Rogers Communications Earnings Call Insights: Wireless Portfolio and Drivers of Strong Performance in Data

Rogers Communications, Inc. Class B (NYSE:RCI) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Wireless Portfolio

Maher Yaghi – Desjardins Securities: Nadir, I wanted just to congratulate you on your tenure at Rogers and I’m sure the investment community will miss you starting next year. Just I wanted to ask you on wireless, when you look at your wireless portfolio and you compare the postpaid net additions you had in the quarter versus Telus and BCE, now that all the results are out, you know it’s been a few quarters that we are seeing your market share below you potential. Is there structurally anything that you can do to manage to improve that market share because in terms of offering, in terms of pricing, in terms of presence on the ground there is not lot of difference between you and Telus and BCE why are we seeing that kind of spread continuing here and do you expect it to close in 2013?

Nadir Mohamed – President and CEO: At the Wireless I think the first thing to make sure that everybody understands. As you know the net share in any given quarter is a function of what happens at growth and then the effect of churn. And you should know that at the (tail) where the customer made the decision on our growth acquisitions, we continue to be very strong and have been that way for some time. Really what you are seeing is the impact of churn and as you know our churn improved from 1.49 in the quarter last year to 1.40. So, that’s sequentially improving and improved for year. But frankly our churn needs to get to be even better because the reality is our base of customers is much larger and if you work the math even if there is a same churn applied on the higher number you would end up with the lower net share. So, our focus very much is on improving churn. Last year or two to be fair to your question if you look at where the competition in terms of new entrants and some of the activity in the market has been strongest they would be in the markets in Ontario where we have the biggest spread on. So, that’s been a contributing factor. But I think you should know that we are absolutely focused on improving our churn and that to me is the best way to get to an improved net share. The last thing, I’d say, Maher, as you know, all of these metrics are interconnected and what I’d point out is that the balancing act would be – we continue to have the best margins in the Wireless industry, we continue to have best ARPU in the Wireless business. So point taken though, where we see improvement going forward which we focus on is churn.