Rogers Communications contributed $14 billion CAD into the Canadian economy in 2018 to strengthen its national infrastructure, deliver “meaningful Canadian content” and help local communities, says the telecommunications giant.
The national carrier made the announcement to coincide with the release of its Q4 2018 earnings results that were made on January 24th, 2019.
Along with investing the money, Rogers said it employed 26,000 Canadians and added 1,000 to help support its customers.
“Investment in our country’s infrastructure is essential to our nation’s competitive advantage on the world stage,” Rogers’ CEO Joe Natale said in the release and emphasized this during the Q4 2018 investor conference call.
The money spent to build its infrastructure was particularly in upgrading its 4G network so it is ready for 5G, the next iteration of mobile technology, says Rogers.
During the conference call, Natale did not mention anything about Huawei and the contentious issues surrounding the Chinese telecommunications giant but did talk about its strong partnership with Ericsson to deploy 5G.
Separate from the infrastructure investment, Rogers said that it also invested $679 million to support Canadian content through local news, live sports, multilingual programming, television and film.
More investment includes $2 billion towards salaries and benefits to employees, $2.8 billion was towards capital expenditures, and $60 million was contributed to local communities.
Source: Rogers
