BCE Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the BCE Q1 2019 results conference call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Thayne Fotopoulos. Please go ahead, Mr. Fotopoulos.

Thank you, Laurie. Good morning, everyone. With me here this morning, as usual, are George Cope, BC's President and CEO, and Glenn LeBlanc, our CFO. As a reminder, our first quarter results package and other disclosure documents, including today's slide presentation, are available on BCE's Investor Relations webpage. Exceptionally this quarter, because our annual general shareholder meeting is taking place starting at 9.30 this morning, we'll be ending the call earlier than usual at 8.45. However, before we get started, I want to draw your attention to the safe harbor statement on slide two. Information in this presentation and remarks made by the speakers today will contain statements about expected future events and financial results that are forward-looking and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements represent our expectations as of today and accordingly are subject to change. We disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law. Factors that may affect future results are contained in BCE's filings with both the Canadian Securities Commission and the SEC and are also available on our corporate website. With that, I'll turn the call over to George.

Great. Thanks, Nate. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'll just begin with a quick overview. Our revenue momentum did continue in the quarter with 2.6% growth. and Bell, as you've seen, reported strong EBITDA results of 6.9%, driven by our revenue growth and the IFRS 16 accounting changes. Importantly, though, we had positive EBITDA growth for all Bell operating units, excluding the impact of IFRS 16. The company enjoyed strong financial results from wireless and excellent wireline broadband retail subscriber growth, with 44,000 combined retail internet and IPTV net ads up 37% year over year. We had positive top line growth across all wireline units producing 1.8% year over year growth. Bell had another strong quarter and second quarter of positive TV advertising revenue growth and cost savings which drove material EBITDA growth year over year. the strong organic results in the quarter and the declining capital intensity drove 20% year-over-year increase in free cash flow. Given it's our annual shareholders meeting this morning, it's notable that overall the company enjoyed its 54th consecutive quarter of year-over-year EBITDA growth, or 13 and a half years of uninterrupted consistent EBITDA growth. Turning to wireless, On the growth, total growth activations for us were slightly up year over year. Postpaid net ads were 50,000 in the quarter, and the reduction year over year mostly impacted as the federal government contract starts to mature out in our net ads. We had our best quarter postpaid churn in 15 years, and in fact, the Bell branded churn was under 1% at 0.98% in the first quarter. and certainly I don't ever recall that happening on the wireless side for us. The blended ARPU increased 1.2% year-over-year to 6735, although I think it's important I call out if you exclude the government contract and the shutdown of our CDMA network early on in the quarter, the blended ARPU for the animals was actually up 0.8% year-over-year. Prepaid gross ads continue to grow, lucky successfully growing in the market. Gross ads up 56% year over year and an improvement of 50% year over year in our net customer losses on the prepaid side. We also harmonized our prepaid deactivation policy to 90 days across all brands, a much more conservative approach to our churn and consistent with our other brands across mobility. Really excited this morning to also announce the Dollarama has been appointed as a distributor of our Virgin and Lucky Mobile prepaid services. That's a key retailer in Canada with over 1,200 locations who's entering the wireless business for the first time and is an exclusive distribution agreement for Bell's prepaid products of Virgin and Lucky Mobile. Just turning to the wireless network, we continue our journey of providing network leadership, not just in Canada, but from a global perspective. Our wireless network generally now is recognized to be roughly twice as fast as the speeds available in the United States. We actually will exit the year with 60% of Canadians have accessing speeds of up to 750 megabit speeds with LTE advanced technology. And some of our markets are actually going to have download speeds that can exceed one gig. I want to remind investors again that our fiber investment and wireline will continue to pay dividends for years for us on the wireless side as we now have completed much of the build for the fiber to cell sites as we begin the journey towards 5G. Approximately 90% of our capacity today utilizes fiber backhaul and that will be obviously core to providing the type of speeds we're all talking about and services and latency reductions and all those things we'll see with 5G in the coming years. Our capital intensity continues to be low. We continue to believe we'll be approximately 7% this year, even with this network leadership that we have in the marketplace. Turn to Wireline. It was a really positive quarter for us. Our strategic investments are beginning to certainly pay dividends for us. Our retail internet net ads were up approximately 25% year over year. We added 18%. saw 18% growth in our fiber additions in the quarter with 51,000 new fiber additions. And all of our fiber footprint today includes an offering of 1.5 gig for our clients, which I don't think you would find in any markets in the world, quite frankly. And so this footprint advantage that we're building over the long-term positions is very well for both business and consumer. IPTV was certainly quite positive up 54% year-over-year with 21,000 ads, and that reflects our strategy with our IPTV product and our Alt TV product, and also is helping us pull through internet clients. Retail satellite ads were lower, net ads losses were better year-over-year, which of course has helped from a revenue and cash flow perspective. Overall, I would say that our investments are truly beginning to provide us some product leadership in the marketplace, and when you start to see some double-digit growth for us year-over-year in net ads, that's obviously a very positive sign for our company. Turning to media, really nice to see a second quarter in a row of strong results there. We saw viewership of our English specialty TV properties up 27% year-over-year. Although not in the quarter, we just could not call out the incredible viewership we're seeing on Game of Thrones and the benefit that's having to our Crave product in the marketplace with the largest specialty audience ever in Canada at 3.3 million viewers one of the evenings, and who knows, maybe we'll surpass that as that incredible series comes to its conclusion. TSN's had a very positive year and a positive first quarter. And as you can see, one of the things we called out is ratings, for instance, on the Raptors for the entire year were up 50%. And, of course, this quarter, if we get a good playoff run, we're a beneficiary of that as ratings are up dramatically over previous seasons. I think a really important call-up for investors is our top 20 advertisers spent about 14% more in the quarter than they did a year ago. And we, as one of our other peers mentioned, are seeing some underperforming. some strong revenue growth from clients moving back into some of our media properties. It's our third consecutive quarter of year-over-year advertising growth and I will tell you that this funnel for Q2 looks very strong indeed in terms of media. With that, let me turn it over to Glenn.