ebitda growth to now be the leader in this current era of technology and you know what it basically is all about is about higher and higher capacity connections i mean if you just step back and you look at the broad sort of history of of this industry all content and communications of all kinds have left or are leaving their previous linear forms and landing on the internet and the internet is going mobile and so for us to be the country's leading pure play mobile internet company with the best assets and a two-year lead in 5g it's a great place to be and what it gives you that 4g doesn't is essentially massive throughput so we covered two thirds of the country today with a form of 5g we call ultra capacity about 225 million americans that's 10 times faster than your lte connection and what that allows you to do is all kinds of new experiences and applications that continue to unfold across this decade like uh the metaverse applications you're now hearing more and more about that two years ago were a twinkle in people's eye that's because they weren't possible two years ago because 5g wasn't rapidly deployed and the same thing happened in 4g you know when 4g came out people said how am i going to use all this and i don't need all that to send a picture on my picture phone but apple created the iphone and android phones came and suddenly we had uber and we had snapchat and we had tick-tock and we had social media on people's phones because of 4g technology that same thing is now beginning to unfold in 5g and while it's happening we're doing super high capacity things like giving home internet on your 5g connection and that you know and that's just mind-blowing for some okay let's suppose it maybe i need 5g i didn't know i needed it but maybe i need it yeah um but i'm here to sell you man well like i have this thing the other day and i have i didn't know who i actually had it turns out i have verizon yeah so why should i convert to t-mobile well i mean by the end of the day you're going to be t-mobile you know am i going to save money am i a better server what am i going to get from you that i'm not getting from verizon we we call ourselves the uncarrier because what we try to do is change the way this industry works for customers the carriers have sort of have had fame in this industry for overpricing and underserving people it's not it's not been an industry it's right up there with cable as being an industry that's not really beloved by consumers and businesses we set out to change all that 10 years ago and what we do is we figure out what are the pain points in this industry and we smash them and that's been our track that's been what has gotten us from a distant number four to a rapidly growing number two that's outgrowing everyone and right now the biggest pain point in the industry's history is being solved by t-mobile i mean for 30 years you have been forced to make a false choice in this industry between the best deal and the best network pick one for 30 years that's been true until now you know t-mobile is now able to offer and increasingly with each passing year the best network experience you can have in the united states while saving you nine hundred dollars per year for the rest of your life because of our lower right but like if i call up the ceo of verizon and said well i just met with the ceo of t-mobile and he says yeah this is better i get the best network and everything else what is it what is his he's going to say mike's everything mike sievert said it's completely true right yeah i mean just you know by the way it's fascinating how this is i'm you know i'm a student of marketing and for me it's fascinating to watch you know sports on the weekend and see everybody everybody's commercials say they're the best 5g right you know we have to we have 5g and you know we you know and um but but what's interesting is both customers and the community of people who watch our industry sort of see through all that last year despite you know a 10-year track record of turning this company around and growing it at historic rates last year 21 the most recently completed year was the greatest growth year ever in our history with 5.5 million new posts paid customers joining us the highest number we've ever accomplished and so that's happening because people see through all the commercials they understand that we're able to offer a better deal and why are we able to do that what do you have the others don't have you have better spectrum is that basically what you have we have the best asset portfolio and that's a great start and that's why we work so hard on the merger because we knew we would have the the incredible brand at t-mobile that's famous for loving its customers and we could marry that with an asset base that allows us to have a more capital efficient business so was it surprising you it took two years for the government to say it was okay well it took a long time and it was it was kind of tracking to take a year and a half or less um when uh the company was uh sued by a group of attorneys general and and then we thought well maybe we'll be able to work it out with them etc and there were lots of discussions but in the end we had to defeat them in federal court so that took another you didn't have to settle with them or anything you didn't pay them any money tried hard to settle with them and uh but in the end so the other day i was in new york city and i'm walking in one west 57th and i said i saw a t-mobile store so i said i'd never been in a t-mobile store so i walked in and i met the young woman there and i said guess what i'm going to interview the ceo in a couple days and she said you know people say that all the time and they come in here so what i want to do is sell you something so and she told me the best service i can't believe she didn't send you out with a plan how are you still on verizon if you will i don't know she was she went through the verse i won't i won't out her but uh but they said 85 for 85 a month i would get the best thing is that the maximum what's the best you said just the time i said what's the best you have say 85 a month you get everything you possibly want is that what it basically cost uh for the first line yeah and then a lot less for each successive line so that she she's talking about our most popular plan right now which is called magenta max and it's not only our best it's actually the one most people are signing up for and we just did a big move a couple weeks ago that um doubles down on one of the most popular moves we ever did back in 2013 we did this thing called simple global and it blew people's minds we said you can have the whole world for free with your plan you know just just nothing to sign up for even before your trip like you get off the plane anywhere in the world back then it was only 110 countries now it's 210 and it's just gonna work all your data you're texting etc calls on wi-fi included for free etc and um last last month we announced that we would we would double down on all that with a new uncarrier move called coverage beyond where now we give 210 countries on that plan with high speed data so you can have 5g 4g whatever that country offers included with your plan with nothing for 85 a month yeah and um so you know and you don't say like 84.99 like other people 85 you know you don't usually yeah because right so i suppose i say i can't afford 85 a month i want the cheapest i only want to make a family of four is 200. so it starts to go down as oh but suppose i say i'm one person i only want the i want the cheapest least expensive service you have what does that cost fifteen dollars a month yeah and what do you get for that one call a month or yeah what do you what do you get for 15. you know um all of our plans include calls and texts because it's it's 2022 david but um okay all right but but you get it's a matter of how much data you get and that plan offers uh you know a couple gigs or so of data and it's at the highest speed but even after that it gives you unlimited data at a slower speed and some people just want to be able to manage they don't want to be socked with an overage they don't want a surprise bill but they do need wireless because right now this service that we offer to your opening question of the audience is an essential service that people need and some people need it at very affordable rates and so that's where we start right so you know you're not in the wired telephone business you're in the wireless right that's right so you think the wired business is a good business to be in or that's well i mean there's massive investment in this country going into fiber and lots of private equity are interested in fiber as you know lots of big companies are interested in it and um you know we we own a fiber asset that came from sprint sprint was very famously a fiber company and this we're still in that business but we're not in last mile fiber and you know i've ruled it out um it's but right now evaluations are very high um there's lots of government interest in this area as well and that you know that's certainly changing the investment thesis for some companies as that starts to move its way through the system and companies might be able to access government funding to help those last mile uh reaches in places that might otherwise be on economic sometimes if you drive down the dullest toll road um i've noticed that the signal drops maybe not on yours well again now you what you've which you've got the verizon right right okay but um is that a common yeah is that a common problem or is that they're fixing you know honestly it's very interesting for me to be in this position because an awful lot of people i'm sure people in this room too um have a perception of t-mobile's network that um is outdated by some amount of um of essentially all of the capital that we've deployed over the last two or three years so 2022 is the biggest capital year ever in our history and 2021's the second biggest and so if you if you heard about t-mobile in 2020 we've spent ten tens of billions of dollars since then building out our network on the strength of this superior spectrum portfolio and our 5g lead and so it's interesting is people that was like the day people even refer to that as last year because the pandemic so quote last year like before the pandemic you might have tried t-mobile it was completely different than now and that's kind of our marketing burden is to is to try to make sure people have a way to perceive the advantages that we when england when companies in england were trying to build out their 5g really ahead of the united states the u.s government said well you're using huawei equipment which is chinese owned and it's not going to be safe and so forth so where do you get your your 5g equipment is it made by huawei or is it who makes your equipment and you're not worried about chinese interference or something yeah no we don't have any huawei technology in our network we um our our core partners are erickson and nokia so they make the 5g parts actually and today what about if i'm worried that somebody's going to hack into my phone how do you how can i be assured you're not going to if somebody can't hack in i mean no company's immune from you know cyber attacks and they you know they are horrible and they're rampant um but the actual transmission of your phone technology is highly secure and it's one of the advantages of 5g versus let's say legacy technologies like wifi israeli company which seems to have perfected the idea of hacking into one's phones you have to sell the service only to a government or something but how can i be sure that somebody not using that technology using that technology is not hacking into my phone i mean there's no way to be sure right no no there's no way to be sure well all we can do as consumers is adopt technologies that have a security first mindset and 5g was designed with security where is the best 5g in the world is it china europe some other place or is the united states t-mobile i'm not just here to sell my book but but t-mobile was the first company is the first company in a large geographic country to cover that country coast to coast with 5g nobody had done it before at a skate at a big geography country until t-mobile had done it uh we cover is 330 million americans right now we cover 315 of them with five g signal and nobody's the other 15 living in washington hills and dales okay so and so um so that's you know that's remarkable and so you know the u.s a lot of people um point to china with lots of admiration the u.s has massive investment what what are we four percent of the u.s population this world population about five percent ctia statistic meredith's here in the front row um we have about 18 of the investment going on okay you know against four percent of the population and you can see that in results like t-mobile right suppose i say i want to sit out the 5g revolution i'm waiting for 6g what is 6g when is that going to happen don't you think 5g has been so breathlessly hyped for so long like nobody wants to hear about 6g they're still waiting for the 5g's guys is there a 6g coming anytime soon i always wait for that it's hard to predict the timelines but if you look at 4 to 5g it was about a decade about a decade before you saw kind of like for like deployments 2010 for 4g 2020 for 5g so you could maybe anticipate we'd be looking at broad deployments of 6g technology by the beginning of the next day so i missed the 4g revolution a bit and so i didn't invest in uber or other things that were helped by 4g what would be the kind of companies i should invest in that are going to be helped by 5g i'd say two or three things one anything that is about taking very high capacity very low latency meaning fast response times into the mobile realm are going to be things that benefit from 5g so right off the bat telepresence gaming gaming on mobile devices has have always had a disadvantage until now um metaverse there's obviously tens of billions going into metaverse and it you know whether this will be 3d tvs or whether it'll be the future of how we live our lives is is is up for grabs but i think it'll be somewhere in between and it's a it's a serious deal and so metaverse it's it's a massive augmented reality is about transmitting massive amounts of data across a mobile network and then returning you an experience that improves your life somehow and all that has to happen in real time look at telepresence if we learned in uh kovid thank goodness covet happened in 2020 and not 2010 we were able to we were able to do video and get by but let's face it it wasn't as good it wasn't like being there there's a reason we gather here and we travel for business is so we can have eye contact and we can have you know synchronous communication we can interrupt each other and build on each other's ideas and we can build trust those kinds of things don't happen in telephony yet because telephony is not good enough yet they require low latency massive connectivity combined with hardware and software innovation that's what you saw in 4g 4g as i said 4g came along before smartphones and smartph and people looked at that and said the iphone's going to be possible or android phones are going to be possible and the applications that we now take for granted all emerged on the back of 4g technology and that innovation cycle is happening at pace right now okay so um i should be happy with 5g right absolutely okay and not wait for 6g no no go ahead and jump in david i think it's yeah yeah no safe to jump in okay so by the way um what type of phone do you use i carry an iphone an iphone and um do you subscribe to your competitors to see how they're doing absolutely i'm you can do that oh yeah absolutely i mean look part of what i do i go around i um i try and take care of customers and i and i try and take care of our network and so like i'm only one guy but um i'm interested in this so everywhere i go i'm obsessed with the signal and if there's a place where we don't have signal that the other guys do i want i i expect something to be done about that so yeah how many customers do you have 110 million all right how many of those 110 million pay each month by a check uh very very few me i'm the only one yeah so you do that at the grocery store too you're that guy aren't you i take out cash actually but uh yeah so so people actually do it online they pay online yeah right yeah you just tap your card david and uh today uh when you get a complaint from one of your customers what's the typical biggest most common complaint well it's the same uh actually across the industry people are um interested in their signal they want it to work where they want it to work and if it doesn't work reliably in the places they they need it to that's the key source of dissatisfaction not a t-mobile but at any of the providers in the industry and then the other is um confusion over their bill um you know i i don't think still and we're we we've made great strides on this particularly at t-mobile through our uncarrier movement but you know it's we the industry are still making this industry too complicated for consumers i mean ultimately what we do is pretty simple we transmit a signal for you to your industry standard samsung or iphone or you know android phone and we charge you by the month for that shouldn't be so complicated but it is and people get confused about their bill or say that the promotion wasn't right but does anybody get a bill anymore that has each of your calls that you make because in the old days you you get paid for each call does anybody get those anymore yeah you're wondering if you've got call laws i'm just wondering whether everybody gets a monthly charge it's not it doesn't make a difference how many calls you make anymore no but you can you can access that information in our app you can't we don't suppose somebody says i just want to make two or three calls a month i don't want to pay for a whole bunch of things yeah can you actually only paid by the call or nobody does that anymore yeah okay yeah all right so let's talk about uh your your company yeah um when cobit came how were you running the company where did you were you staying at home or what were you doing well for us it was fascinating we had the additional complication of creating our new company on april 1st of 2020. so we received our judgment in the federal case in february that gave it set up a very short period and we closed the transaction and created what what's now t-mobile on april 1st of 2020 about three weeks after sending everybody home and at that point we had eighty percent of our stores were even closed uh our staff was at home uh we had we were rapidly figuring out how to take uh three million customer care calls a week from people's homes instead of from our customer experience centers and you know it was a crazy time but we had the additional complexity of becoming a company and welcoming the other half of our company during that like five minutes into it and of course that was my first day as ceo as well i suppose you were uh okay let me make sure i understand if you were a sprint customer and you get merged with t-mobile how many people said i really like sprint i'm not going to stay with t-mobile did people drop or they just had no choice they had to stay well this is the first merger where we've been able to separate out the migration moments and make it way more customer friendly so your rate plan your network you're connected to the brand and the offers the devices each one of these are a discrete decision that you don't you can make or not make and which is so much more customer friendly than prior mergers and and better for our operations so what we started to do was just simply give sprint customers more and more and more network from the t-mobile side by redirecting their phone to the to the closest and best tower so they started seeing their signal improve and they liked that and then we start telling them well that's t-mobile making your signal better and they like that and then we say so you want to switch to a t-mobile plan and also see if we can save you some money well okay maybe how about a new phone you know we and it's basically this kind of progression and we're near the end of that process now and so in an industry famous for like rife with just disastrous mergers i think we have a chance of showing up at the three year point next year basically put a pin in this as the as the most successful telecom merger in the history of our industry and the hardest parts are now behind us we're doing the network shutdown of sprint right now because substantially all the traffic is on the t-mobile side and it's going great and people are really appreciating the stronger signal from the combined the new combined footprint is some of those towers plus all of those so if somebody calls up and says i want to see my monthly calls what i who i made calls to for my own records they don't but you you do and i'm going to make sure you get that let's suppose uh the government of the united states says we're investigating people that made calls uh do you have to get a uh like say a court order for you to give that information up yeah yeah there's a standard industry process uh by which we reply to subpoenas and they happen at scale i mean we have an entire operation under mark nelson here in the front row that responds to those subpoenas and provides the data that's required so your company is based in bellevue um is that essentially the most located place you could have or yeah yeah on the way to everything you know so yeah why is i'm just curious why is it in bellevue now when people come see us we know we matter you know it's great um no i mean as i said our industry was really started in the seattle area and so an awful lot of the when i was cmo at at t wireless in 2002 it was based in redmond washington back then uh it eventually made its way with the singular and sbc and bell south and at t mergers to to dallas but that was the headquarters then for the wireless operation and the wireless company and um so it's just you know strong routes for our end clearwire was based in in so if you were to compare the service that you provide to your customers with the service wireless operators provide in any other country in the world is there any country in the world you think does a better job than your company or our other your competitors in providing cellular telephone service to people yeah because uh some countries are very small and so you can get the equivalent of what our service is like inside one of our one of our metros like in new york city where we're number one or um you know la or chicago or miami all of which where we're number one um you've got countries that have that kind of a footprint and so those are countries that got five 5g very quickly you know south korea is a great example very well covered country where do you think the industry's heading in other words you have a lot of customers now but are you going to get into other businesses what's the future or do you want to be a cellular telephone company the rest of your life or do you want to be a technology company that's more than cellular well we'll be guided by our mission um best in the world at connecting customers to their world and that means maybe you know and what i like about us right now is that we are a mobile internet company at a time when the mobile internet you know is taking over but but we've got advantages that could allow us to smartly move into adjacencies we just need to be smarter than you know others in our industry have been in the past and make sure they're true adjacencies but our brand is incredibly strong our team is highly differentiated by every measure of customer experience we have an incredible network we have incredible data and so all these things can inform businesses but for me it's about making sure that you know we we are in businesses where we have the competency and the permission to win and so far that's really working and um today your workforce approximately you have 75 000 75 000 employees uh what's the diversity in that and how are you improving your diversity um we are 59 uh uh diverse in in terms of ethnic diversity um and at like most companies that goes down a little bit as you get to the most senior levels but it's it de ni has been part of our you know strengths for a long time in our company um that being said like many companies you know we we created a revitalized renewed effort on it in 2020 not just because of the big events that happened then but also because we we created a five-year what we call equity and action plan in 2020 and hired an external advisory council of some of the best thinkers in this space in the country uh people like mark morial of the urban league um reverend al sharpton um you know incredible leaders from major national organizations who have committed their time to us to meet with us several times a year review our data give us advice and direction and so between that and the plans themselves of how we're operating we're seeing our numbers move and it's been really exciting the average person uses his or her cell phone how many minutes or hours a day would you say well it's hours um yeah and it's um you know you you look at a um a customer like our magenta max customers our most popular plant the one they offered you um which includes global data in 220 countries around the world you know those those customers are using now three times more than a typical uh customer on a on a typical connection 4g connection it's so cool i mean you do five times more gaming you know three times more streaming media and so you know it's what about people who are addicted to looking at their phone every two minutes or so is that a problem you can solve or um it's not it's not the highest on my list but um yeah but one of the things that's interesting is that it's not just about your phone anymore it's mobile technology but what's you know you know the last two quarters in a row the nation's fastest growing home broadband provider of any kind it's t-mobile so like you know we're powering now your entire internet connection in your entire house and we had more new customers join t-mobile than cable than any cable company or then a t or verizon last quarter and the quarter before and you know it's a brand new service of ours and so it's fascinating now how this technology is able to solve problems outside the traditional realms and it's not just about your what part of the country uses cell phones the most in other words is it per our let's say person is it one hour a day in washington two hours a day in new york or do you know how that works i actually don't really there's one thing you don't know i don't know it um but i i would assume based on how much spectrum we have dedicated it can be a proxy that the big urbans like like new york and l.a let's talk about your own background for a moment uh you grew up in canton ohio i that's where the football hall of fame is is that what you spent a lot of time doing when going to that when you were growing up i look like a major football athlete yeah right so uh you did well in high school you were uh most likely to succeed or something like that i i i was but more importantly i was voted most likely to be a tv game show host and that is something i have not yet uh made good on right so you went to wharton did you know you wanted to be in business i did yeah i think i'm one of the few people maybe not few but i'm one of the people doing what i dreamt of doing when i was a teenager i read you know you know the celebrity ceo like lee iacocca's book came out in the 80s when i was a teenager and i read that and i was like i i want to lead a great american company one day now you've let you've been in a lot of different companies is that because you can't hold the job or you just get yeah well that's my mom's version of it yeah the sheet my mom's version of it is that yeah you've been in a lot of couples holding down why don't you start up they tire of me after a couple of years you started procter and gamble it's a nice company but what were you doing there you know i i wanted to be i looked out of school at consulting and at marketing and i had opportunities in both and i decided marketing would be my best path to general management just based on what i'm good at and so i i chose a place where i could really learn marketing procter and gamble but i always knew i wanted to be in technology i bought my first pc if you want to call it that in 1977 with proceeds from my newspaper route uh a trs-80 uh model one you remember that compute you had one of those yeah and i didn't i couldn't afford the the floppy disk drive so i had the cassette tape deck as my as my storage and um so i i've been passionate about technology literally my whole life and so i wanted to be in marketing but i also wanted to make my way to technology so my first two jobs were sort of informed by that i learned marketing for six years at procter gamble then went to ibm to learn technology and thought i would stay at ib i was really enjoying it but the dot-com boom of the 90s started to take root and i headed to california to lead mars so what do you do to stay in shape or exercise or to relax what do you ever do you know suzanne and i uh love to be outdoors and it's a big part of the culture up in the northwest um but i'm not much of an exercise guy you know we don't exercise life you walk yeah you know you don't climb mountains like you saw not like not a mountain climber like nate uh i guess i have very shallow hobbies david my hobbies all involve operating vehicles uh so you know whether it's uh you know boats or uh cars or airplanes i'm a i have a seaplane and i'm a pilot uh and that's kind of one of my best that's safe for you i mean you're the ceo of a big company they mind you flying around a seaplane yeah i um i don't know and i don't care yeah if the uh but um no statistically it's um operating single-engine planes is a is about like riding a motorcycle neither statistically are particularly safe activities um but what what differentiates them is i think how much focus and dedication you put into the safety which to me is the is the hobby you know it's about taking it seriously and definitionally a hobby should this one this does it literally but it should figuratively transport you it needs to transport your mental state into something other than your day-to-day concerns and for me when i'm operating an aircraft there's no room in my brain for everything else because i'm very focused on what's really do you take a co-pilot uh well my plane is really small and it seats two of us and suzanne is not a pilot but she has practiced landing it um and uh but but also it has a it has a uh full ballistic parachute system and so if something were to happen to me she can pull the chute and the entire aircraft comes down does that make you feel safe that they they designed it with a parachute in it yeah yeah no but importantly it makes her feel safe and i think that's the you know that's the difference okay so um you're in washington today i assume for some a lot of other things other than this are you seeing government regulators legislators is that an uplifting uplifting experience for you when you do this um yeah i think like most business leaders you know i find myself here reasonably regularly and um it's it's mainly to visit with government and um you know we're doing that tomorrow all day long and but yeah but like what are you trying to get fries the main purpose of the trip was to come see you and generally what are you trying to get the government to do that they're not doing be efficient or something your government at work uh we're interested in all kinds of issues including the ones i talked about um as you know legislation was passed recently that is very interested in making sure every american in this company in this country is covered by broadband and we're interested in that as well so that's a that's a topic of interest um making sure a taxation is a big interest for us there's uh higher taxation yeah well fair taxes um you know what's interesting is there's some there's some real wonky stuff in the in the tac proposed tax codes that could unfairly um tax t-mobile relative to our two principal competitors at t and verizon is that by accident or their lobbyists were better than otherwise i think it's i think it's by accident okay yeah all right we need to make sure so you're gonna let people know about that yeah okay so today uh you're you've been doing you've been the ceo for about two years but you've been the company for quite a while yeah and your your ceo your predecessor was a very legendary figure john um why did he step down he was a relatively young guy did he just did you say to him if you don't step down i'm going elsewhere or why did he step down you know i think um you know it was timed with the merger and you know john was just essential at conceiving of and working on this merger and i think he viewed it as just a fantastic milestone you know and you think about when john and i both arrived about the same time in 2012 i came he recruited me but i came about four or five weeks after him and um you know t-mobile was a distant number four shrinking rapidly we lost 2.2 million customers in 2012 just inside that year and um you know you think about what he was able to do with his team it's it's historic and i you know and then to culminate it in this merger and create this new company you know it's just an incredible run and for me it's been a privilege to be you know a part of that as so you've probably been ceo two years so and you're young so you could do this another 10 years or so i heard you you know you were mentioning you were suggesting maybe 30 which is uh yeah look i don't know i it could be short it could be long it's younger than the president united states in 30 years yeah i look i i really like this you know and i think for all of us in our careers we should do what we're doing if we like it if the we're adding value the people around us uh still want us but no interest in going to government service or anything like that um i wouldn't rule anything out you know like you said i'm a relatively young guy okay yeah and uh today um what what is the number of customers you're getting from those mobile stores you have these you have how many stores you have around the country a little under 15 and do they produce how many how many people they sign up a day on average they have a quota they have to sign up or they close the store no um you know most of our traffic in our stores is taking care of our customers so so we do it is the key place people come when they want to switch to t-mobile but most of the traffic is people coming in to get their new phone or to you know get a problem solved or even to pay their bill metro by t-mobile which is our flagship prepaid brand operates several thousand of those stores and we an awful lot of our customers with metro come in every month right with money to pay their bill that's how they pay is to come to our store they paying cash or something wow you know it's forty dollars a month they come in with two twenties 220s taxes and fees so you can hand us 220s and see you next month somebody doesn't pay their bill how long before you cut off their service well um what's interesting about prepaid is you have this low price and predictable but you must pay it in time or it doesn't keep working so that's metro on t-mobile we have a significant number of our customers that get a little behind and then they reach out to us and we do a payment plan with them to try and give them time sometimes it's weeks and weeks almost all of them cure that eventually so people run in and this is a competency that i think will serve us well if a recession comes because we've always been great at figuring out ways to profitably serve people who have variable economic circumstances sometimes they've got money and then they have a patch where they don't and you know what most of them will cure that you give them the time and because this is an essential product they don't want it cut off you give them the time and the patience um but how they will they will find how much time do you give let's suppose somebody just forgets the bill they thought the bill went to the wrong address or something how long does it take before you cut them off well as long as they come to the app um most of our payment arrangements are actually done in our app so they've got the t-mobile app in their phone and they can just ask for more time and we grant it and in some cases it's you know it's weeks and weeks but after they don't pay for a month or two or three you finally figure out they're not going to pay are you trying to figure out when you just figured out how to optimize yeah i'm just it's great because i when we get you i want to make sure that you understand the flexibility that's available to you yeah so what is the pleasure of running a cellular telephone company i mean why would you tell somebody who's graduating from college or business school or whatever school they should join this industry well part of it is the you know impact that we have and you know to me it's fascinating you think about you ask people about this product this product that we offer people will literally stan stack rank right up there with their rent and their food i mean it's above their personal hygiene products think about that in a crowded room um and so it's important and it's important to get it right and it's advanced technology and so for me what i love it as as somebody who's really interested in customers and people and marketing and really interested in technology is that for me the career is about marrying those two things and it's incredibly intellectually interesting to do that because i get to play in technology problems that are incredibly sophisticated and in you know an all-out you know brand war that's as epic as coke pepsi of the 1980s and i you know i think that's i love and it's and our people love that our retention rates are terrific you know the united states has roughly 330 million people let's say above the age of i don't know 15 maybe you have i don't know maybe 280 million people i'm not sure what percentage of those adults would you say have a cell phone substantially all of them yeah from from about 11 years old what age do children get is that when they get them now and they lobby their parents in 11 years old it's actually bad that say to the kids get your parents together it responds with unsupervised play so every parent's different but unsupervised play starts to happen at 10 11 12 where i'm going down to the park it's two blocks away and i'll see you at dinner and i'll be gone for two hours with no one's chaperoning me and that tends to happen with many parents around age 11 and that and they're like you can go to the park here's your phone or here's your phone watch or something but you can monitor where your children are on your phone right do you have to get their permission to do that no oh really yeah so you know you can that you have two children you know where they are all the time my children are adults they're 27 years old yeah but they're also millennials and millennials aren't that interested in privacy so they don't and can the children monitor where their parents are yeah oh yeah definitely yeah okay so the greatest pleasure you're getting is basically servicing the country and getting them the service is that why you like your job i like that i like the competitiveness you know we when we created this new company we promised the government that took two years to decide we would create a more competitive market and that's what we've done and i like you know i love this industry in that you know i worked at microsoft for a few years and i would kind of get a report i ran the global windows business i would get a report like every month how are we doing almost i'm exaggerating a little but like every morning i get a report at eight in the morning and it says how we did yesterday across every aspect of our operation and two three four of those reports makes a trend and you know and we we just focus tenaciously on how to run this company the best it can possibly be run against scaled competitors they're some of the richest companies in the world i love that i just think you know so you seem like a very happy person generally speaking you know right so uh did you ever get depressed about anything i mean you seem like you're pretty happy guy uh yeah you know i mean how can you be so happy yeah [Laughter] um do you know uh suzanne and i are celebrating 30 years of marriage this next month and so that's wow that's good for you the things that um when i met her your veteran yeah we talked about this i met her move-in day freshman year of undergrad at penn uh we had the saint we were in a co-ed dorm on the same floor and uh you know we've been together ever since and you know what's the odds of that yeah two wonderful kids and what's up good for you look it's a great story congratulations on your success i have a little gift for you that i thank you thank you let's see where is it right here okay this is a historic map of oh very nice [Applause]

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Views: 18,991

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Id: nOh3Y1DRL7Q

Length: 46min 3sec (2763 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022