Good morning, everyone. For those who don't know me, my name is Jeff Fan. I'm the Global Head of Equity Research here at Scotiabank. On behalf of the bank, it's my pleasure to welcome you all to our 28th annual Telecom, Media, and Technology conference. As many of you know, this is a special event for me because for about half of those 28 years, I sat up here and asked the questions. So I'm very proud to see how the event has grown, and I'm delighted to be back here to kick things off. For decades, TMT has been a key sector for Scotiabank, and the sector's relevance to our bank and our economy continues to grow.
At Scotiabank and Global Banking and Markets, we're strongly committed to our clients in the TMT sector, whether it's our research, sales, and trading, generating great ideas to help our investor clients, or our bankers coming up with innovative solutions and advice to support our corporate clients' needs. You can count on us to help you achieve your goals by leveraging our global and local market presence and seamless execution across our footprint. Over the next two days, you will hear from highly respected leaders of some of our top TMT companies in Canada and the U.S., who will discuss key themes and trends impacting their industries, such as consumer pricing, regulations, M&A opportunities, and last but obviously not least, the impact of AI. As in prior conferences, our equity research team will be up here leading these conversations. They are Maher Yaghi, Kevin Krishnaratne, Divya Goyal, and Phil Hardie.
We'll also have keynote presentations on each day of the conference. Today, Maher will lead a session on the future of Canadian telecom with my old friend, Adam Scott, who is Vice Chair of Telecommunications at the CRTC. And tomorrow, Kevin will moderate a discussion on AI and the digital health system, featuring a panel of leading digital health providers. So on behalf of GBM, I'd like to thank all our speakers and all of you being in the room today and for your participation and continued support and trust. We hope you enjoy the conference and that you'll find the presentations valuable and insightful. So without further ado, let me bring up Maher, who will introduce our first guest to kick off the event. Thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone. So first off, we'll start with Rogers. And as you know, we have Tony and Glenn here. Thank you for joining us for our conference again this year.
Thanks for having us. Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Let's dig in because unfortunately, we only have 30 minutes, and we're going to have to cover a lot of topics. We're going to try to cover wireless, cable, balance sheet, M&A. So maybe we'll start with wireless. It's a topic that has affected investor attention, attracted a lot of investor attention last year. It has caused a lot of headaches for investors as well because of the pricing over the last two years has been difficult in the industry. So maybe we'll talk about first on the quantity side. How do you view 2025 in terms of loading in a period where immigration is slowing down in Canada?
A lot of investors think that when loading slows down, companies try to become more aggressive. But actually, this is not what happened in the U.S. We saw growth in loading come down, but pricing went up at the same time. So it doesn't have to be negative all the time. How do you feel about the wireless market right now in terms of loading compared to last year and within your guidance approach for 2025?
As you said, Maher, we look at both the volume as well as the ARPU. They're very much both that we're trying to tackle at the same time. They don't have to necessarily be exclusive of each other, as you said. When you look at long-term cycles, we look to the U.S. We saw them come out with very moderate volumes, a market that's growing 2.5% or so, with good ARPU performance. We've seen as we came into the beginning of this year, as we look to the industry and what our competitors are doing in terms of pricing, coming off the back of last year with a lot of pressure on their ARPU, we're seeing good positive signs in that direction.
But before I get there, if I bring it back to the size of the market, when we look to 2024, the market grew by about 4% in total. So it was still a healthy growth rate overall. But in the back half of the year, we did see a contraction in the rate of growth, but it's still a market that's growing. Against that backdrop, we still added 500,000 mobile customers. So there continues to be good growth, and we balanced it with stable ARPU. And so as we move into this year, our estimate is we'll probably see growth at about 3%, plus or minus a few basis points, which is really driven by penetration gains, which is about 2.5%-2.7% is our estimate. And then the rest is organic or new to Canada, which is much smaller.
We'll sort of see what happens towards the back half of the year in terms of government policy, but we can talk about that later on. But that's how we see sort of the volume right now. As we look to this first quarter, it is down significantly year on year because last year we still had strong immigration and new to Canada in the first quarter, and it slowed down in the subsequent quarter. So on a year-on-year basis, we are seeing what we expected in terms of lower net volume in the market. But as I said, it was expected as a result of that, but still healthy growth. And then the other piece of it is ARPU, as we've talked about. And that one will continue to react to our competitors. We look to be very price disciplined.
And you saw most players come out of the fourth quarter season with some pretty good discipline in various categories. We continue to focus on the Rogers brand. And that's really CAD 50, CAD 60 and above in terms of price points. Almost all our net adds are in that category. And that's a combination of gross, but also the work we do in upselling both chatr and Fido customers to the Rogers brand. A lot of attention around flanker pricing. And over the last few weeks, we saw a bit of a competitive promotional period. Those have all left the market.
This morning.
As of this morning, and so, but I always emphasize it's a portion of the market. It's not the total market. We've effectively competed in that space with the prepaid brand, and that's allowed us to not only compete effectively in terms of gross adds and net adds in that segment, but it also allowed us to not reprice the Fido base and continue to focus on upselling Fido customers to the Rogers brand.
Okay, so on low end, our forecast here at Scotiabank is that we're going to see growth in subscribers at 3%, so in line with your views. But just on the ARPU side, what are you hoping to see as we move throughout the year? Are you expecting prices to go up on a planned basis, or you would be happy if prices stayed where they are right now?
I think we're focused on pricing constructs that really present a simple value proposition, put more value. So far, it's been predominantly based on data or tonnage is what we call it. And those buckets have gotten bigger and bigger. What we're seeing is a trend on cap plans to reduce those because they've effectively become unlimited when you're talking 50+ Gb. The average usage still sits at around 10 - 12 Gb per month. And so these large data buckets become equivalent to unlimited. Now, mind you, on Fido, it is on the 4G network, and our competitors pretty much do the same. What you should expect us to see is effectively improving the pricing through better managing the data caps. And we'd like to see how the market responds to that and how the competition responds to that.
But continue to look to the Rogers value proposition that'll evolve more to what you see in the U.S. in terms of functionality, video quality, ability to toggle whether or not roaming is included or not. And so expect our value proposition to evolve that way, which we think will be contributors to ARPU growth. On balance for the year, we continue. It's tough to predict because you don't know what the market does and we have to respond to it. But you should expect us to be very disciplined in our pricing approach and our value proposition. But on balance, if we, our models and the guidance we provided, we're based on stable ARPU for this year. So we'll have to see what happens and transpires predominantly in the summer months as we head into back to school.
Okay. Let's look at maybe broadband and cable. You made a big bet on Shaw, and we've seen the decline that you started the year with in 2024 slowly improve, and you exited the year flat on revenue growth. How should we think about 2025 in terms of your cable business? Can you continue to improve the rate of growth, or we should expect it to be mostly flat like you exited 2024?
Yeah. On the cable side, there's a few dynamics. As you said, we're pleased with the progress we made throughout 2024 to return that business back to growth, and we exited the fourth quarter with growth, albeit very modest, but the objective was to get on the right side of zero and have a business that is growing top line, and we did that through two main things. One, improving our market share on internet, and the second piece of it is just coming back to price discipline and some price adjustments that were put through and a few other things that I'll talk about in a moment, but it was good to see that while at the same time continuing to improve efficiency and end the year with very strong margins in that business, so as we look to this year, there's a couple of things we look to.
One is where we have our wireline footprint, how we're doing in gross add share, but also in churn. And it's different between the east and the west. And we've talked about it before. Our focus in the west is predominantly on gross adds. That's been relatively weak compared to the competition. And in the east, it's been about churn. And the churn drivers, a bit of price, but more so network capacity. And so we've been, you'll hear us talk about implementing what we call mid-split, which is sort of the precursor to DOCSIS 4 that improves not only network capacity, but the stability of the internet. And you're seeing that in the awards we're getting from umlaut and Ookla in terms of most reliable internet. And that's been our focus. And so we like what we see in terms of subscriber gains where we have our wireline footprint.
We also embarked in 2024 in competing for internet in the markets where we don't have wireline, notably Southwestern Ontario, places like Oakville, and also Quebec. And that's been a very good opportunity for us and has contributed to subscriber gains as well as revenue gains. And you've seen us, the strength of the product exceeded our expectations in the marketplace. And you saw us adjust the pricing on that as well as we increased the speeds. And consumers love the simplicity of it, as did small businesses. And so we're going to look to that to continue to be a net revenue growth driver for us. The technology with creating lanes or network slicing is what you might hear now is going to allow us to put our Xfinity video platform on the 5G modem as well.
And so a customer, doesn't matter where you are in Canada, isn't really going to care about what network they're on if they're on the wireless or a wireline network. It'll be the complete Rogers suite of products that they can get in their home. And so we're really excited about that opportunity that we'll continue to push on. Included in our cable results is also business. And our emphasis there has been on small business where we were underpenetrated. And we like what we're seeing there, approaching double-digit growth rates. And that's in both the west and the east. So very good performance there as well. So those are some of the components. The offset is the cord cutting and the video declines that we continue to see in the 3%-4% range.
And it's always important to highlight that while we're gaining on internet, it's a 100% margin product. The video piece, while we lose the revenue, it's at a 40%-50% gross margin product. And so it's trying to get that balance and make sure we index properly on volume and pricing for internet that is going to fuel the growth of that business. We'll continue to focus on efficiency, but the natural mix shift will also continue to give us strong margins in that cable business.
So as we look for the rest of this year, throughout 2025, expect to see a business that in our guidance modeling, we had a stable, relatively flat with some growth, but very modest for the year. Now, if some things work in terms of the bull case that we have for it, then you'll see more. And you'll see most of that fall to the bottom line. But we want it to be balanced in the way we thought about it for guidance.
All right. It's hard to break MLSE from the balance sheet from your decision to think about selling a portion of your backhaul. But I'm going to try and see how we can manage that discussion first. So maybe on the MLSE side first. You made that transaction, I think, about two years ahead of what you thought you might do it. So that put some pressure on your balance sheet. Why did you feel that you needed to do that transaction? And when do you think you can monetize that asset over time and how?
So two things. One, I think it's important to stress that some of the things we are doing, have been doing, and working on the balance sheet side, we're independent of the MLSE transaction. We had things in the works. We had made commitments that we intend to fulfill in terms of where we want to be on de-levering. And Glenn will speak to that in a moment. And so you can't always pick the timing, but we had the opportunity to buy out our competitor's share of MLSE. And our strategy for sports and entertainment was, which we don't get any value in our share price today, but there's significant assets that we already had in terms of ownership of the Blue Jays and Sportsnet, which is the leading sports broadcaster. And then we had our 37.5% stake in MLSE.
Team values continue to grow at a very healthy rate. We saw some more recent transactions in terms of an NBA team as well as an NFL team. They're attracting significant value growth. When the opportunity presented itself, our strategy has been the way we thought about sports was to consolidate, bring out the synergies in the near term, but importantly, surface that value for our shareholders. That is still the guiding principle for us. It's going to take a bit of time. It isn't something that'll happen quickly. That's the direction of travel that we have.
Surfacing value, as we've talked about with some of you, could be a number of different alternatives, including bringing in private investors for it. We'll continue to work that through. Right now, we're focused on getting the transaction closed. But the objective and the end goal for us is to really surface that value and have the right ownership structure for those assets that benefit the synergies we get today with Rogers Telecom, but importantly, surface the value for Rogers shareholders.
So with that, on your Q4 call, you mentioned that you're still working on the structured deal. But you did not provide any additional commentary about what more has to be done to get the deal closed. Can you share anything with our audience today about or an update on that?
Sure, so the transaction itself is, these are intricate and complex transactions that I've come to appreciate simply take more time than I had estimated back when we first announced in October, but we continue to make progress. We're working with the investor. The steps in the transaction are making sure we have the structure right, making sure we have the credit rating agencies aligned with appropriate equity treatment. If we don't have equity treatment, the transaction doesn't happen, and so we focused on that from day one, and that continues to be aligning, and then it's rolling the assets themselves, and the assets consist of microwave and fiber backhaul from our cell towers to our core, so it goes from the edge of the cell tower to the edge of the core in a region of the country, so it's not all of our infrastructure.
It's a portion of it, a regional portion of it. And then the investor will come in and buy a half interest. And so the steps really are getting the transaction structure correct, making progress on that, and then rolling those assets into the entity and then closing. And so I don't have. I'm not going to give you a date or a time as to when we will complete all of that. But I'm pleased with the progress we're making. And I'll leave those comments at that. I'll restate. They're complex transactions. And there's a lot of interdependencies. And we also have to keep in mind that we've got to make sure that the day-to-day business is able to carry on, whether it's with respect to the impact on the cash flow, but also just the day-to-day operation.
And so that's really what we've been focused on to make sure that the structure is helpful to the balance sheet and not in any way restricting on our operations. And then in the meantime, since year-end, we've closed our CAD 4 billion hybrid securities issue. That gets 50% equity treatment. So that had the impact of raising CAD 2 billion of equity support for the balance sheet. That coupled with the CAD 7 billion transaction, presuming that we're successful in bringing that to a close, that will have the effect of bringing CAD 9 billion of equity onto our balance sheet. Our year-end leverage of four and a half times then reduces to somewhere in the range of three and a half, 3.6 times before closing on the MLSE purchase.
And then that coupled with our organic delivering through the year free cash flow, we still have abundant free cash flow after our dividends that supports paying down debt. Every CAD 1 billion dollars of debt we can pay down is a 0.1 improvement in our leverage. Every CAD 200 million of EBITDA we create organically will also bring EBITDA in with closing on the consolidation of MLSE. Every CAD 200 million that we bring in on EBITDA is another 0.1 reduction in leverage. And so we're making steady progress on lowering debt, bringing equity in, but also on the organic side of paying down debt. And so I'm pleased with the progress. We're a little bit ahead of schedule from where we had first indicated three years from the acquisition. We'd be back to where we wanted to; we were pre-Shaw. We're getting within that range. You're right.
MLSE was a little bit accelerated, but it was always on the roadmap for us to ingest, look after it on the balance sheet, and surface the value that we think those assets have a value of about CAD 15 billion. And they're nowhere on the share price valuation right now. And so part of the exercise, a critical part of the exercise, is surfacing that value.
So if I hear you properly, your advice is to keep the structured deal in any forecast investors would have for you in 2025 as still very possible to close.
Yes.
Yes.
It's very possible.
We continue to work with our investor on it. And as I say, we continue to make progress. I'm not rushing it because it's got to be done right. But it's never fast enough, but I'm pleased with the progress we're making.
We moved forward since Q4's conference call and work is still.
Work is still progressing.
Okay. That's good to hear. Maybe I'll go back to the balance, the leverage, because when you signed up, when you bought Shaw, you made a guidance that you're going to go back to the same leverage that you had prior to the acquisition in three years. We're two years into the acquisition now.
Yes.
Does that now include MLSE? Are we thinking that we can return to pre-Shaw leverage even with the MLSE transaction within three years of the acquisition?
Yes. I think that's going to entail, as Tony and I both referred to, surfacing the value. However, we choose to do that. I think MLSE, we're not looking to ingest MLSE, own 100% of that, 100% of our sports and media assets and be done. That doesn't surface the value. And so the complete exercise of working through bringing in the acquiring the 75% stake, combining it with our sports and media assets, including the Jays, and surfacing that value, that provides another opportunity for bringing equity capital into the balance sheet. So yes, that remains the plan.
Just today, tariff news and election also on the horizon. When you set the guidance, I'm sure you have pluses and minuses and you try to manage all the potential scenarios. But can you tell us about your views about how tariffs, if, for example, are hurting the economy, could potentially affect how you view the business environment for you in 2025? And also any views on federal election impact on your business?
Yeah. I'll start with the tariff piece. The tariffs don't directly impact us in terms of our business. Our suppliers are predominantly Canadian-based or non-U.S. source in terms of hardware and things like that. So in terms of direct impact to us, it's marginal, extremely small. But we do have the broader concerns of what it means for the economy. Now, our business has always shown resiliency to economic downturns. But we do worry in the sense that when they're prolonged, consumer behavior, and in particular, business and small business demand, reprice will filter into the market. So we think about it in that context. In putting out our guidance, we certainly thought about those potential impacts. And you see that in the guidance we put out there. But they're always difficult to predict in terms of where that goes. The second piece of it relates to the federal government.
We are heavily regulated, and so direction of government policy matters a lot to us, and so as we look to how things play out in the next little while, our view is when we did guidance, not a lot changes, which is probably realistic in a very short period of time as you think about it, but we look to a potential election to give us the things that are important to us. One is population growth, and how does a government, and hopefully it's a majority government, so they can take a long-term public policy view with respect to our industry? We think that's important because our investment cycles are 20, 30, 40-year cycles, and so we need a government that has the confidence to put in place policies that are going to provide the right type of competition over the long term.
Population growth is one, and the policy on that, and how do we grow as a country? We do have organic, but immigration and all the other categories are important as well in the long-term policy on that. But the second piece really relates to how the government thinks about and continues to support facilities-based competition. This industry has the best networks in the world, including the U.S. in terms of performance. What you have seen over the last little while is prices effectively coming down. And we've talked about that earlier. And so you see the impact of competition. But what's important is to continue to encourage all the telecom players to invest. And policies in terms of access to networks like TPIA are important and how they think about it.
But the second piece of it is if there is access, how much, and what's the cost of that in terms of prescribed rates. And I would say for the most part, the government continues to support facilities-based. On the pricing side, they don't always get it right. And you see we have a dispute right now with the CRTC in terms of MVNO pricing and a decision they did on that. So they don't always get it right. But it's important as long as that pricing is based on a full costing so that the entity that makes the investment is recouping that investment, then that's healthy competition in our view. And so we'll look to the government and any new government continuing to have that philosophy and in fact reinforce it as we move forward.
Maybe the last question I wanted to ask you, how important is the seven-year window that the CRTC allows MVNOs to access and piggyback on your network to remain unchanged when we get to the end of the seven-year window? Because we've seen in the past some instances where the CRTC does push out the timeline for some regulation if they see the new entrants or the smaller guys get into a bad position. How important is that seven-year window for you when you think about the next set of investment in 6G in wireless?
Yeah. It's a really good question, Maher. It's extremely important for the reasons I talked about. The construct of having a seven-year cliff is probably not the best structure. I think the government should look to a program where there's an escalating and progressive level of investment over the seven-year term because to expect something to happen in year eight is just not realistic. And so I think the government could probably do a better job of forcing the investment obligations that come with spectrum acquisitions on the smaller players. So that's one. But two, to the extent it is the seven years, then they have to get the pricing right in terms of the rates. And that'll balance itself out.
And so while ideally you want to see the investments for a number of reasons, just to put it bluntly, players have to have at-risk capital. That's what creates healthy competition. And a variable rate model, while it does some things in the short term, it really isn't a long-term fix. But as I said, to the extent the rates are appropriately set, they sort of balance themselves out.
Okay. Right at the last minute, last second. So thank you very much for your presence here today. Hope to see you next year.
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Thank you.