BCE, Inc. (NYSE:BCE) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 2, 2023 8:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Thane Fotopoulos - Vice President of Investor Relations
Mirko Bibic - President and Chief Executive Officer
Curtis Millen - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
David Barden - Bank of America
Drew McReynolds - RBC Capital Markets
Maher Yaghi - Scotiabank
Tim Casey - BMO Capital Markets
Batya Levi - UBS
Aravinda Galappatthige - Canaccord Genuity
Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley
Jerome Dubreuil - Desjardins Securities
Stephanie Price - CIBC
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the BCE Q3 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, Matthew, and good morning, everyone and thank you for joining our call. Today, I'm here with Mirko Bibic, President and CEO of BCE; and our new CFO, Curtis Millen. You can find all of our Q3 disclosure documents on the Investor Relations page of 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 certain 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
Thank you, Thane, and good morning, everyone. I'm proud of the Bell team's accomplishments and our performance in the third quarter. These results reflect the outcome of significant and consistent investments in broadband networks and services, continued strong momentum in our core telecom business operations, promotional offer discipline with an emphasis on multiproduct bundling and the streamlining of costs.
We delivered consolidated adjusted EBITDA growth of 3.1%, representing our best quarterly results since Q2 of 2022. This was achieved while confronting ongoing media advertising headwinds and a more active pricing environment across all consumer products. BCE's margin expanded 0.9 percentage points to 43.9% demonstrating our proven ability to drive costs out of the business and to effectively balance growth with profitability in a highly competitive marketplace.
With all new targeted fiber locations for 2023 now either completed or under construction with 5G coverage targets well on track and with continued regulatory uncertainty on a number of files, we reduced CapEx spending in Q3, all of which contributed to stronger free cash flow growth this quarter as profiled in our budget for 2023. This will accelerate even more profoundly in Q4 keeping us on track to achieve our free cash flow guidance of 2% or higher growth for 2023.