There’s no evidence that this is the intention and in my opinion there’s strong evidence against it. Why get obsessed over revenue growth with FTTH being the lynchpin for it? Why sell the eastern ILEC assets so early, creating dividend and funding concerns and using up NOLs? Why sell LATAM and EMEA which seem like they could be synergistic assets to a security/cloud focused company? Why go 100% in on a business that has not been able to grow despite tens of billions of investment over several years? Where is the cash flow going to come from without ILEC? Why spend so much time and resources learning the “FTTH factory” process only to sell it a year or two later?

If you’re right and they do plan to sell in 1-2 years they’ve gone about it entirely the wrong way, and are (again) lying to and misleading stakeholders. And instead of being able to sell from a position of strength, they’re now heavily exposed to a hostile takeover due to the tanking of the equity while reducing debt, the combined effect being an obliteration of the enterprise value which sits al a paltry ~$25B. A 40% premium on that and the whole company can be had for $35B, and shareholders would happily take a 200% return on current equity. The company valued themselves at $60-72B in 2020. After years of work, billions in capex, “huge” public sector wins and a much more expansive fiber buildout they can be had for half that today. LUMN might soon give up all of their business to a big player for pennies on the dollar.

Great strategy! Jeff is a genius.