Lumen Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 31, 2023 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Mike McCormack - Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Kate Johnson - President and Chief Executive Officer

Chris Stansbury - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley

Nick Del Deo - MoffettNathanson

Michael Rollins - Citi

Batya Levi - UBS

David Barden - Bank of America

Greg Williams - TD Cowen

Frank Louthan - Raymond James

Jonathan Chaplin - New Street Research

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Lumen Technologies Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Tuesday, October 31, 2023.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike McCormack, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Mike McCormack

Thanks, Cersei. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining Lumen Technologies third quarter 2023 earnings call.

On the call today are Kate Johnson, President and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Stansbury, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Rahul Modi, our Treasurer.

Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our safe harbor statement on Slide 2 of our third quarter 2023 presentation, which notes that this conference call may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties. All forward-looking statements should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements on Slide 2 and the risk factors in our SEC filings.

We'll be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures reconciled to the most comparable GAAP measures, which can be found in our earnings press release. In addition, certain metrics discussed today exclude costs or special items as detailed in our earnings materials, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of the Lumen website.

With that, I'll turn it over to Kate.

Kate Johnson

Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everybody.

I'm excited to share a summary of the material progress we've made in our efforts to reposition Lumen for growth. I'll start with some major structural accomplishments.

First, we've made significant progress in simplifying Lumen with two divestitures. We expect to close the sale of our EMEA business to Colt tomorrow, November 1, earlier than planned. This transaction will generate approximately $1.5 billion in net after-tax proceeds, which we anticipate will be used for debt reduction. Second, two weeks ago, we announced the sale of the majority of our CDN contracts, a transaction that will enable us to continue to focus our resources on businesses where we can differentiate ourselves in the market at scale.