Good morning. Good morning, everyone. My name is Carrie Cook. I'm the Global Head of Investment and Corporate Banking for BMO Capital Markets. I'm here just to welcome everybody to our conference today. This is our 26th anniversary of our media and telecom conference. Over the years, we've seen the sector innovate, grow, and evolve, and we are extremely proud to continue to bring together key industry players, and we look forward to doing this for many more years to come. We're also pleased that this year it is our technology, media, and telecom conference. We've invited and are pleased to announce that we have many leading technology companies in Canada joining us for this year's conference. This will certainly add to some of the themes and the discussions beyond what we've seen in previous years, and we're excited about that.
All of the companies that are joining us today play a mission-critical role in the functioning of our modern economy, as we all know. Increasingly, many of these same companies are going to play a pivotal role in the development of AI applications for businesses and consumers. Importantly, it's not lost on anyone in this room that the shares in these companies are well owned by investment accounts by Canadians across the country, coast to coast. We value the business of the corporates, the institutional accounts, and everybody in this room. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for the relationships that you have with us, and thank you for coming to our conference. As always, your feedback is incredibly important to us. If there's anything we can do to make your day better and to make this conference better going forward, please let us know.
Before we jump into the conference, I just want to make one small point. We have an event called Equity Through Education Trading Day, which happens every year and is happening on September 24 of this year. This year, we will be donating, as we always do, a portion of the Institutional Equity Trading Commissions, along with a portion of BMO Wealth Management's Investor Line and Nesbitt Burns Trading Commissions to various charitable organizations dedicated to helping students pursue their post-secondary ambitions and goals. This is our 21st year of doing this, almost as long as we've been having the conference. To date, the program's raised over $33 million, and we've helped 5,500 students attend post-secondary education. Many of them, we're proud to say, are actually now working for BMO Capital Markets. This program reflects our mission to boldly grow the good in business and, as importantly, in life.
It provides access to education and cultivates what we believe will be the next generation of leaders sitting in this room and standing in front of you. Thank you all for your continued support of this program. Now, with that, let's get back to the conference. I'd like to turn it over to Tim Casey, our Senior Equity Research Analyst, covering telecom services, entertainment, and cable to get things started. Thanks, Tim.
Thanks, Carrie, and thanks, everyone, for coming today. Before we get started, just a couple of housekeeping notes. There'll be safe harbor slides throughout the presentation. I think you're all familiar with them. We are going to do fireside chat format, as always, here. We welcome your questions. There'll be mics in the room, and on the back of your name tag is some information on downloading the app. There's lots of information on the app, and you can also ask questions through the app if you'd rather do that. With that, we'll get started, and I'll invite up Rogers Communications.
Morning, Tim.
Morning.
Morning, Glenn. Morning, Tim.
I think everybody knows these gentlemen.
Morning. Tony, thanks for having us.
Morning, Glenn.
Morning, everyone.
From Rogers. Look, let's start with wireless, Tony. I think investors would be very interested in your assessment of the back-to-school season. The messaging when everyone was reporting second quarter was encouraging. How do you think it went through, and what's your assessment of the wireless market?
You know.
As we approach the end of the back-to-school and end of the quarter, we continue to be encouraged with the market dynamics, the pricing dynamics. When we reported our second quarter, we made it clear at that time that the plans we put in place and the promotional incentives we put in place, that was going to be it in terms of promotional activity. We would respond to the market depending on what the competition did. I would say there were a few instances of some promotional activity beyond what we had. In some cases, we matched, and in some cases, we felt we didn't. I would say overall, I describe the promotional activity as less intense than last year and prior years. We see that as an encouraging sign as we approach the busy period in Black Friday and beyond.
It's always been a good barometer for the last quarter, and it's been encouraging that way. That's against the backdrop of a market that continues to grow. We expected it. If you looked at the last rolling 12 months, for the end of this quarter, we expect the market overall to be at about 3% growth, and most of that coming from penetration, almost all of it coming from penetration. Population growth is really small and insignificant for the reasons we've discussed previously. It's still a growing market, and we'll continue to focus on value propositions that more and more move away from just pricing and other constructs beyond that.
Yeah, maybe let's dig into that a bit. I mean, one of the things that it seemed that you were perhaps focusing a little more on was multi-line discounts or add a line. How are you approaching the market, like you say, beyond just the pure pricing promotion game?
Over the last few months, we've made some changes in terms of, I would say, strategic pricing from a value proposition standpoint. It really focuses on three areas, and I'll touch on them. One is the multi-line. The second relates to device subsidy as kind of that part. The third is bundling with wireline or home internet. Those are the three things that we focused our promotional activity around. To start with the multi-line strategy, it really is a page book out of the way we saw the U.S. market evolve three, four years ago. What we do know, if you were to look at the number of lines per account, we're at almost half of what the U.S. is. There are two things that are important stats. One is churn on multi-line is way down, sometimes half of what it otherwise is on a single line.
The second is when you look at the price segment of the $30 to $40, $30 to $45 price points, most of those are second, third, and fourth lines in the marketplace. Rather than trying to compete in that space with a single line, and we've talked about our strategy there, it is really to use Chatr or prepaid in the $30 to $40 segment rather than Fido. What we're pivoting to is offering a 5G line on Rogers at incremental discounts when you add second, third, and fourth line. The economics continue to be strong, just given it's an incremental add-a-line. We see it as, while on the surface you look at it and sort of see it as dilutive to ARPU, we think on balance it continues to drive revenue growth.
With the first line likely moving to one of the premium tiers, we think on balance it'll help ARPU. The second piece of it that I talked about and what you will see us, what we have done, continue to do is device subsidy or discounts, tiering those depending on the plan you come in on. More strongly, what you will have seen, and even more so in the fourth quarter, one of the lower price lines will come with little to no discount and then graduated from there. Again, not dissimilar to what you see in the U.S. market that seems to have played out well. The last piece is incentives to bundle with home internet, whether it's the wireline or a fixed wireless access product. There's a small discount on that, generally of $10 in putting those together.
All of those are really aimed at going into the marketplace with something other than just price. The second is focus on increasing share of customer wallet.
OK. You mentioned penetration is still a growth driver. Is that, from what your team assesses, mostly second lines for individuals, a work and a personal line? I would assume we can't go too much lower on kids getting a cell phone when they're 10 or something like that. Is that fair?
That's a fair point, Tim. That's sort of primarily where it's coming from. Increasingly, what we're seeing in our enterprise customers with the significant cybersecurity issues that we all face is the need to continue to have the corporate phone as just the corporate phone. It's something even in our own shop and parts of our business, we are starting to implement that. Many of the banks are down that path. It is accelerating.
Yeah. The other service you're marketing extensively right now is direct-to-satellite. I think you're the only one offering it right now. Maybe can you just give us what the initial reaction has been from the public and where you want to take that service going forward? I think it's on beta until November, I believe.
That's right, yeah. To bring everyone up to speed, we did a deal with Starlink. It's the Starlink satellite to mobile, so it's your device that you have today, and it covers all of Canada up to the 58th parallel. If you were to look at all the wireless networks, this expands the coverage by three times. It's pretty significant, particularly given the geography and the resource industries in Canada. The use case, we think, is pretty significant here. We launched it. We also have deals with LinkGlobal as well as Telesat, but they are much further behind in terms of preparedness of going to market. We launched it as a beta. We made it available to all Canadians, irrespective of which service provider you're on. We thought that was the best approach, not dissimilar to the way T-Mobile launched in the U.S.
and has a number of advantages for that. Right now, the service is text only, including 911 texting. Early next year, and it might be even a little earlier, it'll move to data, so apps, and I would say live streaming, and then voice will follow after that, again, sometime in 2026. We were right on the SpaceX roadmap for that. The initial pickup has been strong, very strong. The way we're pricing it in the marketplace, we've done a beta up until November 4, which is when we plan to go commercial. For Rogers customers, we've enabled it automatically without necessarily having to sign up. That's one. For non-Rogers customers, during the beta period, they reach out to us, and we send them an eSIM, and away they go in terms of being able to use it. The demand, the response has been extremely positive.
Once we go to commercial, it's priced at $15 per month for the texting capability. As it expands to data and voice, then we'll relook at the pricing for it vis-à-vis how we're doing with the texting at $15. For customers in the beta trial, it's $10, so they get a $5 discount for 12 months. That's the way we're pricing the product and approaching it. If you're on the Rogers Ultimate tier, then it's included in your plan. That's our approach in that product.
Yesterday, there was a spectrum transaction in the U.S. with Elon Musk buying some mid-band, and U.S. operators sold off. You're a partner with Starlink up here. I guess the theory being that ultimately it makes Starlink perhaps a 5G player. Can you put that in context to the Canadian market? We have heard some questions on, is Elon going to come up here and disrupt the Canadian business as well?
Yeah, there's a couple of things there. One is we have a strong partnership with them, that's one. Two, the dynamics in terms of tower ownership. Having the spectrum is one thing, and there's a difference in supply of spectrum in the U.S. relative to Canada, so that's one. The second is tower ownership. It's a different, I would say, ecosystem as a result of tower sharing and selling towers in the U.S. compared to Canada. Even after one acquires the spectrum, it is a daunting task to then use that because what you need to have happen is the spectrum from the tower to space, but you still need it from terrestrial tower to tower. Having a significant tower network is going to be important as well. We will continue to watch it. As I said, just the economic industry setup here is quite different.
Yeah, OK. Let's switch over to the cable side for a moment. You've got the revenue line on cable on the right side of positive. What got you there, and what gives you confidence you can stay positive on the revenue side on cable?
When we closed Shaw, we had a cable business that was declining 4% top line year on year. Job one for us was to get that to break even and then on the positive side. Very pleased with the speed with which we did that. It's really been anchored on three primary items. One was putting in pricing discipline on the internet side. That was important that we get that right, and it was on the back of having the best internet ubiquitously across our entire footprint. What you've seen, and that required investment, particularly in mid-split and a few other things, and what you've seen through third-party validation is consistently the best internet experience and network. That was important. We like what we see in both the East and the West in terms of pricing strength. That was important.
The second piece of it was the small business and mid-business and increasing our penetration there. Our enterprise business is included in the cable results. That's been a significant opportunity, particularly in the West, for us to increase market share and grow top line there. What we're seeing is very strong wireline growth in the business side of it. The third piece of it is fixed wireless access, something we launched almost a year and a half ago, and it's the wireless home internet. The capability for that continues to grow. What that allowed us to do was address 40% of homes passed in Canada where we don't have a wireline footprint, notably Quebec and certain parts of Southwest Ontario. We went to market with something that was priced at market. When we launched it, it was $55. We've since increased the price just given the strength of the product.
We've increased the speeds. Network slicing has allowed us to give us more confidence with capacity for customers to not only use it for internet, but we just launched it with the Xfinity platform as well. That'll continue to grow. From our perspective, we now have a market that's 6.5 to 7 million homes we didn't have before. We're obviously focused on the bundling of that. Those are the three things that we're focused on that have driven solid growth. The headwinds, obviously, are the video declines and the satellite business, TV satellite business that we acquired from Shaw. Both of those are declining businesses. On the video side, what we've done there is really pivot to our constructs in terms of video offerings and moved away from cable packages that were centered just on linear broadcasting and packaged them with OTT services.
Our basic will include Netflix as well as some other streaming. As you move, we sort of went to simple, good, better, best. As you move up the tiers, more of those streaming services are included at a discount. We've watched that play out in the U.S. with success there. We are following that same roadmap. It's early days, but it seems to be resonating with consumers. Is it going to be enough to actually turn around video? I don't think so, but it's certainly going to slow the decline considerably in our view.
What about the Comcast pipeline? I mean, they've got a lot of engineers down there working on new services. Are you going to be able to market incremental products to customers over the next couple of years?
The Comcast relationship has been a good one for us, and we just renewed that a couple of years ago. It really is two parts. One, having access to the best services that ride on internet and add on to internet and being able to do it in a much more cost-effective way than would otherwise be the case. As you said, they've got tens of thousands of engineers that we just couldn't replicate. It's been a very good partnership for us. This fall, we launched the new OS platform, the streaming service as well. We launched Storm Ready, which is home internet with cellular backup. If there is a line cutter for whatever reason, the wireline internet goes out, it switches over automatically to wireless, which works for us in terms of having both wireless and wireline capabilities.
Home security, Self Protect, is another one that now continues to increase its integration with home automation as well as home video. The product platform, we see all of those products as add-on to internet as the core.
Right. OK. I just want to get, is there any questions on cable or wireless in the room before we move on? OK, let's move on to the sports portfolio, which is obviously, I think, a differentiating factor in your story. Maybe just walk us through next steps. You own 75% of the equity in MLSE now. Where do we go from here? Maybe flesh out some timelines as best you can.
I want to start with the strategy part of it. It's important to continue to highlight that our move more aggressively into sports and entertainment is really building a third pillar of value for Rogers. We have wireless, we have cable, and this will be the third one in terms of growth. We think about each of the businesses as having to grow on their own, capitalize on the synergies for sure, and I'll talk about that. We see it as an area where we already have significant investment. We have 37.5% of MLSE. We own the Jays, Rogers Centre, as well as our media assets, which includes SportsNet, which is a significant cash flow generator for us, as well as radio and TV assets. Our view is to now move to consolidate all of those.
It's an asset base that continues to grow at double digits in terms of value. We also see significant opportunities for synergies as we put them together, not only in terms of costs, but in terms of revenue as well. I always use this stat. Today, in our cable and wireless, we have relationships with about 40% of Canadians. When you include sports and entertainment, we now have relationships with 85% to 90% of Canadians. In a world where every ticket is digital, we know Tim is a hockey fan, Tim is on a phone that might be with a competitor that's two to three years old. If we get this right, the opportunity for us on the cable and wireless side can be significant. It's not the only reason that we're focused on sports and entertainment.
Turning to next steps and capitalization, if I bring it back a bit, just over two years ago, when we closed on Shaw, you'll recall our leverage was 5.3 times on close. At the end of the second quarter, we reported bringing that down to just above 3.5 times. That became critical for us in meeting that threshold for the credit rating agencies and shoring up our balance sheet. We did that through driving synergies and earnings growth, applying free cash flow to paying down debt, as well as several capital initiatives over the last couple of years, some of them in the first half of this year, closing Blackstone, a key component of that.
With getting it down and then with a bond tender, we actually have brought that leverage down right at the quarter end or the start of the third quarter to inside 3.5 times as a result of tendering and creating about $300 million of debt repayment that was non-cash. We bought back bonds that were trading, long-dated bonds we no longer needed in the market, trading below par, and we were able to take the benefit of that. That became critical in going to the credit rating agencies and allowing the runway to recapitalize RSM and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. We still have a minority partner in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. The optimal way of doing this is to bring together 100% of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment with 100% of RSM and bring that to the market, coincident with driving the synergies.
We're focused on working with the minority investor, figuring out the timing. It may be that that comes in as a result of the mutual options we have in mid-2026. It may be we can move through that a little bit quicker. That'll be up to the minority shareholder and negotiations. We now have the runway that we don't have to try and do something to remediate the balance sheet before taking out the minority and driving the benefits of pulling everything together. Once we pull together RSM and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, we'll own all of the major professional sports franchises in Toronto, as well as the major live sports and entertainment venues. That's substantial. We'll own the only two national MLB and NBA franchises in their leagues. Those are substantial. That collection of assets, I don't know of any comparable globally.
The closest parallel I can land on is Formula One, which Liberty Media owns the entire league. In terms of collecting all of the major professional sports franchises in a city the size of Toronto, that's proving to be extremely attractive. Once we pull it together, take it to market, I expect that exercise will be, give it a 12 to 18 or 24 months time frame as opposed to some time in late 2025, early 2026. It's going to be longer because we'll look at solving the minority shareholder first and pulling them together. We now have runway for that having delivered.
What options are on the table to surface the value in the sports assets? What options are you considering to get there?
I think the options are wide open. There's puts and takes with each in terms of public or private. They start, though, with, have you got a collection of assets that are attractive to investors? The number of messages that come in every day from prospective investors, from prospective financial advisors that want to help, are tremendous. There's a tremendous appetite for investing. Taking it private, you wind up having an asset that, you know, theoretically, there's no discount. You'll trade at the private market value. Taking it public, the rationale is, well, maybe there's a discount for public trading when you look at comparable sports and media assets. The simple truth is we all trade at public market values. Rogers Communications itself is a public company that if we're taken private, would have a premium to it. We are looking at all the options.
My expectation is we will bring in minority investors amongst institutional investors. This is a substantial value on our balance sheet, somewhere in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion today, certainly $20 billion when we take out the minority investor. That is more in the realm of institutional investors. When I talk with them, many of them, their preference would be probably private rather than public. They don't need the public markets for liquidity. We have all options open to us. We'll see. The primary motivation for us is to crystallize or monetize that value in the Rogers Communications share price. Right now, it's not valued yet. As I say, $15 billion to $20 billion is substantial.
You've owned sports assets for a long time. Some of those assets have had success in their respective leagues. Have you been able to, when you look back, do you think there's an opportunity to translate that success when it comes back to the core business, back to Rogers? Have you considered things you can do if the Jays continue to have success? What happened when the Raptors won in 2019? Is there anything that you can draw from those instances?
Certainly in terms of, Tim, if that's what you're getting at, the potential synergies with cable and wireless, absolutely. We'll continue to eke those out. There are certainly brand association benefits, depending on how the teams do. There are benefits in terms of being able to cross-sell amongst the various assets. We see that as incremental to the core value of the assets themselves.
As I said earlier, it's not the reason to continue to invest in sports and entertainment. We will make sure that we maximize whatever the cross synergies are. I'd summarize it as we have solid fundamentals in cable, solid fundamentals in wireless in terms of leading growth all the way down to cash flow, with now the opportunity to surface value with sports and entertainment. As Glenn said, the numbers are significant. That is not in our share valuation today.
Right. Maybe if I could just add to that and emphasize, if you look at our EBITDA of approaching $10 billion a year, if we had owned Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment and consolidated it from January 1 of 2025, the combined Rogers Communications Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment EBITDA would have been somewhere in the range of a quarter billion dollars, $250 million. It's a small fraction of what our combined EBITDA is. The emphasis and the priority for us, though, is that those assets are worth somewhere in the range of $20 billion. It's monetizing those assets. They're accretive. They're positive cash flow. They're positive EBITDA. They do not divert attention from management. They're not distracting.
The $15 to $20 billion of asset value there is the prize in terms of getting that monetized and reflected in the Rogers Communications share price for our shareholders and for our capitalization.
Any last questions on the floor?
Maybe just one last one for me. When you assess potential partners, be they private equity or what have you, what would you like to see beyond money from potential partners there?
I think it's finding somebody who's interested in investing, not so that they can get access to players and tickets and locker rooms, but looking for a financial investment. This is a serious collection of business assets, a serious collection of real estate assets with future real estate development opportunities too. It's an infrastructure investment as well as a sports and media investment. We're looking for prospective investors that have a similar time frame, not looking to trade in and out quickly, but also looking for a financial investment as opposed to a hobby investment. Those are easy to come by.
OK. I think we're right up against the clock here. We'll call it there. Glenn, Tony, thanks so much for coming.
Thank you all.
Appreciate it.
Thank you all.