Welcome. We have Glenn Brandt, the CFO of Rogers Communications.
Good morning.
Thanks for coming, Glenn. Look, rather than start with the networks businesses, why don't we start in sports? Mainly because it's so topical and timely for investors right now. Look--
Just about the game last night?
Oh, that's tough, man. That was tough.
Oh, man. That's a lost opportunity.
That was tough. Look, this is a live file, so I don't expect you to negotiate in public. Can you frame the process for investors and maybe frame some expectations we should have as you move forward with approaching some potential partners?
Sure. It comes up once or twice.
Yeah.
The first priority is closing on the Kilmer purchase. We are expectant and hopeful that we will close that very early fourth quarter. We still have a couple of league approvals, NBA, which I think is meeting this week, and NHL, which I think they have a meeting coming up in the next few days. I don't expect those to be difficult approvals to obtain. We are a known quantity. The transaction's well-known. I expect those to go through, close the acquisition then early Q4. Once we close, we will bring MLSE, Blue Jays, Rogers Sports & Media together, consolidate into a single corporate entity. It will be a single corporate holding company with a few wholly-owned subsidiaries underneath it. That will be a single Rogers Sports & Media group. Then focus on two things.
One, running the revenue and cost synergies, and that's an exercise that we really are just at the starting point on. I expect those to run fairly quickly. We have run some changes through. Once we took control of MLSE, we were able to run some of the change priorities, some of the cost containment, and just change in approach with some of the teams. That exercise is one that I expect will take one to two years to come to full fruition like we had within Shaw. Then bring that to market. We have already started very early conversations with prospective investors. We have advisors in place. We have a CIM and a teaser deck that are with the leagues for final approval before we bring those to market. The intent is to move fairly quickly after acquiring control to then approaching to sell.
I expect it to be a private placement sale. We're not looking to create another public entity. I expect it to be probably institutional investors, but there are a number of private name individuals and families that have reached out as well, so we'll keep an open mind. Then hoping to bring that to conclusion, if not late this year, that might be pushing it on timing, but early in 2027. We bought the Bell stake on July, well, closed effective July 1st. That was in 2025. We have until mid-year 2027 under the two-year calendar that the credit rating agencies run by to delever. That gives us plenty of time to bring this to market, get it closed, get the valuation and the proceeds we're looking for. I've held off with continuing to estimate or to declare a valuation.
You've seen the transactions that have closed over the last few months. The valuations continue to go up. I'm optimistic. We'll see where the market pegs the valuation. Certainly, I expect it to be reflective of the quality of the assets that we're bringing. The significant difference between what we're selling and what we're buying, the purchase was under a call option arrangement that we have with our partner, so we were the only buyer. There was no ability for Kilmer to take this to a competitive bid exercise. We have the opposite on the other end of this, where I expect that it will be competitive. I'm hopeful that we can drive a reasonable valuation on that combined entity. A very strong valuation. We'll see where the market comes. I'll leave it at that.
The folding of the Sports & Media business into MLSE, is there strategic value in doing that, or is it more to leave Legacy Co as a pure networks, cable, and wireless business, or is it a bit of both?
I think there's a very strong benefit of grouping or combining Sportsnet and Sportsnet+ with the teams. The concentration of teams in this market area, one of the largest in North America, together with the media property that carry the games, that's unique. You combine that with the national audiences, there's a tremendous strength in that. If I give the recent example, and hopefully we'll run it back again this year, the Blue Jays run last year. That drove a substantial amount of revenue and EBITDA that was significant. It was split roughly equally between Sportsnet and Blue Jays in terms of the beneficiaries of that run. That was one example. The other is just through the regular season this year. Sportsnet has drawn strong audiences. Blue Jays are drawing strong attendance. I watched some of the games in the other team's stadiums. I watched Cleveland last night.
They're racing for their playoff spot just like we are, and I think the Cleveland stadium was maybe half full. The Blue Jays, we've averaged 95%. I say averaged, it's a sellout more often than we're at 95%. I look at the attendance, I look at the audiences on Sportsnet and the fact that that's a national audience. That's a really strong benefit that our peers in the U.S. don't have, and the investors. The ones we've talked to recognize it. We'll make sure that we emphasize that. There's a benefit to that. The legacy media businesses, right now, they're going to be combined. We'll see when we come to the market whether or not that's viewed as being neutral, positive, or negative, and we'll react accordingly. I expect it will be part of the media group. It could be that we curtain those off.
It could be that they are all just contained within the group. The intent, though, to be clear, is our legacy telecom business and our legacy media business. I'm reluctant to use the word legacy because they're very live right now. They're complementary. We can use those live entertainment properties, the stadiums, concerts, the sporting events, and the tickets for them. We can use them to help drive attraction to the telecom business, and we've started that. You hear our references to One Rogers and providing beyond-the-seat experiences for fans. That we can take across the country. We have for the Jays. We also have sponsorships in place with the western hockey teams, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, that provides us with ticketing in those facilities as well that we can use for driving customers.
Each of those interactions helps to retain, manage our customer base, but also bring in new customers. We see it as being a tremendous opportunity for helping to drive the network business as well.
Okay. Let's just finish up one more question on the sports side, and that is you did re-up with the NHL for another long-term deal. Any implications for financials on that, or do you think the terms are going to be similar to what the last deal offered?
Similar. Like everything, with the passage of time, the costs go up. The revenues have gone up as well, the audiences. We have brought in some, I'll loosely say, partners on that deal. TVA came in and took the French language rights, and they've signed up for the full term of that contract as well as Prime will carry the one weekday game. That allows us to lighten up some of that financial load, but it also helps expand the audience for the offering. We don't carry the properties in Quebec, and so TVA Group is a natural offering there. It helps to lighten the economic impact, bring in some revenues, but also leaves us with control of the property for another 12 years.
It's served us very well over the initial contract. It's evolutionary in terms of those prices that they're not stepping up immediately. They step up smoothly through the years. We're excited about it. Once again, we control NHL, we control MLB, we share Raptors, NBA with Bell here in Canada. It's a strong part of our media strategy.
Okay. Let's shift to wireless. It's that time of year. We're coming out of back to school. What did Rogers see in the back to school competitive?
It continues to be a busy period in terms of market activity. We launched our plans early in July. We did that deliberately to launch plans that were based on premium service rather than discounting. We leaned in on added service offerings to try and entice customers from our peers. We've also leaned in heavily on or emphasizing on base management rather than trying to create froth. We saw that in the first quarter, where with the discounting that started with one of our peers, we resisted, saw churn elevate. Bell saw the same. We both then leaned in to match some of the discounting, pulled those volumes back into our customer base through the first quarter. But all that did was left all of us with heightened churn, lower pricing, and we learned from that quickly going into the second quarter.
I think some of that was managing Legacy for the head of one of our peers who was on his way out. We've seen more stability come in through the second quarter around that level of competition. It's still very competitive, but it's not emphasizing price discounting. With back to school, we've seen volumes are still down. They're down about 30% year-over-year, as we have been for a few quarters now. But we're seeing through penetration gains, still about 2% growth across the sector. In that environment, there's no sense trying to overheat the market. As I say, we've leaned in on price plan features, trying to manage where customers come in on their life cycle. Prepaid is a part of that. But we find that our peers and ourselves have settled down some of that discounting, which is good.
That's constructive for the industry and for the sector. The headwinds we have going into the second half of this year are coming from the ongoing effects of that first quarter discounting, but then also the CRTC regulation around fees. All of us are adjusting to that new regulation and trying to figure out how to offset it. I think that has helped temper some of the price strategy around the discounting. We have a price change, that price action that we put in in the third quarter. I expect that to have a little bit of an impact on churn in the quarter as that rolls through. But modest. We're still running roughly around 1% churn on postpaid as we have been for several quarters.
All in all, I'd say it's a very balanced environment, roughly 2% growth, largely driven by penetration, more stability around pricing, less emphasis on discounting. We can make that work.
So, to boil it down, I think what you're implying is that there's probably pressure on ARPU for a couple more quarters as we flush through Q1 and then deal with the service changes. Then hopefully sometime next year, you would see that stabilize. Is that a fair assessment?
I think yeah.
Subject to competitive action, of course.
Subject to the competitive framework. None of us, I shouldn't say none, one of us, I guess, expected the first quarter. None of us expected to start this year with where we started in the first quarter. You have to react to that. It has an effect. We'll see that roll through over the next few quarters. As we move into the other quarters with more stable pricing, it helps even that out. As all of us adjust to figure out how to offset the loss of that fee income. We're all doing it with setup fees, shipping fees, delivery fees that have always been there. They become more of a part of our strategy rather than an administrative item to try and offset the impact of that fee regulation that came in.
One of the things that's topical with investors is the potential threat of a new competitor with Starlink. Do you want to just give some brief thoughts on that?
Sure. We see the technology here in Canada as being very complementary. If you think of the vastness of this country and in urban markets and suburban markets, we all have strong networks that cover very well. As you get out into the rural areas and the more remote areas, there's vast parts of this country where there are population centers there, but it's uneconomic to cover them with cell towers. The satellite technology can cover it ubiquitously. Our deal with SpaceX runs from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from the 49th all the way up to the 58th parallel. We have ubiquitous coverage on satellite backup to mobile. Outside of our wireless network, we cover virtually every road in the country now with that satellite backup.
As SpaceX launches its second generation of satellites, that coverage will move to 5G coverage. It'll become much more user-friendly. You won't even have to think about it. You won't have to activate the satellite coverage. You'll pull your phone out of your pocket, go to make a call. If it can't connect on a cell tower, it'll just connect on the satellite. You don't need an app to make that call on the second generation. That becomes much more user-friendly. That's how we see the technology as being very complementary. In order for SpaceX to be competitive with wireless or wireline operators, they would need terrestrial facilities.
The aperture of those satellites covers such a broad area that if you were trying to use that to compete with wireline or wireless, one, you can't keep up with the speeds. Fiber and fiber coax and fixed wireless can surpass the speeds that you could get from the satellite. In any suburban or urban environment, the population density is just too vast. They don't have the bandwidth to carry it. They would need terrestrial network and spectrum. That's not available to SpaceX in Canada under regulatory restrictions.
Then finally, I would say the one significantly limiting factor is that you can't use them in buildings. You need clear access to the sky in order to connect. Again, in order to compete, Starlink can compete because you put an antenna on the house, an externally mounted antenna that brings the satellite coverage inside your home. You can't do that with the cell phone coverage broadly on a mobile user. We don't see it as competitive. We see it as a wonderfully complementary service to our coverage that allows us to immediately cover much more of the country without the economic investment of building towers.
Any questions from the audience? Okay, let's shift to cable. You have recaptured growth, modest growth, but you've recaptured some growth on the top line and margins have been very strong and resilient. What's the outlook for that side of the business going forward?
Like wireless, wireline is a scale business, and so you see the benefit of that scale that we have now being truly national on the wireline side with the margins. On the service revenue growth that you see, and you're right, it's modest, but when we started at the start of the Shaw acquisition, that trajectory was - 3% to - 4% in any given quarter, and we've turned that around to being, as I like to say, on the right side of zero. We're 0%- 1% growth depending on the quarter, depending on the competitive framework at any given time. That's come on the back of stringent base management, taking advantage of bundling opportunities, particularly with the acquisition out West. That continues to have opportunities. Then the expansion of that coverage area through fixed wireless.
All of that combined, it's all bunt singles. None of it is an overriding or dominant theme. It's emphasis around attention to pricing and price changes where we're able, moving customers up, adding services, and just block and tackle day in, day out. That's what's allowed us to turn it around. I don't see that revenue trajectory moving into a very substantial level of growth. But when I look at our peers being in the 1% growth area, most of our peers are negative globally. We continue to emphasize the bundling opportunities tying in with wireless and looking to that One Rogers strategy to help us drive further expansion of our customers.
How about the margin side? Are you confident you can keep those numbers?
We've held them and expanded them, modest expansion, but expanded them continuously over the last several quarters. I think, again, with scale, you have the benefit of being able to run a fairly steady ship. I'm confident that we'll hold the gains we've made, and I think as we pare back our capital intensity, and that's underway, you'll see stronger growth in free cash flow. I see those margins being sustainable, maybe a little bit of upside. Yeah.
Okay. You just alluded to it. One of the more significant announcements Rogers made this year, certainly for the financial community, was a pretty material cut in CapEx.
Yes.
About 30%. What can you say to investors to, I guess, manage any concerns they might have that will impact growth going forward or network performance? How have you managed such a significant cut in CapEx?
Sure. The impetus for the cut came from the regulatory environment, and yet another stepping in by the regulator on industry pricing. We looked at that. We looked at where our capital intensity was. The intention always was to bring our intensity down, and we had brought it down modestly. That was really the driver for it, was to say, "Look, this environment, whether it is TPIA and MVNO competition, whether it is price regulation, this environment requires much less capital intensity." You have heard me say this before, if you take a capital plan over four quarters and do nothing more than say, "You know what? Instead of four quarters, you now have six quarters to build out those priorities, stretch it out," that does not mean everything gets completed within six quarters. That means some of those projects will stretch out eight or 10 quarters.
Some of them still have to get completed within that year because they are a priority for either dealing with a service issue in an area, greenfield expansion, what have you. But we now look at it as we have got to contain our spend within that lower capital intensity. I expect the CAD 2.5 billion- CAD 2.7 billion guideline we gave this year to be sustained for the foreseeable future. Not guiding beyond 2026 just yet, but I do not expect you to be surprised when you see 2027. You will see a similar level there if you are working on what to forecast out. The intent then is to manage our timeframes and our framework for priorities. It is also to scale back some of the work we were doing. We were moving into rural areas where the economics were much more challenged.
In a less, I will call it intrusive regulatory environment, you can make those work over several decades. But where you can have your peers come in and use TPIA access to take a share of those customers anyways, the economics become less compelling for us. Some of those projects, we are moving off to others, selling them off and allowing them to step in. Some of the greenfield expansion still makes sense. Some of it maybe does not. That does not mean there are not opportunities for growth, but the emphasis here is not just growing customers. The emphasis here is growing service revenue, EBITDA, and most importantly, free cash flow. When you put all of that together, that is the balance we are following.
Priorities that we followed before, if they are still priorities, they will still get done. They may still get done in year. They may get done over expanding the quarters. But if you take a four-quarter plan and put it over six quarters, you have got your 30% reduction in spend pretty easily.
Good. We are right up against it on time, so maybe just quickly. You have talked in the past about how Rogers credit card has been another tool in the toolbox, so to speak, for base management. But you have been at it for a while. Is there an opportunity to securitize some of those receivables in terms of balance sheet management? Can you set some expectations for investors on that?
Sure. We have a facility that we have negotiated with a few of our lead banks that is near complete to put in place. We are just waiting on every regulated financial institution needs its capital structure to be approved by OSFI, so OSFI is looking at it to see whether or not I know what we are doing in treasury. Once they say it is a good facility, then we can put it in place. Once we can put that in place, it will take up to CAD 1 billion of working capital that is currently sitting on RCI's balance sheet, funding the bank, and put it directly onto Rogers Bank's balance sheet. It is a Rogers Bank facility. It will fund the receivables, as I say, up to CAD 1 billion. We are just over CAD 1 billion of receivables now.
It will take some time to work into that full CAD 1 billion as we make the draws. Not very long. That could be in place before we close out the quarter, more likely early Q4. I expect, as we start drawing that down, we will start our reporting, and I am hoping it is this quarter, we will start our reporting with deconsolidating Rogers Bank, pulling that funding off of RCI's leverage and pulling the EBITDA, which is currently still startup losses. Although they are coming under control. We will pull those out from the RCI leverage structure.
I have spoken with credit rating agencies. They have not seen the reporting yet, but it is a well-established principle that if you have a self-contained financing vehicle, and you have set it up to be self-funded, you can deconsolidate it from the operating entity. That is now underway. I expect that to be in place this year.
Fantastic. I think we are going to have to leave it there. We ran out of time. Thanks, Glenn.
Thank you very much. That was great.
Thanks. Appreciate it.