BCE Inc. (BCE) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the BCE Q2 2023 Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Thane Fotopoulos. Please go ahead Mr. Fotopoulos.

Thane Fotopoulos

Thank you, Gisel. 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, Curtis Millen. You can find all of our Q2 disclosure documents on the Investor Relations page at the bce.ca website, which we posted earlier this morning.

Before we begin, I'd like 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.

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

Mirko Bibic

Thank you, Thane and good morning, everyone. So as our Q2 results released this morning show Bell's operating performance remains resilient benefiting from the team's consistent execution and customer-centric approach, our significant investments in broadband infrastructure, product bundling, quality subscriber loading and disciplined cost management.

Against this backdrop, BCE delivered strong 3.5% growth in consolidated revenue for Q2 and a notable sequential improvement in adjusted EBITDA which increased 2.1% over last year. We continue to front-end load our CapEx spending a further $1.3 billion in new capital this quarter, which keeps us firmly on track to expand Bell's pure fiber network to 650,000 new locations and to grow our 5G service footprint to 85% of the country, while also enabling standalone 5G plus service for almost half of all Canadians.

Bell Wireless and Bell pure fiber rank as Canada's fastest mobile, Internet and WiFi services and influence latest network performance report. With previous recognitions won by Bell, we are Canada's most awarded mobile and Internet services provider. Such third-party recognition reinforces both Bell's technology leadership and customer value proposition to offer the best networks at affordable prices.

We leveraged our leading broadband networks and services to deliver a record Q2 number of total wireless mobile phone, mobile connected device, retail Internet and IPTV net subscriber additions, which increased 76.5% over last year to 241,516.