MONT TREMBLANT – Cogeco CEO Louis Audet said Thursday he thought it pretty improbably that Rogers Cable would want to overbuild his company’s regions of Halton, Oakville and Burlington.
He was responding to a question at the CIBC Institutional Investor Conference at the Fairmont Mont Tremblant, Quebec.
Cartt.ca broke the story last week that Rogers had applied to the CRTC to expand its cable licensed territories to include the large piece of Cogeco’s Ontario territory as well as that of Aurora Cable.
Audet doesn’t figure Rogers has any plans to completely overbuild, as it would be far too costly. “I think the press has made a lot more about this than there actually is,” he said. “The markets talking about are overwhelmingly buried plant.
“Overbuilding that territory is not really a practical alternative,” he added.
However, Audet did acknowledge that Rogers most likely wants to take advantage of the coming growth in the areas it has asked for.
“Ten years hence, there will be a million new people in the Greater Toronto Area who will have moved there and built homes,” said the Cogeco CEO. That means about 400,000 new households.
“This is an open, competitive market so it’s natural that Rogers would have been attracted to that.”
Not that Cogeco is going to walk away from that growth opportunity, however. “We intend to serve all these homes,” said Audet.
“We compete against Bell extremely successfully in those areas.”
Audet also addressed the company’s European forays saying that the integration of its Portuguese unit Cabovisao is done and thanks to a pair of share issues this year, is on the prowl for more growth.
But it won’t come in Western Europe (France, Spain, Germany, etc.) because it’s pretty much consolidated already.
Anything Cogeco does will be north or east of that (Scandinavia and Eastern Europe), he said. “We have been active looking at companies in those places,” said Audet.
“If there’s a good opportunity out there, we can take advantage of it.”
– Greg O’Brien
