TORONTO – Preliminary subscriber data shows that Rogers Wireless added fewer customers in the fourth quarter of 2005 as compared to ’04, but according to a senior executive, that’s just how they wanted it.
The country’s largest wireless carrier added 216,300 net customers in the last three months of 2005, a drop from Q4 ’04 when it added 262,900 subscribers. Rogers Wireless now has 6.2 million customers
However, a dampening on growth was more or less the company’s strategy, said John Gossling, vice-president, financial operations, at Monday’s Citigroup 16th Annual Media and Telecom Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. “Not to say we did a full pull-back,” he explained, “we kind of engineered it this way. We didn’t want to put any more fuel on the fire in December.
‘We did in the fourth quarter feature the Razr and Rokr at $99 but we didn’t play in the free phone space or gift-with-purchase like a DVD player or a hair dryer or whatever,” said Gossling.
“We had a good first couple of months in the quarter and felt we just didn’t need to really add anything to what we had in the market. We’re happy with the numbers.”
Rogers Communications chief strategy officer, Mike Lee, also spoke at the conference and outlined the dramatic shift in the company inside of 12 months.
With the acquisition of Microcell (Fido) now basically done and with overall wireless growth still huge, Lee said, “if you looked at us at the start of 2005, we were a large cable company with a large investment in wireless and at the end of 2005, we’re now a large wireless company with a big investment in cable.”
At the end of 2004, 40% of the company’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) came from wireless. Now, that figure is more like two-thirds, added Lee. “The nature of our business has changed.”
Rogers Cable, Internet and Home Phone also performed well in the past year, too. While the phone side hit the ground running with 500,000 wireless customers thanks to its acquisition of Call-Net (Sprint Canada) this year, Rogers Cable’s VOIP product ended the year with about 50,000 customers, said Lee.
Rogers Cable added 62,200 more high speed Internet subs in the quarter, a 5.1% increase, bringing that total to 1.145 million customers. The company also put 114,200 more digital terminals into the system (for a total of 1.139 million) and 73,200 digital households (913,300).
The company even added 9,200 basic cable subs, bringing its total to 2.264 million.
Lee also added that Rogers On Demand is also growing at a good clip (2.8 buys per month per active user with an average buy of $6.50) and that it will be made fully available to its new Brunswick and Newfoundland subscribers by the end of the first quarter of 2006.
– Greg O’Brien
