BCE Inc. (BCE) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

May 4, 2023 8:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the BCE Q1 2023 Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Thane Fotopoulos. Please go ahead, sir.

Thane Fotopoulos

Thank you, Mode [ph]. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining our call. Today, I'm here with Mirko Bibic, President and CEO of BCE; our current CFO, Glen LeBlanc; and our future incoming CFO and current Treasurer and SVP of Corporate Strategy, Curtis Millen. You can find all our Q1 disclosure documents on the Investor Relations page of the bce.ca website which we posted earlier this morning.

Before we begin, I want to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement on Slide 2, reminding you that today's slide presentation and remarks made during the call will include forward-looking information and therefore, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Results could differ materially. We disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Please refer to BCE's publicly filed documents for more details on our assumptions and risks.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Mirko.

Mirko Bibic

All right. Thank you, Thane. Good morning, everyone. The Bell team delivered operating results for Q1 that were in line with our planned performance for the quarter. We've been making some significant investments in the past 3 years and they are bearing fruit. You could see in our continued operational momentum and particularly this quarter, you can see it in our strong 3.5% consolidated revenue growth.

And as expected and as we profiled internally in our quarterly budget for 2023, adjusted EBITDA decreased year-over-year due to a $67 million favorable onetime retroactive revenue adjustment at Bell Media in Q1 of last year and near-term cost pressures from inflation, strategic initiatives and the normalization of our cost structure to pre-pandemic levels.

In line with our accelerated CapEx program for 2023, we spent close to $1.1 billion [ph] in new capital in Q1 and that keeps us on pace to deliver another 650,000 new direct fiber connections and to grow our 5G service footprint to 85% of the country and it will also enable stand-alone 5G plus service for almost half of Canadians by the end of the year. The generational investments we're making to build the best networks are consistently being recognized by third parties for superior network quality and speed for our low latency and the best overall experience.