Rogers has announced their Q4 2011 results today and Canada’s largest wireless carrier ended with a slight increase in net subscribers of 47,000 (42,000 for Postpaid and 5,000 for Prepaid). This brings their total subscriber base to 9,335,000. Rogers stated in their press release that Q4 saw the highest number of smartphone activations and upgrades ever, “predominantly iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices”, with 791,000 (Q4 2010 saw 635,000). Smartphones now represent 56% of the postpaid subscriber base (7,574,000), up from 41% last year. Of course as smartphone adoption increased, so did data revenue with an increase of 19% to around hit around $600 million for the quarter.
In addition, wireless data revenue represented 37% of total network revenue which was $1.6 billion. Rogers ARPU (average revenue per user) fell 4% ($2.49) to $58.82. On the conference call Nadir Mohamed, President and Chief Executive Officer of Rogers Communications, said that their new data roaming plans and the automated data usage notifications somewhat stalled data growth.
Another interesting point in the results was that Rogers noted that “In the last half of 2011 we sold 16% more iPhones and sold 20% more smartphones than in the same period last year”. No word on exactly the number of iPhones, but somewhat give an insight to how much percentage the number of iPhone subscribers on Rogers’ network.
Source: Rogers
