The $2.85-billion Freedom sale was announced in June to try to assuage concerns the combination of Rogers and Shaw would lessen wireless competition and raise prices for consumers, but the federal competition authority is continuing its attempt to block the merger.
Despite the roadblocks to completing the “transformational” merger with Shaw and a massive outage of the Rogers network on July 8 that has led to added costs as well as increased government and regulatory scrutiny on the telecom sector, Rogers posted second-quarter financial results Wednesday that beat analyst expectations and estimates.Article content
Consolidated revenue of $3.87 billion was slightly higher than the consensus estimate of $3.79 billion, and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization came in at $1.59 billion for the three months ending June 30, also beating the consensus estimate of $1.54 billion.
With the bulk of the third quarter remaining, including back-to-school season, Staffieri said Rogers is comfortable maintaining its performance guidance for the full year. In response to a question from an analyst about whether competitors are trying to take advantage of the network outage by siphoning off Rogers customers, Staffieri said promotions do not appear to be different from prior years.
In the second quarter, which ended before the network outage, year-over-year wireless ARPU growth was 5.7 per cent, beating expectations of 3.6 per cent growth, Desjardins analyst Jerome Dubreuil said in a note to clients Wednesday morning.
If this gets approved it effectively takes away all competition in communications. We already have the highest cell rates in the world. It would be irresponsible to approve the merger.
Just shut it down
Hope it happens never 👎
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