Telus Corp. T-T reported higher fourth-quarter profit and revenue Friday after adding new wireless customers and benefiting from growth at its subsidiary Telus International.
The Vancouver-based telco reported $310-million of profit in the three-month period ended Dec. 31, up 17 per cent from the same period a year earlier, when it had $265-million of profit. Its quarterly revenue came to $5.2-billion, up 2.8 per cent year-over-year from $5.06-billion.
Telus released its quarterly results the day after BCE Inc. BCE-T announced it’s reducing its work force by 4,800 positions. Separately, Rogers Communications Inc. RCI-B-T, which acquired Shaw Communications Inc. for $20-billion last year, offered a second round of voluntary severance packages to its employees Thursday, after an initial offer last year resulted in the departure of 1,200 employees.
Telus trimmed its work force by 6,000 people last year amid what it characterized as a challenging macroeconomic, competitive and regulatory environment.
Scotiabank analyst Maher Yaghi said Thursday that Telus’s cost-cutting initiative in 2023 “is providing an upside push to earnings this year.”
“We credit management for being pro-active on cost,” Mr. Yaghi wrote in a research note.
Telus chief financial officer Doug French said in an interview that the company “saw the headwinds coming on pricing and competitiveness.”
Cutting jobs is “always a difficult thing to do, and none of us want to do it,” Mr. French said. “But the sooner you do it, the less you have to do.”
Mr. Yaghi also noted that despite a heightened competitive push from Rogers into Western Canada after the Toronto-based telco’s acquisition of Shaw, “so far Telus’s results do not show a material impact on customer loading.”
Telus’s fourth-quarter profit amounted to 20 cents per share, up from 17 cents per share.
After adjusting for items such as restructuring costs and unrealized appreciation from its virtual power purchase agreements with renewable energy projects, the telecom giant reported $341-million of profit, or 24 cents per share.
Analysts were expecting earnings of 23 cents per share and revenue of $5.24-billion, according to the consensus estimate from S&P Capital IQ.
Telus added 126,000 net new mobile phone customers during the quarter, compared with 112,000 a year earlier.
Shares of Telus rose more than 3 per cent, or 84 cents, to $23.80 in Friday morning trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Alexandra Posadzki