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Lumen Technologies, Inc. (LUMN)

Q3 2012 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 7, 2012

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CenturyLink's Third Quarter 2012 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tony Davis, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Davis, you may begin.

Tony Davis

Analyst

Thank you, Saeed. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our call today to discuss CenturyLink's third quarter 2012 results released earlier this afternoon. The slide presentation we will be reviewing during the prepared remarks portion of today's call is available in the Investor Relations section of our corporate website at ir.centurylink.com. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks today, we will open the call for Q&A. On Slide 2, you'll find our Safe Harbor language. We will be making certain forward-looking statements today, particularly as they pertain to guidance for fourth quarter and full year 2012, some outlooks for 2013, the integration of Qwest and Savvis and other outlooks in our business. We ask that you review our disclosure found on this slide, as well as in our press release and in our SEC filings, which describe factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected by us in our forward-looking statements. We ask that you also note that our earnings release issued earlier this afternoon and the slide presentation and remarks made during this call contain certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation between the non-GAAP financial measures and the GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release and on our website at www.centurylink.com. Now turning to Slide 3. Your host for today's call is Glen Post, Chief Executive Officer and President of CenturyLink. Joining Glen will be Stewart Ewing, CenturyLink's Chief Financial Officer. And also available during the question-and-answer period of today's call will be Karen Puckett, CenturyLink's Chief Operating Officer, who leads our Regional Markets Segment; Bill Cheek, President of our Wholesale Markets Segment; and Jim Ousley, Chief Executive Officer of Savvis and President of our Enterprise Market Segment. Our call today will be available for telephone replay through November 14, 2012 and accessible by webcast through November 28, 2012. Anyone listening to a tape or webcast replay or reading a written transcript of this call should note that all information presented is current only as of November 7, 2012 and should be considered valid only as of this date regardless of the date heard or viewed. As we move to Slide 4, I will now turn the call over to your host today, Glen Post. Glen?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

Thank you, Tony. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. First, I want to express my sympathies to those affected by the storm along the East Coast last week. Located in Louisiana, we, of course, are all too aware of the devastation of hurricanes and tropical storms can create, and our thoughts are with all those affected. CenturyLink did experience some operational disruptions as a result of the storm. However, we are pleased that all of our East Coast data centers remained fully functioning during the storm, so we could continue to serve our customers during this difficult time. Early indications are that we experienced about $5 million to $6 million of operating and capital expenses as a result of the storm, so we were relatively displaced less than I know many were. I also want to thank our employees for their hard work and dedication to ensuring the best possible service for our customers during this difficult time. Now I'll turn to discuss CenturyLink's third quarter 2012 results and guidance for our fourth quarter and full year 2012, as we provide other updates -- as well as provide other updates about our business. During the third quarter, CenturyLink has achieved solid results, and we continue to make progress on a number of fronts. We remain on track to meet our synergy targets for the Qwest and Savvis transactions and continue to make progress with the integration of these 2 acquisitions. We continue to see solid growth in our Enterprise Markets and Regional Markets business segment with continued demand for integrated network, colocation, managed hosting and cloud services. We also continue to invest in additional data center capacity to drive further growth from these services in the months ahead. With our fiber-to-the-tower initiative, we continue to make…

R. Stewart Ewing

Analyst · UBS

Thank you, Glen. I'll spend the next few minutes reviewing the financial highlights from the third quarter, and then conclude my remarks with an overview of the fourth quarter and full year 2012 guidance we included in our earnings release issued earlier this afternoon. Turning to Slide 15. First, in order to provide more relevant comparisons, I'll be reviewing the financial results on a pro-forma basis as if Savvis were included in the results for all periods. I'll also be reviewing the results, excluding special items, as outlined in the earnings release and associated financial schedules. With that, let's turn to our results for the third quarter. As you can see, we generated strong operating revenues and solid cash flows. Operating revenues were $4.57 billion on a consolidated basis, which was in line with our guidance for the quarter and represented 1.3% decline from pro forma third quarter 2011 operating revenues. This also represents a solid improvement from the 4.6% annual decline in the year-ago period. Strategic revenue in the quarter increased to 46% of total revenue from 43% in the pro forma third quarter a year ago due to growth in strategic products such as high-speed Internet, high-bandwidth data services, Prism TV and managed hosting services. Adjusted diluted earnings per share for the second quarter was $0.66, exceeding the midpoint of our guidance by about $0.095. The difference from our expectations were driven primarily by lower depreciation and amortization, lower-than-expected seasonal plant maintenance, lower property taxes and a slightly better-than-expected impact from the implementation of the CAF Order along with higher synergy achievement. As we've discussed on prior earnings calls, adjusted diluted EPS excludes special items and certain non-cash purchase accounting adjustments. Total cash operating expenses decreased from pro forma third quarter 2011 to third quarter 2012 with synergy…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from David Barden from Merrill Lynch.

David W. Barden - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

I wanted to just ask maybe a couple more strategic questions, if I could, Glen. Obviously, in the last couple of months, I think that there's been some maybe erroneous reports that CenturyLink was trying to buy TW Telecom and your stock took it on the chin to the tune of a couple of dollars as result of those reports, which I think were later actually retracted. But I was wondering if you could kind of set the table a little bit based on where you are in the integration and what your appetites are when we see these kinds of reports, how should we be reacting to them? And then, I guess the second question is -- obviously, the free cash flows are coming in ahead of expectations. The guidance is going up. I know that you guys have talked about stock buybacks as a priority for cash, but could you revisit your thinking about how you consider the dividend -- being a dividend-paying company versus maybe being a dividend growth company, looking into maybe next year?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

Yes. David, first of all regarding the acquisition rumors and where we are with these 2 for inorganic growth, we have -- really, we're focused on the -- investing in our 4 primary growth initiatives that we've talked about: the broadband expansion and enhancement, fiber-to-the-node, fiber-to-the-tower initiative, the managed hosting, cloud service and our Prism TV services. The integration of Qwest and Savvis is going well, but there's still a lot to do. We're achieving expected -- hit our objectives in terms of synergies, but there's a lot of work to do. These are large acquisitions and to do them right, it's going to take more time, as we've stated previously. So there's a lot of focus there. We don't feel the need to acquire in order to drive growth. Our 4 initiatives have strong potential for driving growth, and our size is good. We don't need the additional synergies necessarily that additional acquisitions would bring. We'll continue to evaluate investment opportunities that arise, both organic and inorganic, but we don't feel compelled to make an acquisition. We'll be focused on ways to create [ph] value for shareholders, but there's no -- we don't feel compelled, and we are not out beating the bushes looking for an acquisition. So I'll leave it at that. That's pretty much how we feel about our position here. As far as increasing the dividend or stock buybacks, that's obviously a question that we consider continually with our board. We'll continue to evaluate the best ways to create value for shareholders. Obviously, how we utilize our cash is a key component of that process. We'll consider our future reduced debt and the value of debt reduction. We'll look at the benefits of increasing the dividend or buying back stock -- what that can mean to value for shareholders. And we'll continue to consider investment opportunities, both organic and inorganic, that can drive value for shareholders. These are obviously important and complex considerations, and we'll continue our very disciplined approach to these types of investment decisions. Again, with the objective of really maximizing long term shareholder value.

David W. Barden - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

Glen, if I could just follow up on that real quick. Obviously, we saw about 2.3% increase in the dividend from AT&T today, and I think the investors tend to look at dividend growth companies as being a higher value proposition than simply companies that pay out a dividend. Do you agree with that, that statement, and do you think that CenturyLink has it within its financial wherewithal to maybe support that kind of limited amount of dividend growth, but growth nevertheless?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

I'm sorry, do I support what? Agree with what statement?

David W. Barden - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

The idea that there's a higher value to companies that grow their dividend, even if it's only a small amount, as opposed to just simply keeping a dividend steady through time.

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

Yes, I have seen some studies that indicate that companies that grow their dividend do drive value -- good value for shareholders. So yes, I have seen some of that, and I don't have any -- don't disagree with the studies. It's something that we consider as we talk about our use of free cash flow basically every quarter and certainly every year. We talk in detail about what's the best way for us to drive long term shareholder value, and we realize that growing dividends is one way that companies have done that over time. So it is part of our consideration.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Batya Levi from UBS.

Batya Levi - UBS Investment Bank, Research Division

Analyst · UBS

A question on revenue trends. Revenue decline has been consistently improving every quarter for a while now. You mentioned in 4Q you're expecting some churn from Savvis. Can you -- maybe can you clarify, do you still expect Savvis to -- Savvis revenue growth to accelerate to double digits in 4Q? And your 4Q guidance suggests that revenue decline will stay at flattish. Is that a function of this churn that we talked about or what else is in there? And then mainly just a clarification for your longer-term guidance for revenue stabilization in '14. Do you expect some stabilization in '13, end of '13 and then maybe flat revenues in '14 or will we see some declining trends in '14?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · UBS

Batya, this is Glen. I'll talk on this, start about Savvis, and I'll ask Jim Ousley to also comment. The churn absolutely impacted us, a couple of companies that were in bankruptcy -- it impacted us during the quarter. Also just the longer decision-making process that we're seeing with some enterprise customers, we think that impacted the -- or affected the bookings for the third quarter. That will of course roll into the fourth quarter as far as our revenue growth and early next year. However, we feel very good about the demand that's out there, the potential, the interest from customers, the potential funnel that we have out there. So we still feel very good about the growth here. It's just a matter of getting some of these deals closed and secondly just the churn that we experienced or experienced in the latter part of this year. Jim, you want to?

James Ernest Ousley

Analyst · UBS

Yes, this is Jim Ousley, and I would just support what Glen said. We do -- we would expect that fourth quarter hosting revenue will be double digit kinds of growth levels. So we still stand by that, what we've been saying. And the effects of 2 major churn events in the fourth quarter which were bankruptcies will flatten it a little more, but it'll still be double digit, and we see no downturn in demand. As we and some of our competitors have stated before, the only issue we're seeing is the elongation of decision-making for Savvis Direct [ph] large enterprise customers are clearly taking longer. They're not buying. They're just taking longer to make decisions. Hopefully, that'll ease with the election and all the other issues and the macroeconomics issue. But we're still seeing strong demand.

Batya Levi - UBS Investment Bank, Research Division

Analyst · UBS

Maybe the question about longer-term revenue decline. Would you expect some stabilization in 2013?

R. Stewart Ewing

Analyst · UBS

Batya, with respect to the statement that Glen made in the release on revenue stabilization in '14, we really hope -- hopefully, we'll have revenues such that in 2014 it'll be equivalent to a 2013 revenue on a full year basis.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Simon Flannery from Morgan Stanley.

Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley, Research Division

Analyst · Morgan Stanley

Glen, can you just update us on the labor negotiations? Where are we at this point? Any hope of a near-term resolution? We've obviously seen Verizon strike a deal. Presumably, there's a little bit of a template there. And Verizon and AT&T have made some differing proposals on their pension. Have you got any interest in pursuing either of those sort of approaches? And maybe if you can just talk a little bit about CapEx levels for '13? We obviously saw AT&T increase their capital spending. Are you likely to hold capital budgets pretty similar to 2012? What's implied in your initial guidance?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Morgan Stanley

Simon, first of all on the pension that AT&T and Verizon have done, the stabilization there. We were looking, evaluating them and made no decisions there. Stewart may want to talk about that more in a moment. But we have -- it's an area we are looking at and evaluating. As far as labor negotiations, the current contracts with the legacy Qwest unions were set to expire on October 6. We and the unions agreed to extend the current agreements day-to-day as we continue the negotiations. Our primary focus on these discussions of course is to more closely align our cost structure with the competitive marketplace, the revenue streams that we are seeing and operating in, while continuing to provide our employees competitive wages and benefits. So that's our goal here. We have a number of issues to work through, but we believe we're making progress with these negotiations. And we're not targeting a specific date that we want to complete this agreement by, but we are hopeful that the process can be resolved without too much further delay. We believe we are again making progress in these discussions. And the final question on CapEx, we expect CapEx to be in the range it is in 2012. It can be slightly higher as we due to some expansion of the data center expansion and along with the Prism TV investments. And this is pursuing our strategic initiatives. But we are going to take a very disciplined approach to those investments and if we just see any increase involved [ph] , it will be what we expect revenue gains in the relatively near future from those investments.

R. Stewart Ewing

Analyst · Morgan Stanley

Simon, just a couple of quick comments on the negotiations. Qwest, either the last time they renegotiated the contract or the time before last, they moved new bargaining unit employees that are hired subsequent to that date over to a cash balance plan. So there is no longer really a defined benefit plan for the new Qwest employees. And again, secondly, we are reviewing what others have done with respect to the plans, and we'll decide at some point if we want to try to execute a transaction similar to what has been done.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Frank Louthan from Raymond James. Frank G. Louthan - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division: Just quickly on the Savvis side, I'm seeing you're working on some more customer-facing cloud products for SMB customers and small -- a little simpler interface and so forth. Where does that stand? How successful is that? And then, just on a bigger picture, you've been consistently hitting and exceeding the guidance targets on top line and cash flow and so forth, which is refreshing. What would it take for you to get to positive top line growth in 2013? I mean, you're guiding to maybe negative 0.5%, that's getting pretty close. Is that a possibility and what would have to change? Is that more of a macro issue?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Raymond James

Yes, Frank, first of all, Savvis Direct, we had our launch, our self-launch in October, and it's going well thus far. We have a lot of high hopes, anticipation for the success of this product. It's a one click, easy-to-use web-based solution, and we're seeing lots of interest from customers. Of course, it will start in the small and midsized businesses where we see the most interest, but also there'll be, you'll have the large enterprise business who will eventually use more of the public cloud and this one-click type [indiscernible] that we're providing there. So it is a significant rollout for us, and we believe it's going to have a major impact in the years ahead on the growth. As far as top line growth and what would have to take place, and we just have to see some of these new initiatives take off a little faster than we anticipate. Now we're trying to be conservative on those, but if they were to take off faster, the rollouts were a little more quickly done, and the penetration rates exceeded what we were anticipating, and that could change the -- we'd see some increases there. But that's what it would really require.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mike McCormack from Nomura Securities.

Michael McCormack - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., Research Division

Analyst · Nomura Securities

Just thinking about the sort of 2013 look that you've given us. And I know, Glen, you had mentioned obviously the Qwest synergy opportunity won't be there obviously in '13. But if it weren't for the Qwest headwind, would you have expected EBITDA to be flat absent that sort of $200 million to $250 million headwind on synergies year-over-year? And then Stewart, just thinking about cash taxes, what's your current thought process on when that starts to kick in? And also maybe wrap in the discussion about the potential pension funding.

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Nomura Securities

Mike, regarding the EBITDA, if we'd had the same level of incremental synergy, we would've been close to flat, right around even there, breakeven on the EBITDA. That's correct. We just saw it based a lot of those initial start-up cost, expenses, investments and the new initiatives especially.

R. Stewart Ewing

Analyst · Nomura Securities

And Mike, with respect to cash taxes in '13, probably around $100 million or so. We'll still be using the Qwest NOLs. We'll continue to use the NOLs in 2014 and probably complete the utilization of all the NOLs. We don't have a cash tax number to talk about yet for '14. Pension funding, required contributions for next year, 2013's a little over $100 million. We may possibly look at doing that towards the end of this year as we did last year for the 2012 contribution that we made.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Scott Goldman from Goldman Sachs.

Scott Goldman - Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Research Division

Analyst · Goldman Sachs

I guess when I look at the EBITDA for this quarter and you guys exceeded the top end of your guidance by a pretty healthy mark, which I think is the second time you've done that this year. And I guess what I'm trying to figure out as I've gone through the different quarters this year is, what's changed as you go through and you issue your guidance and then you come out with a higher number on the quarters? Are these costs that are merely being pushed out, perhaps on the Prism IP TV into the next year? Are these the more seasonal maintenance costs and the lower property taxes that you highlighted on the EPS slide that really drove that? And of those costs, sort of which ones are onetime in nature versus sustainable cost improvements?

R. Stewart Ewing

Analyst · Goldman Sachs

So Scott, I think what's happened is we've exceeded the top end of the guidance because we've been able to get some of the Qwest synergies quicker than we had otherwise expected in the guidance that we gave, and it's really in the strategic sourcing area, network integration area and some headcount as well. In terms of onetime items that we had in the third quarter, probably the larger onetime item that we had that's reflected is the, we had about a $20 million reduction in property taxes, below what we expected for the third quarter. $12 million of that was related to a true-up or finalization really of a prior year property tax issue in the state of Florida that came with us -- to us from Embarq. And then basically, the remainder of it was really related to a state where we were able to successfully reduce an assessment that they had previously provided to us.

Scott Goldman - Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Research Division

Analyst · Goldman Sachs

Okay, great. And then I guess just listening to AT&T, at the Analyst Day today, they laid out a path for investment in broadband whereby they plan to bring speeds up to 100 megabits per second on the U-verse platform, probably 75 megabits or even higher on using IPDSLAM technology. Glen, you laid out sort of the coverage where your speeds are up to, say, 20 megabits per second for 1/4 or more of your territory. Just wondering longer term how comfortable you are with the speeds you're driving towards now? Do you feel the need to maybe have to drive to the 50 megabit or 100 megabit by either driving fiber out deeper or utilizing pair bonding or some of the other technologies that may be out there?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Goldman Sachs

Yes, Scott, we do think we'll need to continue to drive additional speeds. We think -- we're shooting for the 20 megabit, 25 megabits for a very large percentage of our areas. But with bonding, we can virtually double the capacity that -- the broadband capacity and speeds in our markets. We're already doing bonding in a number of markets today. So where ever we have 20 megabits, basically, we could have 40. Where you have 10, you could have 20. So that is a major area we're looking at. We look at the -- with our fiber-to-the-node work, where we're hitting 25 to 40 megabits and depending on the distance to our customer's prim [ph] , and then we can double that to 80 megabits. And the fiber-to-the-node work there, it's a large percentage of those customers. We are doing the same thing -- looking at ways to economically reach that customer base with higher speeds. And it's important us. That's why our broadband investment is one of our key initiatives. We're expanding our broadband capabilities. That's a key investment for us and helps drive our penetration levels as well with our broadband products.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Michael Rollins from Citi.

Michael Rollins - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Analyst · Citi

First question is, if you could just size the revenue that you get, the access revenue you get from towers, from the combination of copper and fiber? And then secondly, I was wondering if you could, just going back to the cloud and managed services business that you have, what are you seeing in terms of the learnings, the ability to cross-sell telecom services to your cloud customers and vice versa? And are there other areas that you need to develop to further create this cross-selling opportunity, rather sales force-wise, customer service, any other kind of infrastructure that you need? It'd be great to see -- to get your perspective there.

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Citi

Mike, we haven't given, and I actually don't have right now the access revenue that we get from towers, whether they be fiber or copper. But we obviously serve a very high percentage of the towers in our legacy local exchange areas, either with copper or fiber. And we'll have -- by the end of the quarter, we had about 13,500 towers that we had built fiber to. So it's a good -- and they're all under long-term contracts. So it's a good growing revenue stream for us as bandwidth demands increase.

James Ernest Ousley

Analyst · Citi

This is Jim Ousley. On the second part, on the cloud and managed services crossover, we clearly see the opportunity there. And in fact, we have put a major organization in place of roughly 10% to 15% of the Savvis sales and marketing group are now dedicated to enabling the CenturyLink sales organization to start selling hosting and cloud services. So we see a lot of pull-through there. I would say, it's not a surprise to us, I would say that it's not an overnight process. It's going to take a couple of quarters of training programs, certification programs, et cetera to get the organization up to speed to take on that challenge. But the pull-through going both ways, major network customers that need hosting and major hosting customers that need network, we see significant opportunity. And we will start realizing that based on the training programs in the first quarter of 2013.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Kevin Smithen from Macquarie.

Kevin Smithen - Macquarie Research

Analyst · Macquarie

I wondered if you could talk about the enterprise business. We've seen a series of weak results across the board from your competitors so far in enterprise and SME, and I wanted to know if you could talk about -- they cited specifically weakness in Europe. What are you not seeing that others have seen so far this quarter?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Macquarie

Well, Kevin, we're seeing long delayed -- longer decision cycle times. We had benefited from some pretty large customer deals we've had coming in over the last few months, the last few quarters, that really came to fruition over the last few months. So we've been fortunate, we've had a lot of demand in our areas. I don't know that we're seeing anything different. We're not seeing a lot of improvement in the economy. We are seeing businesses be willing to spend more. But in recent months, we're seeing that delay come -- just like the other carriers have said, we're seeing the same thing. It's just that our revenue has not been impacted like those because some deals we had going that are really -- been good. Our salespeople, our management folks in enterprise group have done a great job of penetrating that market and continuing to grow our revenues in that sector. So it's certainly a challenge, but our folks have done a good job. The issue we see is lack of job growth and what's that going to do longer term to this demand and decision cycle for these businesses. Jim, you want to add anything to that?

Kevin Smithen - Macquarie Research

Analyst · Macquarie

Can you also give us a little granularity as to your exposure to Europe as a percentage of revenue now? Others have clearly cited Europe and multinationals exposure to Europe as a big area of weakness.

James Ernest Ousley

Analyst · Macquarie

Yes, I'll try and address both of your questions. One, CenturyLink in total has very little exposure to Europe. Savvis has some exposure to Europe, but it's fairly minimal and most of our business is in U.K. so we're not affected by the Southern Europe issues that are going on. So minimal impact in Europe to speak of. On the enterprise piece, I would say 2 things are going on. One, we're smaller than our major, our other 2 major competitors. So we have the ability to go after segments that they aren't really paying attention to. And so we put some very focused programs in place that we're seeing very positive results from on a quarter-to-quarter basis on winning business away from those competitors. To be honest, they just aren't paying attention to. So those -- I would say it's in execution, that organization, enterprise network group has executed some focused programs quite effectively.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Timothy Horan from Oppenheimer. Timothy K. Horan - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: I had 2 broad questions. One for Jim, with Savvis, how important is it for you have the bandwidth and fiber connectivity? I guess, how much benefit has Qwest long distance network and fiber connections brought you? And then second, for Glen, some of the carriers are talking about using wireless to be able to shutdown copper and replace the copper to save expenses, I know both in the U.S. and globally. Do you think that sounds feasible from a regulatory perspective and an economic and quality perspective?

James Ernest Ousley

Analyst · Oppenheimer

On your first question, the fiber connectivity, the whole cloud agenda, if you will, is network-based. And for enterprise, which Savvis is focused on, it's high-speed connectivity. So Savvis used to buy those services from third parties and wasn't very good at providing them. So we had to subcontract those, et cetera. Now as part of CenturyLink, one, we have a cost advantage compared to what we had before, and we have a parent that is in the business. And so it should be extremely important to us, and we believe it will be and as far as the rationale on the acquisition.

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Oppenheimer

Tim, regarding using wireless to displace copper. From a regulatory standpoint, that could be a tough go. There may be some areas that will have better service with wireless in some ways. As far as a competitive threat, we don't see that being a real issue for us because just the bandwidth requirements and the limited wireless access or capability in a lot of areas. Obviously, in the most rural areas, it could be an issue, but we're not seeing -- we don't see that as being a major issue right now for CenturyLink. We are looking at the opportunity to use broadband data in some different ways to serve these customers. But right now, we don't see that as a major investment for us or a major risk at this point.

Operator

Operator

And our final question for tonight will be from Brian Turner from JPMorgan.

Brian Turner

Analyst · JPMorgan

Just in the context of the initial '13 guidance, the continued improvement towards top line stability. Any sense as to whether that provides incremental flexibility around the balance sheet and M&A with respect to the rating agencies? And I guess along those lines, can you help us think about how you'd manage potential opportunities for growth, inorganic opportunities for growth, within the context of maintaining IG ratings at both Moody's and Fitch?

R. Stewart Ewing

Analyst · JPMorgan

Brian, I don't think given where Moody's is, and we'll go and talk with them, probably actually after the year ends so that we can talk fully about 2012 and 2013 as well. But I'm not sure that really offers too much flexibility, if you understand where Moody's is with respect to the requirement to get down to their 3x debt to EBITDA using their formula.

Brian Turner

Analyst · JPMorgan

Okay. I mean, I think that they've certainly given a few different parameters and one of them I know was stabilization of the top line, but certainly the balance sheet remains the focus. So I just didn't know if that would give you guys any sense of incremental flexibility to do something, but it sounds like...

Glen F. Post

Analyst · JPMorgan

I don't think it's give us significant incremental flexibility.

Brian Turner

Analyst · JPMorgan

And then I guess the second part, on how you'd think about inorganic opportunities in M&A within that context and how you think about maintaining investment grade versus opportunities out there that may pressure that?

Glen F. Post

Analyst · JPMorgan

We've always valued the investment-grade rating and we still value it. It really depends on the opportunity, what it could do. Future acquisitions should be more -- if we were to make another acquisition in the future, it'd be more focused on an area that could drive growth for us. So we'd have to weigh that opportunity with the issues around credit ratings. We hope we'd find ways to maintain our investment grade credit rating, which we initially do every time we do a transaction now. It's a factor that we consider. So every deal is different.

Operator

Operator

I would now like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Glen Post for any closing remarks.

R. Stewart Ewing

Analyst · UBS

Just one comment to -- someone asked what our required contribution was for pensions for 2013 and I said, a little over $100 million, about $100 million. It's actually about $35 million, the required contribution for 2013.

Glen F. Post

Analyst · Merrill Lynch

Thank you, Stewart. And thank you, Saeed. We are pleased with the continued progress we made during the third quarter towards stabilizing the top line revenues and believe our continued investment in key strategic opportunities will help us continues to drive growth both near term and long term. Our strategic revenues continue to grow, and our guidance reflects our expectation that our revenues from strategic services will continue to grow in the months ahead. We also remain focused on ensuring operating costs align with our revenue mix and on achieving our operating expense synergy targets through the successful completion of the Qwest and Savvis integrations. Additionally, the expansion of our Prism TV service later this year and the recent launch of managed hosting and cloud services for small and mid-sized business customers will further strengthen our product portfolio and provide us additional revenue growth opportunity as we look into 2013. Thank you for joining our call today, and we look forward to speaking with you in the weeks ahead.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes our program for today. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.