Canadian wireless sub adds down slightly from 2018

Canada’s publicly-traded wireless service providers added just under 1.29 million wireless subscribers in 2019, a year many executives described as one of the most intensely competitive in recent memory. The 1,289,347 subscribers added across Telus Corp., Quebecor Inc.'s Videotron, Rogers Communications Inc., BCE Inc., and Shaw Communications Inc.'s Freedom Mobile is slightly lower than the 1,454,180 subscribers the five companies added in 2018, but only the second time in The Wire Report's nine-year tally of companies’ fourth-quarter results that the additions have been over 1 million subscribers. Just as in 2018, Bell led the pack with 515,409 pre-and post-paid subscribers additions, which the company says is its best number since 2005, and is a 7.4 per cent increase from the 479,811 the company added in fiscal year 2018. Telus was in second place with 274,000 wireless additions, some 10,000 more than the 264,000 they added in 2018. Next was Shaw's Freedom Mobile with 266,241 additions, up from the 255,685 the company added in 2018. Quebecor's Videotron added 176,700 subscribers, a substantial jump from the 129,800 subscribers the company added in 2018. It was the largest number of connections, according to its annual report, since the launch of the mobile network in 2010. Rogers reported just some 57,000 new wireless subscribers for fiscal year 2019, despite 334,000 new postpaid adds. The subscriber losses include 53,000 customers of what Rogers termed a “low-ARPU” public service contract that the company no longer holds, as well as an adjustment “to the prepaid subscriber base to remove 127,000 subscribers as a result of a change to our deactivation policy from 180 days to 90 days to be more consistent within the industry.” The company also recorded a further 97,000 losses in prepaid wireless subscribers. The 57,000 adds in 2019 is a substantial fall for Rogers, which added 453,000 new wireless subscribers in fiscal year 2018. It was a particularly competitive 2019 as larger gigabyte and "no-overage" plans that first appeared in 2017 began to roll out across the Canadian wireless sector. When Shaw’s Freedom Mobile introduced its “big gig” plans back in 2017 — offering a base rate of 10 GB of data for $50 a month — it sent shockwaves through the broader wireless industry, with the incumbent providers quickly following suit. Just over a year later in November of 2018, Freedom Mobile upped the ante, introducing a limited offer of 100 GB for customers already on the Big Gig plan. Since the big three major providers have either introduced or said they will introduce “unlimited” or “no overage” data plans, wireless prices have fallen across the country. They have also been falling everywhere else, too. Several telecom executives have said the move has introduced a previously unseen level of competition into the wireless market. In September, Bell's chief financial officer Glen LeBlanc told the CIBC Eastern Institutional Investor Conference in Montreal in September that he thought the move to unlimited was "premature." "We will always go into the market with competitive offers,” LeBlanc said at the time. “But I thought this one was a bit early.” In January, Shaw's president of wireless Paul McAleese told analysts on a quarterly earnings call that the incumbents “haven’t exactly been paragons of pricing discipline during this period,” and said on the call that "since the launch of unlimited plans last summer, they’ve been fairly erratic, and that Black Friday through Christmas period is really no different than that,” referring to competition from the incumbents in the weeks following the close of the company's first quarter of 2019. Television subscriber numbers were, with the exception of Telus, down or level across the board. Shaw lost 160,979 subscribers, while Rogers lost 106,000, both amounting to a drop of just over six per cent on their bases of 2.3 million and 1.6 million respectively. Bell stayed just about level, adding less than a thousand subscribers to its 2.8 million total television subs, while Quebecor and Cogeco Inc. lost 65,000 and 39,185 respectively, on their smaller subscriber bases of 1.5 million and 649,583. Altogether, the telecom companies above lost 304,585 television subscribers, dropping the total subscribers base to 9,951,940, a 2.97 per cent drop from last year. Home internet subscribers were up across the six major providers. Bell led the way with 136,861 new subscribers on a base of 3.56 million, a near four-per-cent increase. Telus added some 107,000 subscribers to their 1.98 million, a jump of 6.6 per cent, while Rogers added 104,000 new Internet subs, a 4.2 per cent increase on its 2.53 million total. Shaw and Quebecor added just 35,586 and 22,800 respectively, increases of 1.74 and 1.34 per cent. Cogeco added just under 6,000 home internet subscribers in the year, a less than one per cent increase. The six providers above added a total of 411,213 internet subscribers, bringing the total number of subscribers up to 12,671,533, representing an increase of 3.36 per cent over last year’s numbers. — With reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Adam Langenberg at alangenberg@thewirereport.ca

Canadian wireless sub adds down slightly from 2018

News | April 7, 2020

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Canadian wireless sub adds down slightly from 2018

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