Says the company is in no hurry to sell spectrum outside of Quebec
MONTREAL – Quebecor turned in a good fiscal 2016 on Wednesday as revenues and income climbed on wireless additions and better than expected cable subscriber results.
2016 revenues were $4.02 billion, up 3.2% from 2015 and adjusted operating income was up 3.7% to $1.49 billion. Net income attributable to shareholders was $194.7 million, an increase of $42.9 million over 2015. Adjusted income from continuing operating activities was $305.5 million an increase of 27.3%.
Vidéotron significantly increased its revenues from mobile telephony (by $106.7 million or 26.4%), Internet access ($58 million or 6.3%), Videotron Business Solutions ($42.1 million or 60.9%) and the Club illico over the top video service ("Club illico") ($7.8 million or 33.1%) in 2016, reads the press release. ARPU was up $9.18, or 6.8% to $144.86 in 2016.
Vidéotron added a total of 125,300 connections to the mobile telephony service to reach 893,900, and 44,600 subscriptions to the cable Internet access service (to hit 1,612,800. The company said in its press release it’s not surpassed 900,000 wireless customers. However, as people cut off their wired home phone, revenues from the cable telephone service decreased $33.2 million to $424.8 million. The company lost more than 12,000 wired home phone accounts in the fourth quarter. On the cable TV side, it had its best year in a while, only losing 5,000 net subscribers as price discounting won customers back from Bell Fibe.
Quebecor also saw increases on the TV broadcasting side too as subscribers to its TVA Sports channel climbed.
"I am pleased to be back at the helm of Quebecor, a corporation in excellent financial health that has experienced steady growth in recent years," said Pierre Karl Péladeau, president and CEO, who returned to the company last month after two years in politics as a separatist with the Parti Quebecois.
Péladeau told the Q4 conference call with the financial analyst community that he plans to essentially stay the course set by the existing management team, tying connectivity to content.
“For the last 16 years we’ve been following the same strategy… I think we’ve been able to enhance and position our distribution platform very well because of the great content that we were able to provide. We will continue in this direction and it looks like that we're far from being the only ones right now to follow this route,” he said.
When asked what the company plans to do with the wireless spectrum it owns outside of the province of Quebec, the CEO was noncommittal. “The spectrum is certainly something of great interest,” said Péladeau. “As you can easily imagine this is something we consider as a very strong asset and obviously we’re not going to negotiate publicly about this. But we certainly sit on great value, and… so, I guess that we will continue to work and we see this as a great asset going forward.”
Finally, when it came to the overhaul of its TV product (something Shaw and Rogers have decided on with their announced rollouts of Comcast’s X1 platform and Cogeco has addressed using TiVo), a decision on how it will move to IP to better deliver TV has not yet been made.
“We are still doing our homework,” said Vidéotron president Manon Brouillette. “We are not in a rush… we want to make sure that we get to the right price point with the vendors, the good partner to go to that journey… So we will announce something shortly.”
