They come from very different corners of Canadian business but are united in one goal: to change forever the $17.5-billion domestic wireless service industry. Oh, and to screw Bell, Telus and Rogers in the process. This year’s unprecedented choice of a three-headed CEO of the Year acknowledges the vast changes that have swept through this country’s telecommunications landscape in the past year, as new wireless companies seized government licences and rushed to do battle in an increasingly crowded, fast-changing marketplace. The three are Pierre Karl Péladeau of Quebecor Inc., Anthony Lacavera of Globalive Communications Corp., and Jim Shaw of Shaw Communications Inc.
The trio have some things in common. They all had to build wireless networks, they’re all new at this, and they all want to steal customers from the Big Three. But they also differ immensely.
Péladeau is perhaps the most fearsome. He has built a media and telecom empire that thoroughly dominates Quebec. He owns virtually every broadcaster, newspaper and magazine within sight of his offices in Montreal. And although he has left a disastrous megamerger of his legacy printing business in his wake, and is grinding unions into the dust, he stands out as Canada’s poster boy for convergence.
Then there’s Lacavera. The brash young entrepreneur took a scrappy little telecom company, secured financing from an Egyptian billionaire, and promptly charged the wireless giants head-on. He united Canadians in an innovative social-media campaign that funnelled dissatisfaction with his rivals directly into his own coffers. His Wind Mobile is far from profitable and has had some stumbles, but he’s still standing. And that says quite a lot about his talent for managing.
Lastly, there’s Jim Shaw, who has expanded his family’s regional company into one of the largest cable players in the country. In 2010, he topped off years of strategic acquisitions and cautious growth with the blockbuster purchase of CanWest Global. In doing so, Shaw, who stepped down in November, has set up his company perfectly for its wireless launch in 2011.
For consumers in Canada, this is all great news. The past year has seen wireless voice prices fall through the floor. Smart phone data plans are also cheaper than ever. And as cable companies like Shaw and Quebecor jump into wireless, traditional phone companies are fighting back by pushing further into TV, bringing better prices and value to consumers. Bell, Telus and Rogers are also responding with newer brands, better devices, more investment and improved service—so even if you never sign a contract with any of these CEOs of the Year, you’ll have benefited from their acumen.
PROOF OF THE PREMISE
Québécois media baron Pierre Karl Péladeau was trudging door to door in Montreal on a fall evening in 2002 when he proved that convergence actually worked. Péladeau was tagging along with a salesperson, knocking on doors in a futile attempt to sell cable subscriptions for his newly acquired company, Vidéotron.
It wasn’t going very well. But at one residence, he saw an opening. The matriarch of the household was rejecting Péladeau’s pitch, but praising his famous common-law partner—the glamorous talk-show host and one-woman broadcasting powerhouse Julie Snyder. So Péladeau phoned her. “He said, ‘Allo, chérie, I won’t come home for dinner tonight,’” Snyder recalls. “‘The lady here said that if you talk to her, she’ll buy cable.’ He passed me to her and I said, ‘Hello.’ And she says, ‘Is it the real one, is it the real Julie Snyder?’ I said ‘Yes.’ And she says, ‘I guess we don’t have any choice.’”
No one else did, either. That phone call to his partner was the first time Péladeau’s connections to the world of media and broadcasting would help him cash in on the cable business. But it would not be the last—literally, since he pulled the call-Julie-to-impress-people stunt two more times. But things also clicked in a much broader sense, as he spun his French-language broadcasting, publishing and printing powerhouses together with Vidéotron to create an unstoppable convergence machine that now dominates la belle province and has media and telecom ambitions beyond its borders. Péladeau had to stare down unions and fire a bunch of managers, but he eventually turned Vidéotron from a dilapidated cable company into a TV and Internet powerhouse. He then started to vacuum home phone customers away from Bell Canada. His success in Quebec has Bell, Rogers and Telus shivering about what he went and did next: launch a wireless network geared entirely toward smart phones plugged into Quebecor’s irresistible content factory.
