Bell has just announced their 2011 Q4 and full-year results this morning and their wireless subscriber base has reached 7,427,482. Q4 Postpaid net additions totalled 131,986 – smartphone users account for 48% of total postpaid subscribers (up 31% from 2010). Blended ARPU (average revenue per user) increased $2.16 to $54.50 per month (up 4.1%). Q4 revenues increase 5.9% to hit $1,365 billion in Q4, but also raised 6.6% over last year to end 2011 with $5,231 billion.
Going over the financials, Bell wrote that “Postpaid gross activations were 389,317 in Q4 compared to a record fourth-quarter total of 399,041 last year. Prepaid gross activations decreased by 31,073 to 122,600. Total gross activations were 511,917 this quarter, 40,797 lower than last year. Prepaid client base declined by 74,100 this quarter, compared to a customer loss of 39,926 last year, due to higher churn and higher prepaid-to-postpaid migrations.”
Bell also noted they launched a total of 10 new devices within the last 3 months, highlighting the Galaxy Nexus, iPhone 4S, HTC Raider LTE, LG Optimus LTE and the BlackBerry Bold 9790. All these allowed “customers to take full advantage of enhanced Bell Mobile TV service”. There was no confirmation on the number of Bell TV subscribers, last count was 300,000, but they’ve been pushing media content in a big way – wireless data revenue grew 32% in Q4. In an earlier email to us this week Bell PR said the Super Bowl XLVI was the most watched mobile TV event in Canadian history, actually tripling the amount of viewership from the 2010 Olympic Gold medal hockey game.
Source: Bell
