Rogers Communications Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Rogers Communications, Inc. fourth quarter 2022 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. Following the presentation, we'll conduct a question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Carpino, Vice President of Investor Relations with Rogers Communications. Please go ahead, Mr. Carpino.

Great. Thank you, Ariel, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today I'm here with our President and Chief Executive Officer, Tony Staffieri, and our Chief Financial Officer, Glenn Brandt. Our call today will include estimates and other forward-looking information from which our actual results could differ. Please review the cautionary language in today's earnings report and in our 2021 annual report regarding the various factors, assumptions, and risks that could cause our actual results to differ. With that, let me turn the call over to Tony to begin.

Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this busy morning. When I stepped into the CEO role one year ago, our performance had been lagging our peers and we had lost our leadership footing. Last year, we set a clear plan to reestablish our leadership position and to deliver sustained, strong results. This included a renewed focus on the fundamentals and a significant improvement in execution. In short, we set a plan to turn around our performance. 12 short months, I'm pleased to share we have made significant progress. And we did it with a backdrop of a lingering pandemic, a new executive team, and one of the largest proposed mergers in Canadian history. Despite these challenges, we did not get distracted, and we remained focused on driving better execution across our entire business. As a team, we made tremendous strides, but we have much more opportunity in front of us. I have to say I am pleased with the speed and magnitude of our turnaround. Across critical valuation metrics such as financial growth and customer share gains, we went from consistently ranking second or third against our competitors over the past few years to now ranking first on the vast majority of these important metrics throughout the year. Our turnaround wasn't about coming out of a pandemic It was about instilling a performance-based culture focused on our customers returning to growth and outperforming the market. In 2022, the whole market grew slightly more than prior years, but we grew even more. In wireless, we went from losing market share just a few years ago to now industry-leading share of mobile phone net additions. The momentum you saw in the first three quarters carried through into the fourth quarter and continues to power forward into 2023. Importantly, we met our upgraded guidance for the year and set a strong foundation for growth in 2023. For the full year, we delivered strong total service revenue growth of 6% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 9%, the highest growth in over a decade. And the improvements we delivered in 2022 were reflected in our total shareholder return, which was up 9%. By comparison, our two national competitors had negative returns of minus 4% and minus 8%, and the TSX and Dow Jones were down as well, 5% and 7%, respectively. In wireless, postpaid mobile phone net additions were 193,000 in the fourth quarter. up 37 percent from last year the team executed exceptionally well in q4 and we delivered the best black friday in our company's history for the full year we added 634 000 mobile phone net ads post paid plus prepaid our strongest result in 15 years and the best performance in our industry In cable, we continue to see very aggressive in-market promotional activity from our main competitor. And although revenue was flat, we delivered positive, adjusted EBITDA, despite investments in key areas, including customer service. Here, we see opportunity to improve our customer share performance, and we have confidence that our product set, and in particular, internet and TV, have a competitive advantage across our entire footprint, and our recent heightened investments in cable will begin to yield market share growth this year. In media, we delivered a strong fourth quarter and full year. In 2022, we grew revenue by 15% and turned $127 million of losses into $69 million of profits. Our media performance clearly stands out in the industry, reflecting the quality of our assets and the team's execution capability. Importantly, these results did not come at the expense of investment. In 2022, our team invested a record $3.1 billion in capital, the vast majority of which is now in networks. In fact, a doubling of where we were several years ago in network investments. Looking ahead to 2023, we continue to see healthy growth catalysts supporting our businesses from factors such as healthy population growth, penetration headroom, and the benefits our transition to 5G technologies will bring. And against this backdrop of healthy growth, we expect to continue leveraging our execution momentum to drive leading share of customer growth, which will fuel robust organic growth in both total service revenue and adjusted EBITDA, as you saw this morning in our full-year guidance release. You will also see that free cash flow will continue to grow as well as we deliver another year of record investment in our customers and our networks. In fact, in 2023, we have allocated an incremental $700 million of our CapEx envelope towards ensuring we continue to have the best wireless and wireline networks. As I reflect on the year, I am proud of our entire team for their relentless focus, disciplined execution, and firm commitment to our customers and shareholders. While there is clearly more work to do, we have reestablished momentum. Before I turn it over to Glenn, let me provide a brief update on Shaw. As you heard last week, the Federal Court of Appeal reaffirmed the decision of the Competition Tribunal. two federal courts have now unanimously and decisively ruled in favor of these pro-competitive transactions, namely the sale of Freedom to Quebecor and the sale of Shaw to Rogers. To quote the tribunal decision, there will continue to be four strong wireless competitors in Alberta and British Columbia. And the decision goes further, concluding that Quebecor will be a more disruptive wireless carrier and, Rogers will inject a new and substantial source of competition. Given the matter is before the federal government for final approval, we will not provide any further comment at this time. Let me now turn the call over to Glenn.