Montreal-based national carrier Bell reported 102,980 postpaid wireless net additions to now to have a total of 9,630,313 total wireless subscribers in Q2 2019.
The carrier released its earnings report on August 1st, which noted that postpaid wireless subscribers decreased 4.8 percent from the 122,092 it had added in the same reporting period a year ago.
Bell said it was “due to fewer year-over-year customer additions from our long-term mobile service contract with Shared Services Canada.” It said excluding that “postpaid net additions were higher than last year, reflecting in Bell’s mobile network leadership, strong sales execution across our retail channels and lower postpaid customer churn.”
Overall though, the carrier said it was the best Q2 total postpaid and prepaid net customer additions since 2001.
The company said that it prepaid subscribers increased by 46,498 net new customers, compared to a net loss of 7,606 it saw in the same reporting period a year ago. This is a 92.6 percent year-over-year increase in gross additions “driven by continued strong demand for our low-cost Lucky Mobile prepaid service and exclusive national retail distribution agreement with Dolarama.”
Bell signed an exclusive partnership with all Dollarama stores across the country on May 2019 to sell Lucky Mobile and Virgin Mobile SIM cards for $4 CAD.
The churn rate, or the rate at which a customer leaves the company for its competition, improved by 0.05 percentage points to 1.06 percent for postpaid wireless services.
Bell said the churn rate for prepaid wireless it increased 0.86 percentage points to 4.20 percent, due to “increased competitive intensity and a change in our prepaid deactivation policy at the beginning of 2019 from 120-150 days to 90 days.”
The Average Billing Per User increased 1.6 percent to $68.70 “reflecting more customers subscribing to higher-value monthly plans with larger allotments, as well as the flow-through of price changes and subscriber adjustments made at the beginning of 2019.”
Overall, total Q2 2019 operating revenue was up 2.9 percent to $5.93 billion, and net earnings increased 8.2 percent to $817 million.
Source: Bell
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