TORONTO – "This year’s second quarter EBITDA is greater than the full EBITDA of 1996… the six months EBITDA is higher than the full year in 2002," Rogers Communications CEO Ted Rogers said this morning in unveiling the company’s second quarter results, for the three months ended June 30th.
Consolidated revenue grew 29% to $2.24 billion in the quarter and consolidate operating profit increased 31% to $742 Million.
As for individual customer figures, wireless postpaid ARPU grew 6.9% and postpaid Churn fell to 1.27%. Residential and business local telephony lines have passed 735,000
All three of the company’s operating units delivered solid growth, including 19.4% growth at Rogers Wireless, 57.3% growth at Rogers Cable (thanks to some fee increases) and Telecom and 13.8% growth at Rogers Media (TV, radio, magazines, baseball). Consolidated quarterly operating profit grew 31.2% year-over-year, primarily driven by 33.4% growth at wireless, 35.4% growth at cable and telecom and 17.6% growth at media. On a pro forma basis, pretending the acquisition of Call-Net had occurred on January 1, 2005 and not July 1st of that year, consolidated operating profit growth would have been 24.4%.
Postpaid subscriber growth continued to be strong at wireless, where quarterly net additions of 130,000 subscribers reflected an 11.6% increase from the postpaid subscriber growth of 116,500 reported in the second quarter of 2005.
Cable and Telecom ended the quarter with more than 164,700 residential voice-over-cable telephony subscriber lines, with net additions of 68,000 cable telephony subscriber lines for the quarter.
Availability of voice-over-cable telephony service expanded through the second quarter of 2006, with service now available to approximately 90% of the homes in the company’s cable service.
Cable added 38,900 net digital cable households in the quarter to reach a total of 1,002,200, while residential high-speed Internet subscribers grew by 21,600 in the quarter to a total of 1,198,200. The second quarter is seasonally the slowest of the year for subscriber net additions reflecting the adjournment of colleges and universities for the summer break.
Media’s operating profit increased 17.6% from the same quarter in 2005 on solid growth across all divisions. Media entered into an agreement to purchase certain radio stations in Alberta for an estimated purchase price of $39.7 million, subject to regulatory approval, and also received regulatory approval to increase its ownership of Biography Canada and G4TechTV Canada to now hold 100% and 66 2/3%, respectively. Rogers bought out Shaw Communications’ stakes in each channel.
