MONTREAL – After summer-long public relations campaigns which saw wireless companies and the federal government at each other’s throats, with consumers caught in the middle, the CFOs of Bell and Telus believe the industry must do a far better job of telling Canadians how good they have it in Canada.
“We have to work on our communication of why we’re successful in Canada, why this is a competitive market, why pricing isn’t out of line with what’s happening in the rest of the world,” Telus EVP and CFO John Gossling told attendees at the CIBC Institutional Investor Conference in Montreal Wednesday morning.
The public relations campaign and the negative reaction to it, “It tells us we’ve got a lot of work to do in Ottawa but also with consumers and our customers because we need to make sure that they are with us on this. We don’t want to be putting them in the middle of a regulatory battle,” he added, noting Canadian wireless networks rank among the most advanced anywhere on earth.
Bell EVP and CFO Siim Vanaselja added later in the morning, while the amounts Canadians are paying for service is rising, it's due to their usage of their wireless devices, “and actual pricing has come down… What’s become clear to us at Bell and BCE through the course of this debate is, as an industry in Canada, I don’t think we’ve really done justice to the way that we’ve communicated and tried to educate both consumers and government about the nature of the competition and frankly where our pricing stands relative to other world competitors, because it’s absolutely correct when we say Canada’s pricing in the wireless sector is, when you look at other developed countries, certainly in the mid-range.”
“If you look at Bell’s smart phone pricing compared to Verizon, our price points are lower than they would be in the U.S.,” he added.
– Greg O’Brien
