“Our focus on profitable growth allows us to fund those higher customer net adds and still increase our core adjusted EBITDA expectation, which we now expect to be between $28.9 billion and $29.2 billion.”

In context

“ash flow was up 64% year-over-year and with the highest free cash flow to service revenue margin relative to our peers year-to-date. We expect this to be a durable and differentiated unlock of shareholder value going forward. This strong financial performance also supported our share buybacks as we repurchased 25.2 million shares for $3.5 billion in Q2 with a cumulative total of 83.5 million shares repurchased for $11.8 billion as of July 21. All right. Let's jump into the details of our increased guidance for 2023. We now expect total postpaid net customer additions to be between 5.6 million and 5.9 million, up 250,000 at the midpoint, reflecting growth across all of our market opportunities and we continue to expect roughly half of postpaid net adds coming from phones for the full year. Our focus on profitable growth allows us to fund those higher customer net adds and still increase our core adjusted EBITDA expectation, which we now expect to be between $28.9 billion and $29.2 billion. This is up 10% year-over-year at the midpoint based on higher service revenues and merger synergies and excludes leasing revenues of approximately $300 million as we transition substantially all remaining customers off device leasing by year-end. Our merger synergies are expected to be approximately $7.5 billion in 2023, achieving the full run rate synergy target provided at our Analyst Day a year ahead of schedule as we build towards the full run rate synergies of $8 billion in 2024. We continue to expect merger related costs, which are not included in adjusted or core adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $1 billion before taxes. And we now expect cash merger related costs of $1.6 billion to $2 billion for 2023 as they have underrun the P&L recognition to date. Net cash provided by operat”