“Excluding the impact of mobile devices, we now expect our full year 2023 change in working capital to be negative by a few hundred million dollars, given the timing of capital expenditures and lower-than-expected accrued programming at year-end.”

In context

“iled outlook on our fourth quarter 2023 call in January. I want to highlight that capital expenditures, excluding line extensions and network evolution as a percentage of total revenue, have remained consistent since 2021. And following the completion of our network evolution initiative, capital expenditures, excluding line extensions as a percentage of revenue, should decline to below 2022 level, which has important long-term cash flow implications. As Slide 10 shows, we generated $1.1 billion of free cash flow this quarter versus $1.5 billion in the third quarter of last year. The decline was primarily driven by higher CapEx, mostly driven by our network evolution and expansion initiatives. A couple of brief comments on working capital and cash taxes before turning to the balance sheet. Excluding the impact of mobile devices, we now expect our full year 2023 change in working capital to be negative by a few hundred million dollars, given the timing of capital expenditures and lower-than-expected accrued programming at year-end. On cash taxes, we did have a lower cash tax payment in the third quarter, which is just a timing difference. The full year cash tax outlook, which I provided during our fourth quarter 2022 call, still stand. We finished the quarter with $97.6 billion in debt principal. Our current run rate annualized cash interest is $5.2 billion. As of the end of the third quarter, our ratio of net debt to last 12-month adjusted EBITDA was 4.45 times, and we intend to stay at or just below the high end of our four to 4.5 times target leverage range. During the quarter, we repurchased two million Charter shares and Charter Holdings common units, totaling $854 million, at an average price of $421 per share. Our 2023 EBITDA growth has been pressured by significant investments we've made in the future growth”