Rogers Communications Inc. (RCIB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We'll get started here with the next session. Thank you guys so much for coming. I'm Dave Barden. I head up telecommunication services and comm infrastructure research for Bank of America based here in New York, covering the U.S. and Canada. And representing the great nation of Canada, we have the team from Rogers with us today, Tony Staffieri, President and CEO; and Glenn Brandt, Chief Financial Officer. So guys, thank you for making the trip out. I appreciate you coming.

You bet. Good morning, and thanks for having us.

Do we have to do any safe harbor at the moment or just kick things off?

No, we're good.

It applies.

You're not going to give me any of the good stuff anyway.

So all right, guys, so thank you for coming. So look, let's start off with -- before we kind of get into the meat of the business, let's kind of start off with a merger update. We're about, I don't know, 5 months into the 24 months that you guys laid out or trying to get $1 billion of synergy out of the Shaw merger. I think that some people question whether that's an achievable thing, but it's an important thing on your way to kind of achieve some of your leverage goals and commitments that you've made. So why don't we start with how the merger is going so far?

Yes, I'll start with the operational side of it and Glenn will update on where we're at vis-a-vis the targets we had communicated previously. In terms of the merger, I've said it before, but we're -- we continue to be extremely pleased with the quality of the asset. As we look to the network that it has and the work they've done on mid split within their plants. We look at Internet congestion and how it performs, especially vis-a-vis the competition, extremely pleased. And there's a lot of things they've been doing there that I would say, is more aligned with Cable labs and what some of the U.S. players have been doing, which has been working extremely well. They've got a portfolio with extremely low churn in the West. And so it's going to be in that position. So it's clear what our mission is there, which is focusing on gross sales as well as the bundle, which we can talk about more later. And so -- and there are a few other things as well. In terms of the integration, we always said we would start with the customer experience first and that continues to work well as of July 1, we were up and ready so that in each of the channels, the agent could interact, whether it was a Shaw customer, Rogers customer be able to see the customers' accounts and bills at the same time and give the customer a seamless experience. And that's been going well. And you see it in our bundled sales programs and the outcome in terms of market share results that we're seeing in the West. So that's trending well. The second piece of it relates to our organizational structure. And we moved very quickly in trying to get the org structure that we wanted in place very quickly and deal with the labor force reductions early on. And so we're largely got that behind us. There'll be a few areas that will continue to always look for more efficiency, but we've got the bulk of it behind us by now. And then the last piece is on integrating some of the network things that I talked about and that work continues to be underway, especially we had announced splitting out our IP core between wireline and wireless to build better redundancy, and the closing of Shaw gave us the ability to accelerate the time line to be able to do that. And then the last piece, which we've always said would be a much slower role are some of what I would call the big back-office integrations like billing ERP. We're going to do that over 2 years and be very measured and thoughtful in how we do it. We want to get what I would describe as back-office systems that are robust, good enough, make the best use of what we already have as opposed to chasing sort of the next gen and be at the forefront of that. I think we're probably more conservative on that side of it, provided that whatever we're doing gives us the efficiencies we're looking for.

Before we move to Glenn on the financial side, if I could just ask maybe one kind of obvious glaring follow-up, which is if the Shaw asset was so good, so efficient, high-quality, low congestion, split nodes, low churn, why was Shaw so bad at competing on -- for net adds in the West with TELUS. And I mean, what's the recipe to fix it?

Yes. A couple of things that drive that. One is when you look at the net add calculation, churn is low, they were lacking on gross sales, the in funnel. And there were a couple of reasons for that. We were down a path of trying and maintaining price discipline. So while TELUS was in the marketplace with a consistent price discount to Shaw, Shaw did not, in any meaningful way, match that price. And so that's first and foremost. The second is they were at a bit of a handicap in terms of bundling not just home with wireless relative to TELUS. But increasingly, a home monitoring product as well. TELUS had acquired ADT. And to their credit, had been successful in bundling that at a very compelling price with a wireless or home own Internet product, which Shaw did not have. And so they were at a disadvantage from that perspective. And we understand the reasons why they followed that approach. And of course, they're worried about base reprice and we get that. But that's something we've been working hard in the east for a long time because we've been up against this with Bell. And you need to be able to do both effectively manage the base while at the same time be competitive in the marketplace. It's interesting anecdotally, I remember it might have been the second day after close walking into a Shaw store target to a sales rep, what do you need? And I was -- just the stand of the answer was, I need to be able to match, customers are coming in saying, this is my TELUS software, what have you got for me?" And their hands were tied and say, "I can't match it, our prices are priced." And so you can just imagine kind of how that proliferates in terms of the impact that it has. So that's the bigger issue on sales. And as I look to our results post close, we're back in positive territory in the West on Internet and even better on wireless. And so we think we know what we need to do to turn around the sales performance and the net add performance in the West.

So maybe just to kind of tie off the gross add strategy. So we brought the Rogers brand in a better wireless bundling opportunity. We've integrated the 2 channels so that you can walk into a Shaw or Rogers store and get a Shaw or Rogers product from either -- we've added price flexibility to match TELUS on the ground. And I think that there's one more thing that you've done, which is kind of lean into more of a door-to-door sales force. I think that, that was a strategy that you were talking about this summer. Is that kind of going the way you wanted it to?

Pretty much so. And so that's a channel, given what we did in the East, and it's a very similar playbook. If we were to look at absolute numbers of door-to-door sales and it still continues to be the #1 acquisition channel. And Shaw would have had about 100 to 150 door-to-door sales rep and the competition was sitting at somewhere we estimated in excess of 800. So that's the disparity of that channel in terms of execution muscle. And so we've quickly been ramping up. We're not -- we haven't closed the gap, but we're very much along the way to closing that gap. While at the same time, focusing on the retail distribution channel. One of the things, even door-to-door is effective, but a relatively expensive channel. And what we bring to the table is store traffic. And so we've made the whole process of bundle and walking out of the store with an actual modem that is what we call hot, a much more seamless process. So the customer can self-install on home Internet and get going quickly with that. And so that increasingly has become an effective, what I would call, utilization of our distribution channels out West.

Cool. All right. Glenn, numbers.

Numbers. The synergy cost exercise is going well. We are at or ahead of plan on every measure, largely ahead of plan. It's early, we're coming up on 6 months and so there's still a lot of work to do. I -- it's my human nature to temper that and say at or ahead of plan because it's early days. But truthfully, we are ahead of where we expected to be at this point, this early in the exercise. We have signaled all along that we'll have $200 million of in-year cost savings through synergy in 2023. We will hit that mark. We had $48 million in the second quarter. We'll carry that into the third quarter and build on it. So you'll see when we report our third quarter, we will build on that for the quarter for realized in quarter and then again, carry that into Q4. We've gone through a large part of the heaviest of the exercises, which is the headcount rationalization, eliminating the duplication of our duplicated departments, whether it's in head office or within cable. Those are the largest targets, wireless and media, lots affected on the cost side, but it filters through the entire organization. So we've had a voluntary departure program that we launched through the summer that was successful at taking out some of the duplicative head count. It was targeted so that we were able to focus on the areas that we wanted to focus on and left with the employees that wanted to be -- to remain with the combined company, very successful. While that was going on, we had put in for a waiver in terms of further reductions across the company. Again, we've been targeted with where we have focused those. It's gone very successfully. We've done most of the heavy lifting on that. So that will be a large part of what we fold in, in Q3 when we report in a few weeks' time. So that's well in hand. We've also been focused on vendor negotiations, truing up contract terms across the 2 companies. I won't drain the list, but each of the streams is well underway, whether it's media content, real estate, third-party vendors, general third-party vendors across the operations, we have it well in hand. We do get challenged a lot on $1 billion sounds like a lofty goal. Put it in context, we've doubled the size of our cable company. We've substantially increased the size of Rogers, and we're talking 12% of our operating spend. It's absolutely achievable, and we are ahead of plan for this point in the exercise. Very confident. We'll close the year with, as I say, the $200 million in-year savings is what we've guided, $600 million annualized run rate, either at the close of this year or achieved very early in 2024 in the first quarter. Keep in mind, March is the 12-month anniversary of closing the deal, but we will have the $600 million either at year-end or early in 2024.

And so just to make sure everyone's expectations are level set. These synergies are coming through, they seem, right? But there is a cost to achieve. And you've set that at about $1 billion...

About 1x, right.

Over a 12-month period kind of situation?

Most of it will be realized within that 12-month period. There might be some that comes through the middle part of next year. But yes, it's -- the largest category by far is the head count reduction. And that, you realize that fairly quickly on in order to do the integration.

So we should clean up a lot of that in the second half 2023?

A significant piece of it. There will be some that falls over in early '24, but yes.

And is that mostly cash, that $1 billion out the door?

Yes, it's cash. Some of it can be over time as opposed to all upfront. But yes, that's -- think of that as cash cost. At least on the headcount part, yes.

And just maybe before I leave the Shaw situation, I want to just talk a little bit about something that's not in the numbers or hasn't been put in the numbers to this point in time is the revenue synergy side of things. You guys were generous enough to come down this past summer, not too long after the close. And Tony, you kind of shared some stats that in -- I think it was Vancouver and in Alberta, you had increased wireless market share by 10% from I think you said like 20% to 30% in Alberta, like 50% to 60% in Vancouver. Is that holding? Is that improving? And if it is, are we at a point where we could start to maybe hint at some dollars around the revenue opportunity that you see now in the West?

Yes. The revenue synergies that we've seen early are the ones you've talked about, as we look at the sales performance for wireless and to some extent, Internet, which I touched on. But certainly, on the wireless side, as we look at our capability to bundle and continue to focus on new to Canada, which Vancouver would be one of the fastest growing just second to Toronto in terms of size. We've been capitalizing on good share. And so as we look to our market share performance in those 2 provinces, B.C., and Vancouver being the main city there in Alberta with Calgary and Edmonton being the 2 main cities there, our market share on a year-on-year basis continues to be 10 points higher. And so just terrific improvement, much better than we expected going into this. And so -- and we saw that continue on through back-to-school, which we're extremely pleased with. The second phase of it that we see as a bigger opportunity is the enterprise side of things and replicating that formula in small business in a big way, which we have not done. Shaw has very good penetration of small business in the West on the wireline side. And so there's an opportunity for us to look at where we don't overlap our wireless and wireline customer and cross-sell to that. So for example, if you're a Shaw wireline small business, but you have TELUS wireless, that's a prime target for us and vice versa on the wireless side. So that's one we've started to execute on. And then, of course, there's the mid to large now that we have a national footprint and the largest national footprint, then that's one where I would say we are perfecting the value proposition that we have and going to market with that. You should expect to see much like we've done on the consumer side is closely follow the Comcast road map in small in particular. That's been a very effective cost model for us in growing that, simplifying the product line, minimizing the product research that we do. And so that's the path we're on is to expand that relationship to the enterprise side of it as well. So that we're not only focused on the revenue side, but managing the cost and CPE costs.

Yes, I had thought about that. I mean, look, for the cable companies down here, the enterprise and small business, midsized business opportunity has been a 10% grower plus for years and years and years. What is the TAM for enterprise in Canada now that you're the only national provider in Canada, it seems like that's a natural place for you to win. Can you size that, like opportunity for me if you have a number?

Yes. I'll say it this way. There's really 2 components to it. One is if you think about the mid to large, our competitors to national telcos just because of the legacy and not unlike the U.S. would sit with -- our estimation is 90% plus market share there. So that's what we're going after in terms of size of market. And so it is double-digit in billions in terms of the size of that market. And it will be a very long process because those are the more sophisticated buyers that are either in contract, RFP processes, et cetera. And -- but -- and so having said that, then there's the small business. And what we're seeing in small business is much -- it sort of mirrors the population growth that we're seeing in Canada. We've been extremely fortunate in seeing good growth, and you see it in our wireless market. So the wireless market over the last year in a bit has been growing 5% to 6%. Half of that is penetration. But the other half, 2.5% to 3% is new to Canada category. That continues to go strong. As we look at Q3, we're seeing a continuation of that size of market. And so it's against that backdrop that we're executing well. And then that consumer base growth grows into -- and there's a bit of a lag of 6 to 12 months, but we're now starting to see that in the size of the small business market growing as well. And so the timing of this is working out well for us. So the synergies and size of market really relate to both of those.

Okay. Great. And what that actually makes us as like the U.S. market, we would estimate about $80 billion. Canada is about 10% the size of the U.S. and probably a little denser business-wise. So $10 billion, $11 billion, $12 billion opportunity that you have sub-10% market share of probably a nice opportunity. Okay. Let's talk about the business. Is the Canadian wireless market broken because when I look at these stocks, it says it's broken. If it's not broken, these stocks are way too cheap. So is it broken?

I'll talk to the -- there's 2 parts to your point. One is, is the valuation broken, and I would suggest, yes, and I look at the fundamentals of the business. And I've talked about the size of the market growing, one of the fastest-growing markets with decent ARPUs in the world. And population growth is going to continue in Canada. We sit at a market of about -- we're approaching $40 million. And it's growing at $1 million to $1.5 million a year. And so you just do the math on that, we'll be a $50 million plus, I suspect by 2030, so the size of the market continues to grow. I then look at the fundamentals of the market, and we have stable ARPUs. There was much, I would say, noise that was largely manufactured noise, frankly, by your peers in Canada that with the closing of Shaw, all of a sudden, we were going to see Quebecor disrupt pricing. And of course, they did what we expected them to do, given the lower quality network that they have is continue to push on a small discount. That's always been the Freedom model, and not much of an impact. We then had back-to-school as being the next wave of disruption that was going to happen in Canadian pricing. And as we've worked our way through that, I would describe the competitive intensity in this back-to-school is on par with what we've seen in the past with an actual nuance to it that I think is much more favorable. What you would have seen in the past is a race to match as quickly as possible each other, including that of Freedom. And Freedom, as I said, continue to do the mild discounting to our pricing, as an example, to compensate for a number of other things, as I mentioned, we decided this year not to match. We had our strategy, which is to focus on the Rogers brand, the Rogers value proposition. Our competitors took a bit of a different approach and focused on the flanker and introduced 5G on that. We decided to wait to see what the customer was telling us. And we didn't match. And you can take away from that, it didn't have the impact to us that some thought it was going to have. And so what we're seeing is a robust market that continues to, of course, be competitive. But far from things going south, they continue to go north. I remind you, in Q2, we posted 7% wireless top line growth, 9% EBITDA growth, supported by significant growth in subscribers and our relative market share. And as we progress on Q3, we continue to see good, strong, robust growth in that sector.

So a couple of questions -- follow-up questions on that. So with respect to -- I asked all the major carriers about the iPhone down here in the U.S. iPhone launches tend to be maybe a little less impactful in Canada for a couple of reasons. One is, there isn't a lot of handset discounting that goes on in Canada. So it's really not that big a deal. Number two, Canada doesn't necessarily get first [indiscernible] at all the volumes that are going to come out. And so it kind of feathers into the market in a more rational way. So is it fair to say that the iPhone launch has not bored gasoline on the promotional environment in Canada?

I think that's fair to say, Dave. I mean, we'll see what the market does and what our competition does. But traditionally, in Canada, it hasn't focused on discounting of handsets. If you look at the Rogers P&L, what you see is handset costs are roughly neutral to our P&L. We just pass on the cost to the consumer as part of the financing. And we haven't nor has the market gone down that path. So we'll have to see what the others do and decide how we respond to that if we respond to it. But for all the reasons you talked about, the expectation is it will continue to be something that's focused on price of the plans as well as other value propositions in particular quality of the network.

I think one of the things that happened over the course of the summer that did raise some eyebrows was you have a flagship $80 plan. And then you introduced a $60 plan, which had some usage limits on it. And I think that there was a sense that, that was a capitulation to the marketplace that you were lowering prices, maybe you were not getting the volumes in the premium plan that you wanted, that you would see price downs as a function of introducing this plan, which would put downward pressure on ARPUs, what has actually been the result of this exercise that you did through the summer?

Yes. For context, that plan, and I would call it was really about our strategy, which we had broadcast well over a year ago was a focus on the Rogers brand. When you think about the Canadian landscape, we have 3 brands. Our competitors, each have 2 to 3 brands. And so you think about each market and the size of the market, there are a lot of brands. Our strategy is and has been to consolidate to the Rogers brand and move away from the flanker, make the flanker in prepaid brand, very clear in what the value proposition is and create a distance between the 2. And so as part of our strategy, rather than leaving Rogers as the only place where you get an unlimited plan much like you see in the U.S. market, we started to introduce capped plans, and that was the $60 plan that you referred to, which was a capped plan. And so that was Phase 1. Our hope in doing that was that we would get those that are on the flanker brand in the $45 to $55 range upgrading to the Rogers brand and which would now get them on 5G. And so -- and it's a much easier experience when you bundle it with your home products as well. And so what we saw was a very healthy uptake. The risk was were we going to get customers in the $80 range coming down. Our bet was for the price difference getting the price certainty and service you get with unlimited versus going to a capped plan was going to be minimal. And in fact, it was minimal. And so we're seeing exactly what we wanted to see. And so when I look at back-to-school, traditionally, back-to-school has been a flanker period with discounted phones. We decided to really push on the capped plan on Rogers and bundle it with Internet. And what you saw for the first time in a long time, if not ever, since we introduced the flanker brand in 2008, the majority of our loadings came on the Rogers brand. And so that was a really good shift to see in terms of the market acceptance of the Rogers brand and the effectiveness of doing that.

The importance of that plan is that as our customers on Fido brand move up, they now can move up within Rogers and not get picked up by our competitors. So what else with churn that we've seen in some of the prior periods, where we had left that open space. We don't have anything open there anymore. It's -- we can look after that continuum right on through.

So maybe to the extent that it was rational for investors to be anxious about the traditionally promotional back-to-school season. Is there a moment when we can all unclench company. And is there like a traditional, oh, well, the week after school starts in Canada is traditionally when everyone kind of just goes back to the usual rate rack or the rack rate plans and all the promotions kind of evaporate and then one goes well wait a minute, that didn't -- the [indiscernible] didn't burn to the ground. What's going on here? Is there going to be that moment?

I think you start to see it. If you look at -- you would have seen this week already coming out of back-to-school is a pullback on some of the bonus data buckets that are included and that's amongst all of us, including even Freedom. You would have seen them reduce that this week. It will start to ramp up again, as you would expect, as we head towards Black Friday and the holiday season. But -- there isn't anything that I would put in the category of abnormal in terms of that. And so time will tell, and I don't think there's ever a perfect time to sort of say, okay, we're out of that. I would say just look at the last 6 months, post back-to-school and with everyone is reporting in Q3, I think it will make it clear that the wireless industry in Canada continues to be not only stable but robust in terms of growth opportunities.

The unclenching event third quarter. Got it. Okay. So -- gosh, we're going to run out of time. So let's talk a little bit about the Internet since the -- sorry, the broadband business, the consumer wireline broadband business. We talked about that in the West a little bit. But let's talk about what's going on in the East. So we had this episode where network outages, mea culpas, credits back to customers. Obviously, BCE leaned into that. They kind of took share kind of we're making hay while the sun shown, that seems to have kind of come and gone, how would you describe kind of now the back and forth between BCE and Rogers in the West in the consumer broadband business?

Yes, as we look to it, our focus on the broadband business in the East is really, as you said, about regaining share. We were on a path. And I would say, if you look at Q3 of last year, we had a setback both operationally, but importantly, from a brand perspective, we've had a very good bounce back. And you see that in wireless, and you see that coming through in our Q2 results in terms of Internet. And so as we look to the back-to-school period, what you see is 2 things: one, a continuation of that improvement in the East with, as I talked about, a turn to positive growth in the West. So it's a combination of 2. The reasons for them are different. I've talked about the West being more of a gross sales. In the East, it's more of a churn and managing churn down. And that's really been on the back of 2 things: One, competitive pricing by our competitor. And we've been largely matching. But as we focus on ARPU growth on the wireline side of the business, what we're seeing is good improvements in the pricing side of it in the market that seems to -- that was just launched over the last few weeks that seems to be taking hold. So we like what we see there.

Could you elaborate on that?

Yes, reduction of promotional discounting in the market.

Just in the last few weeks.

Just in the last few weeks to the extent of up to $20 reduction.

And is this de-escalation on both sides? Or is this just a unilateral action on Rogers' part?

I think we're being much more disciplined in where we do it. And so I would say it's on both sides is what we're seeing in the marketplace. And the second piece of it related to some of the issues we've been having on I would say, customer service matching, not unlike what we saw in the West and the ability of our agents to match real-time. And so we've changed our processes so that when David Barden calls in and says I had a bell rep at my door and they offered ex rather than saying, "Hold on, let me transfer you to someone important to give you an offer which you might lose the customer, we've now armed our agents with the retention tool." And it's postal code specific or building-specific, so they know exactly what the offer is. They know it's a legit offer. We don't have to go through a validation process. And the agents authorized to match real-time. So that's become much more effective and starting to reduce the churn on the Cable side. So we like what we see there in both of those coming together, the ARPA and the net side to work on the top line, which is sitting in a decline in Cable right now in both the East and the West. But we know what we have to do to revert that to positive growth.

Okay. Just quickly on -- I got a bunch of stuff I want to talk about. But so just one thing that's kind of come up would be there's been these conversations. One of the things that's been helpful to the Internet business has been the population growth, household formation, one of the things that's been a conversation topic has been concerns about housing availability, maybe we need to limit immigration, concerns about eliminating foreign students coming into the country. Are any of these things something we need to be factoring into our thinking about what Internet growth might look like and how that creates competitive intensity at the margin?

Yes, I would say real quick. If you look, there's a lag between the growth you're seeing on the wireless side and the Internet growth in our country, largely because supply is still constrained. I would say the municipalities and governments at provincial and federal levels are only starting to realize they need to speed up that process to get more housing supply. And so what we expect to see where we traditionally had a 2% growth in size of market on the wireline side, we think that catch-up will start to, over the next little while, bring it more into the 3%-plus range. And then in terms of the government thinking will they start to curb some of that coming in, there's always a possibility. There isn't a lot of talk of that now. It's still about continuation of proceeding at the current pacing of immigration.

Got it. Okay. And then maybe lastly, as we kind of wrap things up, I guess, we talk about this all the time with Rogers kind of where the leverage is today in the 5x ZIP code, everyone always wants to see a quick answer, an asset sale. And everyone throws out the Cogeco stake or the Blue Jays, and that's never going to happen, it seems. But you keep talking about this noncore stuff that you can sell. Can you just tell me what the noncore thing is that you're going to sell, so I can do it in my model.

So the largest part of that is real estate. We've got a few buildings that make up somewhere in the range of $400 billion, $400 billion to $500 billion, depending upon how successful we are. There's a couple of properties that are maybe a little bit longer lived. There's 2 properties in particular. One is an office building in Central Toronto on Bloor Street, that used to have is in my office, it's vacant. It's -- so we're going to get rid of cost when we sell it. And it is a prime redevelopment opportunity as a mixed-use condo rather than as a small office tower. So that one is underway in terms of finding the right buyer for it. I anticipate we could see an announcement for that before we close out the year in terms of having proceeds. Think of that probably first half next year. We've also got our campus out in Brampton that houses our technology, but it is very sparsely populated relative to the size of the land and the available space in the buildings in terms of how many people we have out there. There is a more efficient use or space for those people that is also underway in terms of finding the right buyer similar time frame, David. The other business pieces we have, I'm saying noncore because it's unsettling to our employees, probably announce that we're looking at -- noncore [indiscernible].

That's [indiscernible].

In our content, that's maybe not as central as [indiscernible] of BofA, but think of it in the context of this is not something that is going to have a meaningful impact on our EBITDA. There is significant value there, maybe another half of that $1 billion target across those 2 entities. And again, processes are underway. Similar time frame, maybe think of that as Q1, Q2 next year in terms of seeing proceeds. It could be that we have one or another announcement again before we close out the year. That $1 billion of proceeds I anticipate coming in, in the first half of 2024, which is fine in terms of my timing, I've got ample liquidity and really, the exercise is to get it in to help manage our EBITDA. Now that $1 billion, and I think most of you have heard this before, that's 0.1 improvement on our leverage. The driver that we are focused on is earnings growth, driving the cost synergies. $1 billion of cost reduction is a half turn improvement in my leverage. And so on the day-to-day, we're not distracted on driving the cost synergies. We're not distracted. These other exercises we'll get to them. You're right to point out the Blue Jays, we're not looking to sell the Blue Jays, the Cogeco stake, it's a store of capital and a value for us. Yes, we've held it for 20 years, but it's an available source of capital. At some point down the road, maybe we'll look at that, too. That's not part of the $1 billion.

Perfect. Guys, thank you so much for being here flying down and doing all the meetings and everything. It was a pleasure to see you again. Thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.

Next up in this room after the coffee break will be Lumen. So thank you so much.