All right, thanks. Welcome to the telco portion of our inaugural Toronto conference here. We're delighted to have TELUS presenting first here with Doug French, the CFO, presenting. Doug, thanks for being with us.
You're welcome. Welcome. Happy to be here.
Great. Maybe a broad question to start. Sometimes we get the questions from generalists who are coming new to the industry, wondering what are the differences between the three big telcos that are out there. You've been pursuing different strategies of growth over time. Maybe if you can explain how TELUS's strategy is differentiated as you want to be achieving your growth targets.
Yeah, we've continued to focus on the three pillars of best networks, best products, and best customer service. The foundation has started there from day one. When you look at our networks, we were the first to start fibre and have the significant fibre penetration. That has led to copper monetization. It has led to exceptional internet growth. Internet becomes a bundle to other items. What else can you do with it, i.e., product superiority, as an example. We have branched into products that are usable by our telecom customers, but also relevant around the world. When you think of our health care, it is a marriage of both. Yes, it has connectivity and it has partnerships with our telecom in Canada. We are doing offerings all around the world to grow, i.e., new product sets.
Similar with our security and our home automation, where we are rolling out new technology that is significantly cheaper to install, way more user-friendly on applications for energy, for aging at home, and bringing new products that make us relevant beyond just an internet pipe would be the next one, as an example. Lastly, I think it comes down to our products and our customer service. We've had the lowest churn rate now in wireless for many, many years, and continuing to be unsatisfied with where it's at. We still think we can do better. I think that when you see some of the actions we're taking, you think some of the digital investments we're making and AI investments we're making, it is absolutely to give our customers the best experience, how they want to be served in a fast and more efficient way.
There is always going to be room for improvement on that side. I think we have differentiated that way with our first to market on a lot of things, including the fibre. Second, our expansion for around the world. Make it in Canada, build it in Canada, take it on the road. That is where we can scale it with billions, not the Canadian population. That is the way we continue to grow as well.
Great. Maybe we can talk about some of the more near-term aspects of the industry right now on the mobile competitive environment. We have been seeing the industry competitive intensity easing off a bit since the month of May. Now this is the U.S. Thanksgiving. This is Black Friday week. Historically, it has been a lot of loading for the industry, but sometimes a few skirmishes also on the competitive side. What have we seen so far during Black Friday?
Oops, sorry. I'd say it's been a little bit quieter than we've seen in previous years out of the gate. We're still seeing some specials here and there, but more below the line, more targeted. Seen a few more specials on the internet side versus wireless in certain areas or regions. I would say overall, the trend is very similar to what it's been the past few months. When you see Statistics Canada come out that we're down the rates that we are from their initial ask, over 70%, and one significantly lower than the United States in pricing now. There is a true up and a correction that needs to happen, being our cost of delivery is higher. I think it's balancing out. I'd say the trajectory is still going. We're looking at all pillars. ARPU versus handset subsidy.
Where do we finance a handset? At what level do they have to have a rate plan? All three of those impact the economics extremely well, or extremely importantly. You have to watch all three as you go into Black Friday, not just the one. I would say as you're looking at any, is it getting competitive or not, those are the three initiatives that I would really focus on.
So far, so good.
So far, so good.
We could say. Great. That brings the next question, obviously, of the wireless ARPU recovery. We've been seeing a bit of a sequential improvement in the pace of growth over the last two quarters on that front, suggesting that the backbook repricing issue is getting worked with. How should we be thinking about ARPU growth going forward? I think this is one catalyst that the investors have been waiting for in terms of seeing that ARPU number being on the right side of zero.
Yeah, and I think we've seen some improvements over the last couple of quarters. Still negative on a growth rate, though. You're seeing that once you get penetration into your base, unless you make subbase adjustments or something abnormal, it doesn't turn overnight. You actually have to work your way through your base again. Slow and steady to improvement is what we're seeing. The trajectory is in the right direction. Is there any way to make the trajectory steeper to the right direction? It'd come down, I think, after Black Friday. I'll tell you whether that's doable or not. I would say that right now it is slow and steady. I'd expect to see continued improvement into 2026.
Great. Continued improvement from the current levels towards zero.
Correct. That is correct.
Great. I want to touch on the wireline side of story as well. You've been delivering some pretty solid internet ads in Q3. Was it 40,000? And some of the questions we've been getting is where are those net ads coming from? Is this the TPIA? Is this maybe some venture of the fibre in the East already? Or it's in the more traditional markets? If you can unpack a bit where that growth came from.
Yeah, so it's split between the East and West and then business. I would say we're getting good weighting on all three, to be honest with you. SMB has been accelerating on internet growth as we've been leveraging in our fibre territories. We're still loading in the West very well as we complete the build in some of the more rural areas. It's real that the East is also getting good traction now on bringing our bundle, bringing our service to the Eastern market. I'd say it's split pretty evenly, which makes it nice for us that we can continue to double down or look at areas to improve on across the board. I would say with all three, I was happy with the result. It is the linchpin product. It helps you with TV. It helps you with home phone.
It helps you with wireless. It helps you with security. Continuing down that path is a significant focus for us.
You said a part of the growth is coming from the East. One shift in strategy that you've been discussing over the last couple of months is actually deploying fibre in the East. That is a bit of a shift versus the historical approach of focusing on your Western footprint. If you can maybe talk about this initiative, will this ever be meaningful to your strategy? Does this work in the context of your 10% capital intensity objective?
It is all within our capital intensity objective. This will not take us outside of that, first and foremost. We are building, as others have slowed down their build in the East. We looked as an opportunity that would say we all agree the value in fibre and the life of fibre is 50 years, 60 years, 70 years. You could see some of the valuations on fibre showing the value where it is in any of the acquisitions that have happened on that side. We looked at it that we would go into regions that were being deferred by others that would have an opportunity for scale. Yes, they would have to be big enough. I am not going to go with very long DPPs out of the gate, but look for opportunities where there would be scale and a population deserving.
Everyone deserves that fibre at the end of the day. Meeting the needs of Ontario and Quebec, where it's not being built, it will be, again, slow and steady. We've applied for permits, and we're starting in a few areas in Ontario and Quebec. It is still early stage. We were using third parties a little bit as well. They'll build the fibre for us, they'll own it, and we will lease it as appropriate after that in certain circumstances. We will not burn the balance sheet nor our free cash flow because of it.
Okay. It is a matter of bundling the footprint that you have.
Absolutely.
The subscriber base.
Absolutely. We have a lot of wireless customers, obviously, in the East. Being able to bundle the internet with that, and then our security, home automation, and even some of our health care applications as well will go very well with that application.
Okay. Makes sense. Kind of last question on the wireline side. On fixed data revenue, we've been seeing your growth of the fixed data side slowing down a little bit, now 1% recently. If you can unpack what's behind that, because you would think of the subscriber aspect that we discussed, that was pretty strong. On the pricing side, maybe some bit of a competitive dynamic happening there. If you can unpack those.
Yeah. Our consumer internet revenue growth has been over 6%. Very, very strong. We have seen a bit more pressure on the biz side. We are getting more re-rates in the large corporate and public sector. Any competitive bid that comes through is generally coming with a large re-rate. If you have one of those in a quarter, your business results will have a bit of a blip because it is a step function. They are fairly large enough to make your data revenue fall in any given quarter. You outgrow it over the next couple of quarters. I would say consumer is still extremely strong, as you have seen. Yes, a little bit of pricing competitiveness with the rollout in both the East and the West, but still doing very well and profitable across the board.
Most of the slowdown was on the biz side. You'll see that, unfortunately, for a quarter or two, because that blip does take a quarter or two to outrun. I would say early next year, we'll start to lap it again and be back to the growth rates that we had projected or above. In the short term, we're going to see a little bit of that impact.
On the B2B side, are we talking more it's a lumpier business, obviously. Is there some sort of a structural shift there or not really?
No, it's more the one-offs of the larger customers. The more we focus on SMB, you'll get more stability on the business, ARPU, and the network and then the data revenue. The more larger customers you have in your base, you're going to get more lumpiness. One re-rate can be millions and millions of dollars for a quarter, as an example, depending if it's a government or a large corp.
Yeah. Makes sense. I want to talk about the whole AI theme. I think it's something that the telcos could eventually play in. You've already started. You actually provided some targets at your most recent earnings. You're looking for your AI-enabling revenue going from $800 million- $2 billion in a couple of years. I'm wondering if you can unpack where is that growth exactly coming from? What are the services, the solutions you're providing to get that $1.2 billion incremental growth?
Yeah, thank you. The starting point is, let's say, substantially the TELUS Digital AI services that we had. It was the WillowTree and data annotation businesses that we had from TELUS Digital. They also are into application development, AI implementation, and data management concurrently. When we look forward, if they were majority of it, we are increasing by about $1.2 billion over the next three years. They are about half of that. Their growth will continue to be probably 30% range on that data and AI and annotation side. That is building applications, building AI for customers, handing off their agents and other areas so they can be more efficient and effective with their customers. That would be the half of it. The other half would be our B2B growth.
Our B2B growth would include, yes, some of that digitization and AI within our telecom customers. It is also our data sovereign solution, which would include our data centers. We were blessed to keep all of our data centers and be able to leverage them for compute. We had the power. We have the buildings. We are actually live right now. You may have seen that we announced a lot of the customers that are actually in our data center using our compute at the moment. We have a running start to that, being the fact we really just had to get the chipsets and the server, which we have a deal with NVIDIA and HP to do that. We are running now, getting the pilot. We built that as well on a layered basis.
As you start to fill out that first layer of compute, you can add another one and add another one and add another one. We're doing that for capital efficiency, so it does not have that blip you talked about on capital. Since we had the building, we had the power. The real cost for us is really just buying the compute, the chips. If we do it in this layered way, you're earning revenue off the first wave, and then you're putting in the second. The also good advantage is the NVIDIA chips that we bought two months ago are less productive than the ones we're buying today. Every single chipset you put in is now more productive, providing more capacity and more revenue opportunity for you using the exact same amount of power.
You do not have to upgrade your power if you're getting more efficiency out of the chips. We are very excited about this opportunity. We are completely Canadian. We do not have a partner in the U.S. We do not have any of our data residing in the U.S. It is 100% Canadian from beginning to end, which, again, will hopefully look very well for us with the government contracts, with health care, with others that have that data sovereignty requirement. Looking forward to the growth trajectory on that. Because we own it all, it will give us more opportunity for profitability as we move forward, not having to share profits in any form whatsoever.
Yeah, that's interesting. I obviously want to touch more on this because I think on the growth aspect, it's kind of easy to see that the data repatriation or compute, bringing compute back to Canada absolutely makes sense. We want to control our destiny, basically. You have been announcing some pretty interesting partnerships with OpenAI, EY, Accenture there. We see real demand that is there. It's not a game of hype there. The question I'm getting a lot, though, is what is the investment required for this? NVIDIA, they like their margins, obviously. There are probably a couple of different scenarios you're thinking about. To reach your objective that you've been discussing, this 50 MW of power, this 25,000 GPU objective, what is the cost behind that?
The cost really at this stage is we have in each of our data centers, it's a modular approach. We have in Rimouski and Kamloops, the power goes down the middle, and we have room for eight modules on each side. Each module is not that expensive. We only have one per site at the moment. We can add up to seven more as required. If we maxed out to that number, the CapEx would be still the biggest cost of all. The compute would really be the one that we would actually have to, as costs come down over time, continue to manage for profitability. That being said, we do like our agreement that we have right now with NVIDIA and HP.
Being able to bring that in and do it in a layered approach so that you're selling compute and then adding more capacity, it's almost like popping in a new capacity chip as you move forward is efficient and effective. I don't have an exact number for you on CapEx, but it will not change, and it will not stop our 10% capital intensity number. If anything, it'll probably complement it by an accelerated revenue opportunity.
We can think about maybe stable CapEx or no directional change because of that investment going forward?
Absolutely. Absolutely. When we put out our deleveraging targets, our dividend growth target, and our payout ratio, we brought in all of our assumptions around free cash flow, including CapEx. That CapEx number was well thought through of everything that we plan to do over the next three years. If anything, wireless getting a little bit better, the regulator bringing in the fact that we can still sell in the East and that not being overturned, if anything, adds a tailwind to our objectives that we set out before all of that happened. I do not see that changing at all. If anything, I hope to beat them.
Yeah. I'll come back a bit later on the leverage aspect. One of the things that can help you get there is probably TELUS Health. You've been investing a lot in that venture over time, and now we're seeing some pretty decent growth there. How should we be thinking about the monetization of that as part of your plans to meet your balance sheet objectives?
We've had very good growth. Our goal from day one on WPO, when the acquisition and LifeWorks acquisition was, make sure that we reap the synergies from those acquisitions. We take out the cost structure and get our structure to a stage where our shareholders benefit from that work. Restructuring and aligning cost structures is one that is doable and is controllable. We are there. We've taken out the cost structure. We've got the appropriate cost structure. Still finalizing the WPO one, but we've monetized a lot of that margin accretion opportunity. Still more room to go. We've got a lot of the ones that were the low-hanging fruit, for a better term. Still using Digital and AI. We're going to go significantly further. Leveraging the WPO footprint will even go further.
That's created an asset that is well above $5 billion in valuation now from any measure, a small multiple to a higher multiple, approaching what we would hope to be closer to $10 billion in the not too distant future. We are ready to find a partner and bring in a partner as soon as it's applicable to do so. I would say I would expect that partner to be one that brings commercial efficacy to it, one that's going to bring more business or more scale. We would bring in a partner that would easily, in this scenario, bring in $1 billion-$3 billion if that was the case. Again, just swagging numbers for planning purposes. Excited about that opportunity and looking forward to the next conversations that would bring it to fruition faster.
Great. From a timeline perspective, if I can understand, is that you're basically just finishing the integration of Workplace Options, and then you're open for business with this one?
Absolutely.
On the outlook, I mean, we've been touching on most of the businesses, almost all. I'm not going to ask you to give us your guidance here for us, but you can do it if you want. Maybe what should we?
I'm sending my board meetings next week. I don't think I want to do that.
Yeah, they'll learn it first. What should we be thinking about when we're all adjusting our models ahead of this guidance for next year?
Yeah, I think as we look through the headwinds and tailwinds that we had talked about, you would have seen, obviously, we had an ARPU that's improving, but still negative growth as we leave the year. Immigration is still, I'd say, tempered from what it was a few years ago. You're going to have to still work through that tail on ARPU. I think what you see as the tailwind, though, is we actually do have more opportunities on the East. We have small business, which now is getting exceptional momentum. Health care is going to continue to be mid to high double digits on EBITDA growth and shooting to the mid or, sorry, double digit growth in revenue as well. You've then got our integration of TELUS Digital, which is going to bring numerous opportunities.
One, the AI opportunity and digital opportunity within our org and adopting it from end to end. Every process in our company we are looking at now, even my financial statement close process, how can I use the AI to simplify it, make it faster, and do it with less resources? We are all in on those improvements, which will, again, help bring down your cost structure. We have the growth engines of health care. We have the growth of tech. TELUS Digital started to show positive growth on revenue. We expect that momentum to continue. We did have a cost problem where their EBITDA growth was still negative. Pushing that to synergies that would bring it positive as well. It is a little early to say exactly what that will be in next year, but we will, obviously, by February.
That will be a positive versus a drain. You look at our products, our products from home security or from home automation and our improvements we're looking at in our own churn rate and our own customer service. We can do better. I would say in all of the cost reductions and everything that we've done, I think we can still up our game in our churn and customer management. I would say that would be another tailwind opportunity for us as we look forward.
Great. Maybe one last one on the leverage balance sheet situation. We've touched on it a couple of times, but the DRIP is still in place. We have the dividend that is there as well. You've kind of discussed why you think your free cash flow is going higher. Some of the items that happened in the meantime since you've provided your leverage guidance a couple of quarters ago. How should we be thinking about the company meeting? What is the roadmap, basically, to be meeting that returns objective?
Yeah. I think you're going to see our EBITDA growth being leveraged off our growth engines while overcoming some of the ARPU things that we had talked about. I'd say strong EBITDA growth would be the best description of that. Our data revenue continues to grow in consumer. When we overcome one or two of those business blips that we talked about, I think you're going to see more momentum there again. We do have a deleveraging where we're divesting of incremental assets over the next two years. That could be the partnership with health that we talked about or tech. It could be the monetization of real estate early, whether it be fully waiting for a REIT or just monetizing part of that real estate portfolio.
We're still on the path of monetizing all of our copper footprint to the extent we are one of the first pulling significant copper out and putting it back into the copper supply chain. I would say strong EBITDA growth complemented with selective divestitures and a flat to down CapEx allows you to get exactly what we portrayed in our deleveraging plan, our affordability on our dividend plan, and our payout ratio. We also said we're bringing the DDRIP down to zero by the end of 2027. You will hear more about that exact step function in the not too distant future. I think it's going to hit the mark to what the expectations are. We're going to live up to our word of what we set for 2027.
No change on the leverage expectation.
No change.
Good place to leave it. Doug, thanks very much for your insights.
Slow again. These are low chairs.