Canada’s best oligopolies: The top stocks

Consumers like to complain about Canada’s biggest telecom players, banks, railways and grocers, and how limited choice in this country is keeping prices higher than in much of the rest of the world.announced a deal to acquire Shaw Communications Inc., in 2021, the Competition Bureau warned that the transaction would narrow the telecom field even further, leaving millions of consumers with higher cable and cellular costs, and worse service.

“We have a handful of oligopolies that are able to fend off new entrants without needing to destroy profits for an extended period of time, or where we need a government financed solution,” Ian de Verteuil, head of portfolio strategy at CIBC Capital Markets, said in an e-mail. “A high level of industry concentration does not by itself enshrine consistently high profitability or long-term returns – but it certainly isn’t a drawback,” he said in a December report.

“It’s a structure that has proven to be necessary because of our low population and geographic dispersion,” said Martin Pelletier, senior portfolio manager at Wellington-Altus Private Counsel, referring to oligopolies in general.is trailing its population growth, which is hardly an inviting trend for expanding multinational corporations that could offer meaningful competition here.

“It gets the greatest benefits of the oligopoly, just by sheer size,” said John Aiken, an analyst at Jefferies. “Since one rail car can carry the volume of approximately four trucks, and less fuel is consumed during the transportation of rail freight as opposed to other modes, the greater the distance, the more efficient rail is,” Adam Anderson, vice president at RSI Logistics, a transportation consultancy, said in a e-mail.

The appeal here is that businesses and consumers need connections no matter what the economy is doing, which gives the sector a defensive quality that has worked over the long term. According to CIBC’s numbers, the sector delivered a total average annual return of 11.4 per cent over the 30 years from 1989 to 2019, which is 3.2 percentage points better than the S&P/TSX Composite.

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