Rogers Releases Its Q3 Numbers And The World Did Not End For Them

Today is the day that a lot of people were waiting for. Which is Rogers reporting their Q3 numbers so that we can all see how much damage that the July outage caused team red.

Rogers Q3 numbers were released today. Spoiler alert! The July outage didn’t seem to really hurt them. Here’s the highlights:

  • They had revenue of $3.7 billion which came from Rogers wireless and media businesses. Though that would have been much higher if they didn’t have to hand over $150 million to customers due to the July outage.
  • Rogers only added 6,000 new Internet customers. Down from 20,000 at the same time last year, which a 14 percent decrease.

And listening to the investors call early this morning, I’d like to provide a couple of quotes that are relevant:

There were approximately 666,000 mobile phone net adds across the sector this quarter, and Rogers has succeeded in attracting approximately one-third market share. Once again, reflecting strong competitive execution and attention to customer service. Postpaid mobile phone churn was 0.97%, compared to 0.85% one year ago, remaining under 1% and similar to our peers.

While our churn was more elevated early in the quarter, we had returned below 1% by the time the more promotional back to school selling period commenced. ARPU as reported was [56.82] [ph], down 2%, but grew 3% to [59.76] [ph], excluding the impact of the aforementioned credits. With consumers continuing to travel, roaming revenues were strong in Q3 up 130%, compared to the similar pre-pandemic third quarter period of 2019.

So what that suggests to me is that their wireless churn rate likely went up after the outage. But came back down. When it comes to cable, its a bit more murky:

We were largely measured and balanced in our competitive response matching competitive offers where appropriate and otherwise maintaining underlying profitability versus driving loading. On a product basis, we delivered 6,000 retail Internet net customer additions in the third quarter and video net additions remained positive at 7,000. 

While the highly promotional environment, and network outage impacted our third quarter churn and customer net additions in cable, we remain competitive in the market and optimistic as we move into the fourth quarter.

That caught my attention, so I went back to their press release and found this:

The customer relationship net losses, the lower retail Internet net additions, and the lower ARPA this quarter were a result of the July network outage combined with increased competitive promotional activity.

That suggests to me that Rogers lost customers for their cable related businesses which includes Internet, TV, and home phone.

The net result is that Rogers didn’t bleed customers and they came out okay. But based on this press release suggests that not everything is rosy in Rogers land. And they know that. Especially since both Bell and Telus put up some impressive numbers.

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