BCE Inc. (BCE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

February 2, 2023 7:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the BCE Q4 2022 Results and 2023 Guidance Conference Call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Thane Fotopoulos. Please go ahead, sir.

Thane Fotopoulos

Thank you, Mode. Good morning, everybody and thank you for joining our call at this unusually, but unavoidable early start time. With me here today are Mirko Bibic, BCE’s President and CEO and our CFO, Glen LeBlanc. You can find all our Q4 disclosure documents, including our Safe Harbor notice concerning forward-looking statements for 2023 on the Investor Relations page on bce.ca website, which we posted earlier this morning. We have lot of material to get through this morning on this call. However, before we begin, I want to draw your attention to our Safe Harbor statement on Slide 2 of the presentation.

With that out of the way, I will turn the call over to Mirko.

Mirko Bibic

Thank you, Thane and good morning everyone. Our 2022 accomplishments are anchored to the operational priorities we set back in 2020 and the Bell team’s unwavering commitment to all our stakeholders. These priorities remain the foundation for Bell’s future success. With a strategic roadmap, including a historic multiyear transformational accelerate CapEx program that is well advanced and already paying off with subscriber loadings and improved end-to-end customer experience, leading self-serve apps and consistently strong execution, the Bell team delivered great results across all operating segments this past year.

In terms of overall financial performance for 2022, we essentially achieved the midpoint of guidance for both revenue and EBITDA growth despite unprecedented cost pressures from inflation and record storms an expensive and highly competitive Black Friday and media advertising softness. Normalizing for $87 million in largely unplanned inflation and storm-related costs this year, EBITDA growth was actually 4%.

We are making massive investments to build the highest quality networks and they are consistently being recognized by third-parties such as PCMag, Ookla and OpenSignal as being the fastest. Our customer value proposition is to offer the best networks at affordable prices. And we are loading these networks profitably while maintaining margin stable in a highly competitive marketplace. It’s a notable achievement.

Since 2020, we have accelerated CapEx, investing more than $14 billion, the highest ever over a 3-year period by Canadian Communications company and we are doing it to forge ahead aggressively on constructing the broadest fiber footprint in North America, opening up Wireless Home Internet to 1 million rural homes in rural communities and building our mobile 5G networks faster. In the past 3 years alone, we have delivered over 2.6 million new customer-ready broadband Internet locations, including a record 854,000 direct fiber connections in 2022.