All right, last telecom we kept Rogers to the end, so you had time to come back from Florida. So thank you for coming, Tony and Glenn. Glad to have you. Maybe I'll start with cable. Let's start with the reason why you bought Shaw. We saw results on the cable side that has fluctuated, slightly declining a little bit over the last couple of quarters. What are your goals for cable and how you think you can turn that business to turn into growth in 2024, 2025, and the next couple of years?
Great. Yeah, I'll get into it. First off, thanks everyone for being here, and thanks for hosting us. I probably should clarify, coming back from Florida from a board meeting, I'm not taking my eye off the ball here.
Thank you for making it happen.
Yeah. In terms of cable, that's just like every part of the business. We're focused on returning top line to growth, and it really is going to fundamentally be based on getting our market share up in both the East and West, and you're starting to see that already come in. In the West, it's really been about the gross adds in terms of sales efforts, and I'll come back to some of the things we've been doing there. But certainly, as you think about all the channels, whether it's the retail channel, field sales, and outbound sales from our call centers, all three of those have been ignited, and we like what we see in terms of gross adds sales growth there while we continue to maintain churn. In the East, it's more about churn and some of the things there.
And so you can imagine we're very focused on what are the churn drivers and tackling those one by one, week by week, on what those are. And we like what we see in terms of our growth in subscriber. You saw some of that in Q1 come in nicely, and you'll sorry, in Q4, and you'll continue to see that in Q1. So clearly, it's focused on the customer and making sure that we're growing there while we maintain ARPA with slight growth in ARPA. And ARPA is really going to come from internet ARPU growth as customers continue to move up the speed tiers to higher value segments. So we like the way the model between ARPA, internet ARPU, and subscriber growth is trending. So that's at a macro level. Underneath that, a few things we're looking at.
One is our cable numbers include enterprise, and that business has been another one that we haven't talked about revenue synergies as part of the SHA transaction. But what is coming in nicely is in the mid to small, particularly in the West, a lot of what we're seeing in consumer, we're seeing on the enterprise side as well in terms of bundling. And so when you look at our enterprise side, both wireline and wireless is growing at double digits. So we like what we see there. We are seeing the synergies come in, and we're quite enthusiastic about how we're playing in that space. What you will see over the next little while is more consolidation of our product set across the country so that we're offering the same very simple business product set to our customers.
That's part of the synergy and cost savings that we have on the enterprise side. With Shaw closing, we cover two-thirds of the country in terms of homes passed with our wireline product. We cover the entire nation with wireless, but we're now focused on expanding our services to the one-third of homes we don't pass. What you saw us about a week and a half ago is relaunch our fixed wireless access product in a much more simplified way. It is a product priced at CAD 50, and I would say it's at market. We aren't looking to what I would call buy share. The product's worth every penny in terms of the CAD 50, 100 megs of speed, and no overages for customer, and it's a terrific customer experience, and we're selling it nationally.
Simple to deploy.
Simple to deploy.
Simple to buy and run.
Yep. And with our 5G network and the capacity we have on 5G, it is a low-cost option to get additional revenue, and so we're quite excited about that. As I said, we've launched it nationally, and there are use cases, even where we have wireline, where it makes sense because it could be a temporary worker, could be a student that isn't interested in a long-term contract or relationship, and they're in and out, and so it's easy to set up, easy to bring back, and so it works well. But in particular, in Southwestern Ontario and in Quebec, where we don't have a wireline network, we're seeing good traction on the product, and so it's playing its role. And then we're also wholesaling in those territories as well.
In the fourth quarter, we bought Comwave so that we had a wholesale platform, and our vision is to be able, across the entire nation, is to have complete overlap between our wireless and wireline networks so that we can offer the complete suite of Rogers products in a bundled capacity. So that's sort of an overview of the primary drivers of our cable business in the next little while.
I'm not going to spend too much time on fixed wireless, but it's a technology that I find very fascinating, and we had Verizon yesterday talk about it. Any concern about network capacity as you roll that product out?
Yeah, it's something that before we rolled it out, we wanted to be careful because some of the learnings from the U.S. was exactly that, getting network congestion. And so we're being very careful in how we deploy it. There's, as I said, good speeds, but we are particularly focused on a tower-by-tower basis as to what capacity looks like. By mid-year, we already announced testing and deployment of what we call network slicing, and so by mid-year, we will be deploying that. So that way, and if you're not familiar with the technology, we essentially create lanes for different types of users, and we talked about it in the announcements. First responders, for example, could have a dedicated lane so they never get congested.
We would have a dedicated lane for fixed wireless access so that our smartphone users don't get congested as a result of the fixed wireless access . And part of network slicing is it also enables a much more efficient data transmission so that we can have enhanced capacity, and that's what's going to allow us to be much more liberal in selling a complete suite of products, our Ignite platform, which includes video.
Great. I know it's a product that will be slow in terms of deployment but has good potential in the marketplace for a certain population group that, like you said, looking for low-priced, easy access, fast in and out, so.
I think that's right, Maher, and that's how I'd like to emphasize is it's a good product, and it has a demographic. There's a lot of, I would say, hype around it, and I don't think we want to oversell what it is in terms of some of the stuff you've seen in the U.S., for example, that have come in at low pricing. That's not the way we're approaching the marketplace with that product.
Okay. Maybe I'll turn over maybe on the integration side and talk about what you have achieved in terms of operational changes and what's left to do to achieve that CAD 1 billion of cost savings that you talked about. What are the major still unfinished businesses there?
Good question. I'll start with the summary, and I would say you saw us exit Q4 with a very good run rate on the synergies. The majority of them, we talked about CAD 1 billion over 24 months, and we were well on our way at the end of Q4. As we exit Q1, really good progress on top of that, and Glenn will talk to the specific numbers on it. But if we look at the things that we want to do, the back office, a lot of the customer-facing things have happened. So what you should expect to see this year is a continuation of the brand integration. We started with Shaw together or Rogers together with Shaw, or you might see in some things Shaw powered by Rogers.
What you're going to see now is a much cleaner branding of the Rogers name, and that'll happen this year. There are a number of cost benefits associated with doing that, and so you'll see that on the branding side, and there are good customer benefits as well. In terms of integrating some of our customer interaction points, there are a few cleanup things in terms of call center, how some of the calls get routed, etc. That's all going to be done by, if not the end of this quarter, certainly by the middle of Q2 in terms of those customer-facing touchpoints. And then the last piece that we talk about are what I would call back office items. ERP would be a good example, and we always said those would take two years.
I would say we're slightly ahead on those, but much of the synergies we were expecting from things like that, we've been able to realize those. So all that to say, we are well on our way to achieving CAD 1 billion, well ahead of schedule, and what we're focused on now is making sure the customer experience continues to be seamless. We always talk about revenue synergies. That'll be tougher to quantify, but you'll see that in our top line growth. I talked about the enterprise as a good example.
In cable, essentially in cable, or in wireless, you think?
You see it in wireless as well because a lot of the upside and I've said this previously, our fastest growing markets in wireless are BC and Alberta because we have a whole host of previously Shaw customers that are interested in the Rogers brand that would have been with a competitor. That combination and co-branding and the introduction of a bundling has been upside on the wireless side for us, and so it's hard to sort of pull out what exactly related to the Shaw transaction, but you'll see it in our growth numbers for both wireless and cable.
And then on the numbers, you saw last year's results, CAD 375 million of cost synergies realized in year, CAD 750 million run rate. We have added to that through the first quarter, and so we'll have good progress on that. Still substantially indexed toward the employee side of the integration, getting the teams properly balanced and set on their priorities and their reporting lines. We had a little bit more in the first quarter that we did there. Very happy with how that's filled in, and we've started leaning in more than started. We've leaned in on the vendors.
That's the, I think, the piece where there's the most opportunity now for 2024 to make further gains on cost reductions, whether it's large vendors such as Comcast, our media content providers, as well as just the nuts and bolts collection of vendors across all the different areas of just what it takes to run our buildings, our offices, and operations. And so we're starting on the largest priority files. We've already started leaning in on those. I expect some of those will come in in the first quarter. As we fill in the CAD 1 billion, and it's not going to take us two years to fill that in, the conversation will start then moving more toward the year-over-year growth in revenue and EBITDA and growth in our margin, not just within cable but predominantly within cable.
Some of the benefits are at the head office level as well and some within wireless, mostly within cable, though. So you'll see continued margin expansion as we move through this year, but most of the commentary, once we fill in that CAD 1 billion synergy bucket, will be, as Tony has said, around revenue and EBITDA growth, and there's still more opportunity there.
Okay. Maybe I'll touch on wireless because I think the market and myself included got concerned a little bit, let's say, with the churn levels going up for all three incumbents in Q4 pretty materially and surprisingly versus previous periods. So can you explain how a higher churn number, what it means to running a telecom business, and what is the cost of that, and how you expect it to behave going forward? Are we thinking that this can decline?
Maybe some of the learnings you had in Q4 about competing against Quebecor .
Yeah. A couple of things there. I think it's helpful context. In this industry, we've always looked that higher churn is bad, largely because the cost of acquisition was so expensive, especially in a handset-subsidized model, and churn still is bad. Losing a customer is not what we strive to do, so lower churn is always better. But when we think about it in the context of what does it mean for the financials, the economics are different than they used to be. Has the industry here in Canada moved to handset financing? What you see is, and you see it in our fourth quarter financials, handsets are essentially a pass-through to the customer, and when you look at equipment revenue and equipment costs, they generally offset each other on a small margin either way, but it generally is flat when you look at it for multi-quarters.
The other thing that's happened is we moved to more efficient channels, including digital. The cost of acquisition has come down substantially, and so when you look at Q4, notwithstanding heightened churn year-on-year, what you do see is strong margins and margin expansion, and that's a reflection of some of the things I just talked about as well as productivity. But the point is the way we traditionally thought about higher churn as an economic hindrance to margin expansion isn't necessarily the case. The other piece of it is, as we unpack it, as you would expect as to what's happening and driving the higher churn, a little bit, of course, is fourth quarter promotional offers that you would always expect in the fourth quarter.
But the second piece of it is really the nature of the market now has a much more significant component of folks coming in and out of Canada, whether it's temporary workers or foreign students, and that number has not been insignificant over the last little while in terms of growth. And so what you saw is gross add for the whole market be up substantially in the fourth quarter, but you saw churn come up as well, and that captures some of that exit that you see happening. So those are some of the dynamics to keep in mind, and so what we see is you look to Q1, you'll still see heightened year-on-year churn, not as much as you saw in Q4 because the promotional intensity really isn't there to drive some of the other things that you see there.
You asked about how we think about competitive intensity, particularly with Quebecor, and I would say they generally have been very consistent in what their value proposition is with their CAD 29 and CAD 34 lead offers, and we compete fine using our flanker brand on that. You would see in Q1 we're predominantly priced CAD 5 higher. We believe we have a network advantage that commands that, and our market share numbers clearly indicate at that segment that we compete well beyond just price. But it's important to keep in mind that's at the bottom end, top end of prepaid, bottom end of postpaid, that you see that competition happening. But then there's competition at the premium space as well in terms of our unlimited plans, and that's where we over-index.
So if you're to look at our total portfolio in the fourth quarter, more than three quarters of our gross and net adds came in on the premium brand, which we've said consistently for the last two years. That is our focus, to continue to focus on the Rogers brand, and we like the way that strategy is playing out for us.
Maybe I'll follow up in terms—I mean, you've been in the industry for a long time, Tony, and you've seen the ups and downs with new competitors coming in and going out. I'll ask you the two-part question because there's a part where you can talk about Rogers, how you're responding to the increased competition. But overall, if you look at the industry in general, how would you say it's behaving and the expectation as for 2024 versus prior years in terms of competitive intensity, in terms of cash flow generation? And maybe then you can talk about Rogers specifically.
Yeah. Well, I think as we talk about the competitive intensity and what it means for the financials all the way down to cash flow after CapEx, I think I would say a few things. It's important to keep in mind that all of this is happening within the context of a very healthy market in terms of growth. In 2023, we saw unprecedented growth, frankly, in terms of SIM cards in the mobile space in Canada of over 5%, and half of that was driven by continued penetration growth in Canada, and the other half was driven by the new-to-Canada category.
As we look to 2024, we continue to see healthy trends in penetration growth, and in terms of the new-to-Canada, with some of the limitations that the government put in for foreign students, I would say we're seeing the early signs of that that moderate that, but it hasn't significantly reduced it. So that's why we still see very healthy growth overall, even with that. So it's against that backdrop that we're all competing for competitors in every market with multiple brands, and when we say we see increased competition, I don't know that I'd put it as increased. I would say if you rewind the clock to three years ago where there was no transaction in play, there was quite a bit of activity in the marketplace, and each player approached it differently.
So what I would say if I look at the marketplace now, Quebecor's approach is to focus on price, and that's always been the play for the Freedom brand and, frankly, for the Videotron brand and Fizz, obviously, as well. The dynamic we see different that's worked well for us is while we pivoted to the premium, we saw our primary competitors focus on their flanker brands and spend more time competing on what I would call the flanker side of it and in the lower end. The introduction of 5G to their flanker brands is the opposite of the strategy we went. 5G is only available on Rogers, and so I would say the dynamics are different in terms of how each of us are picking where we want to put the competitive intensity, and so that's a little different.
I don't know how to play out this year in terms of what the competition is going to do, but we're going to continue on our strategy, which is our value offering is more than just price. We will pulse in and out when we need to in competitively intense periods. March would be a great example, but we're going to do it on more than just headline price for the most part. Just last week, we announced our new roaming plan, so we're trying to do things that are timely, especially with March break. An all-in bundle that includes roaming is kind of the value proposition, so we're trying to be more creative in what's most relevant in a value, what's the value proposition to customers in that moment. So we're trying to be more thoughtful than just the headline price.
We have creative things like financing, for example, by the handset on the Rogers Mastercard. We're a licensed bank, and so we're now leveraging that asset. We've had it for 10 years, but now we're leveraging it to allow customers to amortize it over four years. Handsets are lasting a lot longer. We're seeing an average of 36 months now, and so that essentially cuts the payments on handsets in half, and we're having really good traction with that. So expect to see more of those, what I would call, more thoughtful value propositions for the customer in 2024 than just trying to compete on price alone.
Okay. Maybe I'll ask a question that maybe Glenn will also want to interject. When you think about guidance for 2024, which assumption would you say is the most critical that you need to achieve to hit that guidance for the year in terms of free cash flow? Is it RPU growth? Is it subscriber growth? I know it's a combination of all these, but which one is the most critical and the most risky, let's say, to achieve?
I'll start at a high level. It's a couple of things. I would say on the top-line side, in a growing market, we don't underestimate the importance of market share. We think that's important to ride that part of the wave while either maintaining stable or growing RPU at the same time. We don't see a world where we would buy market share at the expense of RPU. That model doesn't work for us because the value proposition of our product inherently continues to go up. Usage continues to go up. The reliance on internet and smartphones continues to go up, and consumers continue to buy more and more from us.
And so we want to have a balanced view on ARPA and ARPU growth, but just because the size of the market is growing at a very healthy pace, we see it in wireless, and as housing supply, not so much this year but in the outer years, to the extent the governments can figure out how to unleash the housing supply, then we'll see that benefit the growth in the size of our cable market. But as well as we expand in territories outside of our traditional areas like Southwestern Ontario and Quebec, then that provides the growth opportunity. And so that's the top line, and then as we look to margins and cash flow, that is really going to be about the efficiency things that we've been talking about.
Synergies are largely there, but that doesn't mean we stop on productivity, and so there's quite a few things, some of which Glenn has talked about, third-party spend that will continue to be an opportunity for us.
Yeah. I think the only elements I'd add to that is you hear in Tony's answer, it's real growth for us. It's not price increases. It's not looking at melting revenue either. It's adding customers, whether it's expanding footprint, finding other technologies to grow our customer base, and then for me, it's following that balance where we have flat to just the right side of zero growing RPU. And if you look at wireless as an example, we've had consistent 9% overall service revenue growth, 9% or better growth in EBITDA each of the last several quarters. You can build a solid business on that. We've had RPU growth in the range of 1%. That's a perfect mix from my standpoint.
When you ask what's the most critical to follow, for me, the most critical lever I have for looking after our balance sheet and restoring our leverage back to where we've operated previously is earnings growth, and so that's just following the balance of real growth in customers, customer relationships, growing the services that over time will add to our revenue as well, and being prudent on our cost and productivity to expand the margin. We have found that balance over the last several quarters that'll continue through 2024.
Okay. Before I'll ask you a question about what's to come after those synergies are achieved because I think that's an important driver for long-term stock performance, and a lot of investors are focused on what's after. But before that, and you talked about the leveraging, I mean, we always talk about MLSE, but nothing happens. What's preventing?
That used to be true on the Cogeco shares too, Maher.
Yeah. It took a few years, but it happened, so.
To be clear, I think you're talking about MLSE. We haven't been talking about that.
We're focused on operations.
Any assets that you think have high likelihood that we could see some disposition of this year that can help in acceleration of the deleveraging?
We have a couple of business units that are underway, minor, small, not MLSE, not Blue Jays or our media assets. Don't get excited on those. We like those businesses, and we like the appreciation and the asset values there. I'll come back to those ones in a moment, but it's predominantly real estate, some in the synergy category of getting rid of duplicate properties that we have in various cities, particularly out west with the Shaw acquisition, some of it just needing less footprint from what we required pre-COVID. One example is our Dixie Road site out in Mississauga. That one has been underway for some time and is progressing along. I expect to have something there very soon. We have a business unit that I'm hoping to have something also in the coming weeks, and we'll keep looking at those.
With respect to the sports assets, I think it's apparent to everybody in the room and certainly within our conversations that the value of those holdings in Blue Jays, MLSE, Rogers Centre, Scotiabank Arena, that value's not reflected in our share price yet. So to the extent we turn our attention to those assets, don't think of that as looking at a potential sale to generate capital. I've got plenty of other avenues for that. It will be more finding a way to illuminate the tremendous asset value and growth in those properties and using that to help the share price rather than raising capital.
Okay. Then, as I mentioned, post-synergies, and I mean, the big question is can we see Rogers continuing to grow at a materially good pace after all these cost synergies are behind us, which currently is helping grow the company at a higher pace? But when you think about 2025, and I don't expect you to give us guidance here, but how should we think about Rogers in terms of revenue growth, EBITDA growth, capital intensity to run the business over the medium term?
Well, I'll start with the general principle. We continue to focus on Rogers being a growth company. We will always look for efficiency, but we're growing with the nation, so we're fortunate we've got a country that has very healthy population growth, and that feeds into our business model. So on the wireless side, we continue to see good, healthy growth in terms of subscribers, and we'll continue to do what we need to do to get leading share in that. And so that's first and foremost while maintaining and growing RPU is the objective in that, and so we continue to see growth on the wireless side. I talked about on the cable side. That's a real opportunity.
Today, we are underindexed in market share, and we think we've got the right focus to turn that around so that we move to leading share on that, especially as we move to 2025. I've talked about some of the specific tactics, but I would not underestimate the power of the Xfinity product set here in Canada. And as we unveil the future product sets that some of you may have seen Comcast already talking about here in this country, we think we are going to have a product advantage in addition to our distribution advantage as well, and that's going to propel that growth. And then finally, our media growth is centered on sports, which is the fastest segment of media growth anywhere, and so we've got the right foundational assets in media as well.
So it's a combination of those that we see continuing to propel top-line growth. We've always done a good job of translating the flow-through of that revenue to the bottom line for good margin expansion, and we're going to continue to invest what we need to in infrastructure to ensure we have the best network. We're proud of our network. You saw our wireless for the fifth straight year in a row have best network in Canada. As we move to DOCSIS 4 and a lot of work we're doing there and move to the 10G platform, we'll have a product advantage there as well that is going to work for us and continue to provide efficiency and capital so that we've got three businesses, the primary ones being wireless and cable, that we see having very healthy cash flow growth.
Great. Thank you very much, and please stick around. We have a great AI Summit program for you that will follow right away. Thank you.
Thanks, all.