BCE Inc. (NYSE:BCE) Q2 2024 Results Conference Call August 1, 2024 8:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Thane Fotopoulos - Investor Relations
Mirko Bibic - President and CEO
Curtis Millen - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Maher Yaghi - Scotiabank
Stephanie Price - CIBC World Markets
Sebastiano Petti - JP Morgan
David Barden - Bank of America
Vince Valentini - TD Securities
Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley
Jerome Dubreuil - Desjardins Securities
Batya Levy - UBS
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the BCE Q2 2024 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, Matthew, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. With me here today are Mirko Bibic, President and CEO of BCE; and our CFO, Curtis Millen. You can find all of our Q2 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, of the analyst presentation reminding you that today’s 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 turn the call over to Mirko.
Mirko Bibic
Thank you, Thane, and good morning, everyone.
So looking at our overall second quarter operating results, the Bell team managed well and we executed with financial discipline against the backdrop of a highly competitive marketplace. We have a clear vision for how we're competing now and into the future, combined with our proven trademark consistent execution.
While consolidated top line growth continued to be impacted by sustained competitive pricing pressures and expected revenue loss from the source, we remain laser focused on profitable margin accretive subscriber growth and driving costs out of the organization, as you can see by 2% EBITDA growth in Q2 and a 1.3 point increase in BCE's margin to 44.9%.
Both of these results were higher than forecasted, demonstrating our success in driving efficiencies and reducing costs to offset near term competitive and economic pressures. This contributed to $1.1 billion of free cash flow being delivered in Q2, which represents an increase of 8% over last year and aligns with the expectations we shared with you on our Q1 conference call in May for higher free cash flow generation as profiled in our quarterly budget at the start of the year.