Frontier Executive Chairman John Stratton stressed that he and the board are open to discussion as the company faces pressure from an investor to conduct a strategic review of the business and consider various options, including joint ventures and a sale of certain assets or of the full company.
"We are highly attuned to M&A and the strategic landscape in which we operate," Stratton said Tuesday at the UBS Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. "We have an ongoing dialogue with our key shareholders. We listen very carefully to their feedback, to their input. We value their perspective; we take it quite seriously."
Stratton stressed that he's not at liberty to publicly disclose the contents of those discussions. However, Frontier is "very willing to explore all alternatives that may be present for us to achieve our number one objective, which of course is to achieve a maximum value creation for our shareholders … Everything's on the table."
Stratton was asked to address the situation a day after Jana Partners issued the board a letter urging the company to "immediately" conduct a comprehensive strategic review of the company and a revised path that could boost Frontier's stock price.
For the moment, Frontier is laser-focused on building and selling fiber services alongside an ambitious plan to build fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) to about 10 million locations by the end of 2025. Frontier ended Q3 with about 6.2 million fiber locations.