Okay, we'll keep going here with TELUS. I think everybody knows Doug French, a regular here. Doug, thanks for coming again this year.
You just call me old.
I would never do that. Look, maybe I thought we'd start with, I guess, a big picture question, for lack of a better word. There's a lot going on in the industry, as always, particularly from a corporate development perspective, because I think yourselves and your competitors have got the message that shareholders think you have not enough growth and too much debt. You guys are out in front of it, maybe from TELUS's perspective. How do you think you're positioned for that dynamic? Clearly, it's something that the shareholders want.
Yeah, so we, for as long as I've been at the company, had a consistent strategy. Our consistent strategy was to build the best networks, to have the best customer service, and to build products and services of consequence. We haven't changed that strategy. We've obviously had to modify how we execute on that over time, especially as times have changed. Starting with fiber and wireless, being the first one to build on fiber, that hasn't changed. We still believe it's the best technology for internet service. The fact we started so early is why we're getting some of the synergies we're getting now that's allowing us to deliver right from real estate to copper. You would have seen recently our tower and Terrain agreement, again, showing you that assets of consequence can be then monetized when appropriate to do so. That would help you on the delivering front.
Times change on why, you know, towers were the right time, and you know, we'll probably get into that later. On customer service, you would go back to, you know, and actually maybe one other thing is we were building Canada in five or 10, 15 years ago, before it was even sexy to build Canada. I mean, now it's everyone's phrase and so on, but we've been doing it forever. We've been investing in Canada first, and then taking all the benefits of the investments in Canada around the world, like healthcare and tech, as an example. Build Canada first, scale around the world. That's been our strategy on the product side. Then leverage products of relevancy for the future.
If you're riding on your laurels of a security business that was old age security and not moving to home 2.0 or not moving to energy or not moving to aging at home, which are changing with the times, your relevancy with that product will be out of date. We've continued to think or work through how do we stay relevant to our customers and provide that product and services over our leading industry on fiber and wireless to be able to monetize. Bringing those products in health and tech are another synergy that comes with that. Again, building on assets of consequence, leveraging your assets, and then monetizing them appropriately operationally and/or through partners, IPOs, or sales. Last is customer service. We've been the customer service and had churn leadership for, again, over 15 years now.
Ensuring that we keep that focus, whether that's through digitization and AI so that customers get served when they want, how they want, and faster, or whether that be continuing with the call centers that we do have, but trying to run them more efficiently and effectively in the meantime. That is where I think we still have the opportunity. We have an opportunity lever from our operational growth that we actually have products that are going to grow with relevance around the world. We have monetization opportunities that, because we started so early on fiber, have opened up between real estate, copper, etc. We have assets like TELUS Digital that are going to allow us to continue to bring down our cost structure, leverage AI and digital within our own framework and within our own control.
Okay, lots to pack through there. Maybe let's start with, you know, shorter term and the revenue outlook. We'll start on wireless and we'll get into wireline. I think investors would want to hear you weigh in on the pricing environment. Wireless seems like it's encouraging. How does TELUS think about that?
Yeah, I would say it's been definitely more stable, but I would say it is still very competitive. I think you still see during times of Labor Day and back to school where promotions will show up throughout the offer stream. If you remember, there's three value props that you can do promotions on. There's your rate plan, the handset subsidy, and/or the device financing floor. All three of those impact your profitability and all three of those impact your promotions. It also is in biz and consumer. A lot of what is seen publicly is consumer. A lot less of what you would see publicly is on the biz side. I would say you can definitely see when pressure comes on by any one provider, that if it's not above the line in consumer, it could be EPP, it could be small business, it could be corporates.
I would say that we've taken still the approach of not only following where it makes sense to do so, ensure that it's economic. I would say we have not followed in still numerous offers this quarter, both on the biz side and the consumer side, because of the unprofitability that that's going to bring. It's still happening, I'd say just to a lesser extent than it was in the past.
Are you, in general, are you encouraged by what you're seeing in the market, or is it a red flag?
Generally encouraged and expecting improvements to continue. I would say it's still not a step function. It's going to be slow and steady. It's a grind. It's going to be a grind, but it's definitely in the right direction.
Okay. How about on the wireline side? I mean, the key line item on your revenue statement people focus on, obviously, is the fixed data line. That's been ticking along around 3% through the first half of the year. That's better than your competitors. What's driving that and how sustainable is that?
I think it goes back to my opening on our relevancy in products and services. Bringing our products and services to the table between all of our platforms is really what's driving that. You'll see we've had good and solid internet loading, and then the products around it, whether it be TV and security, which, you know, under a little bit more pressure now when economic times turn down a bit, they're an opportunity for cost savings and fine-tuning on those ends. You can see those even last quarter were a little bit lower, just based on economic conditions. Bringing in the bundle, as a better term, for all of our fixed services and recovering on biz. Business has eaten through a significant amount of its legacy to digital J curve that it was on for that three to four-year period.
They're getting good traction now in fiber and more services. Even tech and health, when you think through data services, they bring through those solutions as well. I would say it's the combination of all of our products. I would say we have products that our peers don't sell. We have traction on growth, and we're continuing to do that right across the country.
Yeah, that's where I was going to go next. I mean, your incumbency in the Western markets, but it sounds like you are getting traction in, let's call it Ontario and Quebec, beyond just the consumer. Is that fair? Can you dig into that a little bit?
Yeah, we've always had a significant business footprint across Canada. We've had significant government contracts and large corporation contracts. They continue. SMB was the opportunity that we continue to focus on. SMB being, yes, they're a business, but they're more like consumer than they could be from a business. They needed to be treated differently. We've really focused on how do we make sure that they get the special treatment they need. We're seeing very good traction on that because when their services go out, they're out of business on average. You have to make sure they get the A++ service all the time. We've been doing that to try and get the traction in small biz right across the country. On consumer, we're obviously expanding as much as we can into the East, both from a TPIA perspective and from a fiber build perspective.
I think you're going to see that continue to deliver incremental results with the overall objective of bundle and incremental services. We're not going into it as a sell-for-loss, we're not going into it as a loss leader. We're going to make profit along the way, and we're going to do it through the bundled home.
Okay. That's a good segue into capital intensity and TPIA and everything. I mean, your fiber build in Western Canada is largely done. You'll continue to deploy fiber, but within an envelope. It looks like TPIA is going to happen. We have to wait for rates. You've identified a 10% capital intensity kind of line of sight. Yet a few weeks ago, you talked about spending CAD 2 billion in Ontario and Quebec. I mean, can we square that circle, you know, both from a balance sheet and from a strategic perspective? How are you approaching that? How do we get to 10% if we're going to spend CAD 2 billion in Ontario and Quebec?
Yeah, so one, you're going to continue to see growth from our organization, both in all of our asset chains, from recovery of TELUS Digital to health to tech to our data services, as you highlighted. As ARPU recovers in wireless, that will be obviously an input to that. You're going to see, call it as fiber in the West is coming to a close, as we've now deployed all of our middle spectrum. We've had our small cell deployment, which we've been doing as part of our fiber build. Doing millimeter wave is going to be fairly easy where we're applicable to launch that as well, because we've been pre-built and got the real estate for a significant portion of that that we would want to put in in high urban areas and/or some rural areas.
You'll see capital continue to come down, call it from the legacy West capital envelope, which allows us to spend it in the East and still keep our capital flat. That would be one initiative. You're also seeing that we're using third-party opportunities, as the pilots we had done in the West on building fiber. We're going to do the same in the East as well, so have a third-party build on fiber. It's an infrastructure asset with over a 60-year life. The return on that is exceptional, as you've seen. We've built our own asset of consequence in fiber by the West. In the short term, leveraging the model we used in the East, or sorry, in the West, in the East, and ensuring that we serve Canadians that are underserved right now in areas of Ontario and Quebec that don't have fiber, that should have fiber.
We'll continue down that path.
How will you, you know, determine which markets you want to go into? Because, you know, if the incumbent telco is pulling back on certain markets, there might be information in that that they just don't think they're that lucrative. How will you balance your go-to-market strategy that way? In the West, you know, you had a pretty clear path to go to run through.
The analytics and the metrics behind that decision-making are very similar in the East and West. You can look at population density. You can look at the component of MDUs and apartments versus residences versus business and do an assessment of how much market pen can you get by having a superior product like fiber. We're also new to the East in substance when you go to the consumer market. Being an Easterner all my life, I know we've had friends and not friends with my service provider, no different than in the West. I know there's customers that are unhappy with the TELUS brand as an ILEC. Bringing a new fresh brand and a new fresh offering to Eastern Canada, I think, will help us get market penetration.
Considering as well that we have customer service and how we do it is one that we're the first in the world in our social and how we deliver back to communities around Canada and around the world. Bringing the best product with fantastic customer service and the brand that we have will allow us, I think, to continue to expand in those areas. We will be building in areas that do not have fiber today. I will not overbuild. We will do TPIA in those areas where we can. It'll be non-fiber areas and it'll be on an assessment basis, no different than we assess the Western markets.
On the TPIA side, I mean, we've only seen interim rates. We haven't seen final rates. You know, the margin on the broadband part of the package doesn't look that significant. How can you make money in a TPIA construct if the tariff comes in at, let's call it, CAD 68?
It's all about the home. Two things you need to do are bring in multiple products and ensure that we have the security, home automation, the energy platform, the aging at home platform, healthcare, or wireless. All of that would be point one. You need to do it efficiently and effectively. That AI digitization back office on service delivery and ensuring that your cost structure is first class would be number two. That's how you would make money. That is how we are looking at it. We are setting targets for ourselves internally that by executing better on all of those items, our margins in the East should be not far off of our margins in the West. That's our internal target. We are not going into this to have losses from any perspective.
I mean, I think people can understand the differentiated nature of your bundle. You do bring a number of things that other operators aren't offering. How about on the cost side? You've mentioned digitization and AI a few times. Can you walk us through how you think that side of the equation will drive profitability?
Yeah, right now we are implementing with the help of TELUS Digital numerous, call them, opportunities from churn management and propensity to churn management. The model that they, the AI model they put together for us reduced our churn by 5 basis points within 3 months. Just identifying customers that are likely to be unhappy just by the fact they look on your website or they've made one phone call or whatever that looks like. We've been able to do that as an AI opportunity. Second is we've actually been able to reduce the amount of calls that can even go into the call center by having more structured, call it, online opportunities where we can solve problems quickly. That would be the second one, that you have to wait. Unfortunately, customers do have to wait online. I don't have the patience to do it.
We have to somehow get our customers to not have to do that either. Lastly, even for our agent models, we've done a lot of AI tools that if our agent pulls up a word that the customer is upset about, it'll bring to their screen all the solutions for that item. Giving our agents time that they can actually now reduce the time they're on the call with the customer, solve their problem the first time, and then gives them a better feeling of success instead of either trying to hand off or struggle with what is the right answer. That internal agent, which is all AI-driven as well, is again creating significant opportunities and cost reductions just by having less of the customer on the phone for a lower period of time, which will also then flow through to better revenue and better churn.
Initially, it is the agent's effectiveness and the cost structure behind that.
How early or far in the journey on that? How long, how when did you deploy all these tools?
We've been doing, I'd say the last 12 months is when it's really accelerated. I would say we still have, we're not halfway done to what we expect we could do. I'd say less than half. There's still a long way to go and a lot of opportunity there.
Okay. One of the other metrics you've signaled to the street is on leverage. You've drawn a line in the sand. You want to be at three times by 2027. How do we get there? What boxes should investors look for you to tick to get there?
I think it goes back to our part of our discussion already on capital. We expect our capital to stay relatively flat on a pure dollar basis, not just an intensity basis. It'll come down on an intensity basis, as we discussed. I think the operational execution will continue on our growth rates and free cash flow generation through all of our products would be, you know, again, the foundation to our plan. Then the monetization of, call it, non-core assets and the monetization of core assets when it's applicable to do so. The non-core assets would be items like copper and real estate where we don't need it anymore. That could either be through just selling outright or it could be development, then selling the property or re-leasing the property, whatever is applicable at the time for the best monetization.
It could be the tower agreement model as an example where we have a partner who is going to help us build and grow the business. In an environment where all of us need a lower cost structure, we should be sharing infrastructure at the end of the day. When we talked about what changes over time, we were forever, I don't want to sell my towers as a strategic advantage, but it's really not a strategic advantage anymore. Offering up usage for everyone, and I walked in at the end of Cogeco, they have to build a network and we're open for business. We will allow them access at reasonable rates to all of our towers so that they can do that and fulfill their obligations. That's the way we've approached the tower agreement.
We will see the tower agreement grow, I believe, over time, let alone with the TELUS growth that we see on data growing and growing and growing. We will have to still densify our network. We're still going to have to build more towers, and the tower agreement is going to be the arm to do that for us. That would be another component to that. I think the last is probably the strategics. Building assets of consequence, like healthcare as an example, we will look to bring in a partner or have a partner, not a financial partner per se initially, but a strategic partner that, yes, it may involve cash, but it may involve assets as well to scale the business even further.
Tech, I would say, is a following behind it, but it has an opportunity to also, whether you bring in a partner and merge or something to scale as well, to get that growth and to get the capability set you want around the world. Between all of those, I would say that is where the deleveraging is coming from. We had a three-year plan that we are ahead of at the moment.
Okay. We'll come back to a couple of those, but just a couple other items. How should investors think about copper monetization these days?
We are still, I would say, early. I think we're maybe 5%- 7% through. The problem or the good side about not having every sell 93% left, but you have to get every customer off your CO and start before you can start pulling that. That includes business, wholesale, and consumer customers. We're finding consumer customers the easiest, business customers being second, and wholesale customers giving them another option over fiber, whatever that looks like. We do have the engine working now, but I would say it's still not as nimble as I would like it to be. Will we get copper sales over CAD 100 million for the next few years? Absolutely. Is it going to be a big bang and step again? The answer is no. It's going to be steady as we take off the last tail of our copper customers in each of those regions.
That target of CAD 500 million is really kind of a medium term.
Yeah, it's probably going to be a three to four-year term.
How about real estate? Where are we on that file?
We're in a very good position. We have three or four buildings coming on right now that'll be rentable within early 2026. Seeing that utilization will be extremely helpful to then bringing out the first wave. If we have over CAD 500 million of assets generating free cash flow, you could consider a small REIT. We'll probably decide what we do and partner or sell even part of that, that we don't need to even wait for a REIT. We could find a partner and we could sell part of it. I would say by the end of 2026, it'll be way more clear on how much investment will come through there. I would expect us to have a monetization of some capacity by the end of 2026.
By the end of 2025, do you think you'll have enough information to at least guide the street on which path you're going to go, or is that a little premature?
I will try, but unfortunately, I don't have that at my fingertips right now.
I hear you. Quickly, just on the tower agreement, you've monetized 49%, but you've taken operational control. Back to inviting other people in, is it possible that this could become a national tower agreement? Other operators pool other assets in? How are you thinking about that?
It's wide open. If the right structure is to do that, to drive the best outcomes for our organization, the other organizations, and Canadians in general, then yes, I could see that as a possibility.
Any questions from the floor? We've got one here for Brian.
Just curious, Doug. TELUS has been going asset-light of late. We have our deal on the TPIA. Would you ever consider monetizing your own fiber network out west?
It's potential. Sorry, do you want to repeat?
I'll just repeat the question for people on the line. Brian asked if you would consider monetizing the wireline market.
Potentially, but not at the moment. We think with all the other tools we have at our fingertips, fiber is still strategic enough we'd want to own it. Back to the pricing we even talked on TPIA, I like a wholesale market. I'd like to actually benefit from that in monetizing my fiber over time. There would be a point where you would say maybe the strategic advantage of holding your old fiber isn't there. I don't think we're there yet. I think we would be better off monetizing ag, monetizing real estate, monetizing copper first, and then decide is there a need to, and is it the right economic time to do? We would consider it.
Just a second one, Doug. You've bought some security companies. You bought a baby team to pull up the company. Hopefully, you see you've picked up. How much have you bought in the security space? What do you think?
I probably won't give you market share, but we are the leader in Canada. We are the largest security company in Canada right now. We're looking to expand that. I don't want it to be security anymore. I want it to be home automation. We are upgrading all of our tools and assets that would allow you to migrate the system you have, if it's not ours, without changing your equipment. It'll be a software flash or just a panel and software flash. Make it simple, make it easy for you, but bring you the best services on home automation that we possibly can. With that software upgrade, you would then also get energy aging at home where applicable, etc. All those added services we're trying to bring in, which make it relevant for the future. That is really our focus point.
Bundling it and growing it is our objective, not selling or getting out of the business. We love the business. The churn rate is on average very low. When you bundle it with internet or wireless, it's even lower.
Anyone else? Doug, in the few minutes we have left, maybe just touch on TELUS Health. I mean, it's been posting some pretty good numbers this year, double-digit growth. What's driving that compared to last year, and how sustainable do you think it is?
It's still not meeting my expectations. I think we can do better. The growth has been combo with some more inorganic, but mostly organic. It's been on EBITDA front for sure. A lot of the LifeWorks synergies that we drove through, you're really seeing come to fruition now. I think we can do better still on revenue expansion, especially internationally. We're in over, I think it's 28 countries now on EAP services. With the acquisition of Workplace Options, which had a significantly lower cost structure than what TELUS had on delivering EAP services, we're rolling that model out now around the world as well to improve the profitability of the organization overall and allow you then to even bring your cost down to your customer, which allows you to have more accelerated revenue growth. I'm still very optimistic that health is going to continue to grow and post good numbers.
Our objective, obviously, is to get it into a valuation zone in that CAD 5 billion-CAD 10 billion mark, which I think we're in now at the, call it, bottom to middle end. We're going to continue to grow it. I'm excited on, you know, kind of my comment at the beginning of built in Canada, but impacting the world. That's really what our health asset is doing, and we're very excited to take that further.
To be clear, investors should think about a potential monetization event there as a partnership with a corporate, if I can put it that way, other than just a financial sponsor.
Yeah, and we've had a lot of conversations with either private equity that owns health assets that would be open to that kind of a combination and/or other organizations themselves that would say being a partner or a joint ownership of some capacity would be beneficial commercially. We've had significant conversations on that right now. What I didn't want to do was give away all of the LifeWorks and WPO synergies that haven't been executed yet to somebody else, knowing it's at our fingertips and it's ours to execute. I want our shareholders to benefit from that and then bring in the partner subsequently. I would say we'll still see a partner, I hope, in the next 12 months, 18 months most.
That being said, I want to make sure that we get the maximum, call it, trading value if you're bringing in assets, that our valuation is top-notch compared to whatever we're buying or whatever investors are coming in.
Okay, and last one for me. TELUS Digital, you've decided to bring that in. What's the, you know, why now, and are there implications for your other assets there?
Yeah, I think you've seen a lot of acquisitions or take private of those companies or companies like TELUS Digital in the industry. I think the timing now was that it was sustained at a lower price. It's sustained at the recovery was going to be longer. Bringing it in allows two things. One, we can reduce the cost structure and reduce all the public company costs, which do carry a burden. We can then have the AI integration back into TELUS again, which I think we can do and accelerate the growth externally and internally by having it right next to our asset. The TELUS customer was so big for TELUS Digital that, again, thinking how you structure that and how you merge it back into the TELUS organization will drive synergies and probably free the rest of TELUS Digital to focus externally and grow even further.
We do believe that between the AI and the CX focus on external, we will be able to help turn it around again. I think the time was right that it was just sustained. It was too long and the whole market was consolidating. We believed it was the right time at that.
Right. We'll leave it there. We're right up against it. Thanks, Doug.
Thank you.
Cheers.
Thanks for coming. Appreciate it.
Hey, Mark. Yeah, we're good to go. Thanks for coming.
I'm good. How are you doing?
How's the arm?
Ding is on the arm.
Oh, that's Chris. Okay, I think we'll keep going. We've got BC here, BCE up now. I think everybody knows Mirko. Mirko, thanks for coming. Let's talk about. We'd start.