Following the successful acquisition of MTS to form Bell MTS in Manitoba and announcing support for Quad Band LTE, Bell has reported strong Q1 2017 results.
Bell ended 2016 with a total wireless subscriber base of 8,468,872, with postpaid subscriptions measuring in at 7,690,727.
For the first three months of 2017, Bell increased its presence in Canada by improving upon its subscriber numbers by 8.6 percent. This number includes 476,932 subscribers that Bell acquired from MTS. In total, the carrier now has 8,144,936 subscribers on postpaid plans, which is up 10 percent from Q1 2016. In addition, 83 percent of Bell subscribers are using an LTE-enabled device.
Wireless revenues soared by 7.1 percent from the same period last year to $1.814 billion CAD, representing 34 percent of BCE’s overall business. Bell Media owns 12 percent of its business and earned $751 million in revenue, while Bell Wireline holds 54 percent and brought in $2.980 billion in revenues.
Bell noted that postpaid customer churn saw a slight increased of 0.02 percentage points in the quarter to 1.17 percent, which was caused by “the remaining deactivation of low-ARPU customers from the loss of a corporate contract in 2016.”
Blended ARPU (Average Revenue Per Users) saw a jump by 4.2 percent to $65.66. This, as expected from previous quarters, is due to increased LTE data usage and more customers on postpaid data plans. Bell’s LTE network now reaches 98 percent of the Canadian population.
Source: Bell
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