Telus CEO decries ‘race to the bottom’ through price matching with competitors

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This article was published 09/05/2025 (213 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The chief executive of Telus Corp. says there’s more the company can do to attract new customers without necessarily having to lower prices to match its competitors.

President and CEO Darren Entwistle said Friday he was encouraged by Telus’s performance in its first quarter as it added 218,000 net new customers, up around 9,000 compared with the same period a year earlier, and marking a company record for the first three months of the year.

The figure includes 20,000 mobile phone subscribers — down 25,000 year-over-year — and 21,000 internet customers, a decrease of 9,000 from a year earlier.

Speaking about the record on a conference call with analysts, Entwistle said Telus isn’t satisfied.

“OK — clap, clap. That’s great, but it’s not good enough,” he said, adding he’d like to see Telus scale more aggressively on its machine-to-machine and Internet of Things sales.

“That is profitable business, that is attractive revenue growth for this organization. It’s a (return on investment) on all that money we spent on 5G infrastructure and spectrum along the way. It’s good business from a retention characteristic point of view.”

The more that Telus can boost sales in that area, the more revenue growth it can generate, said Entwistle, and therefore alleviate pressure on its average revenue per user — a key metric monitored by companies in the telecommunications industry.

Telus’s mobile phone ARPU was $57.13 in the first quarter, a decrease of $2.18 or 3.7 per cent from a year ago.

The company said the drop was due to customers signing up for base rate plans with lower prices “in response to more intense marketing and promotional price competition targeting both new and existing customers,” along with a decline in overage and roaming revenues.

Asked by an analyst about Telus’s wireless service revenue being down almost one per cent in the quarter and how the company can balance pricing and subscriptions, Entwistle said Telus should “move to a more sanguine economic model.”

Noting that “customers value reliability more than affordability,” he decried a culture of price-matching in the telecom industry and argued that Telus should move in a different direction.

“We have to change the psychology within the industry as it relates to marketing and sales. We have a wireless industry where we have to have price competition parity and I, for one, don’t understand that,” said Entwistle.

“Why can’t we have a price premium? If we have better product features, but more particularly, better customer service for our clients, why do we always have to price match, price match, price match in a race to the bottom? That’s a transformation that this organization is working ardently to achieve.”

Entwistle added that Telus has “been a chronic underperformer on product integration or bundling” and would look to improve its ability to cross-sell products to customers. He said doing so could help reduce churn — a key metric measuring subscribers who cancel their services.

The company reported its mobile phone churn rate was 1.06 per cent in the first quarter, down from 1.13 per cent in its previous first quarter. That included a postpaid mobile phone churn rate of 0.84 per cent.

Meanwhile, Telus raised its quarterly dividend Friday as it reported its first-quarter profit rose compared with a year ago. The company will pay a quarterly dividend of 41.63 cents per share, up from 40.23 cents per share.

The increased payment came as Telus said it earned $321 million in net income attributable to common shares or 21 cents per diluted share for the quarter ended March 31. The result compared with a profit of $127 million or nine cents per diluted share in the first quarter of 2024.

On an adjusted basis, Telus says it earned 26 cents per share in its latest quarter, the same as a year earlier. Operating revenue and other income totalled $5.06 billion, up from $4.93 billion.

Scotiabank analyst Maher Yaghi said the results were in line with expectations, while Telus’s wireless “echoed what we saw from BCE and Rogers, showing continued pricing pressure from adoption of international roaming plans and lower overall plan prices due to intense competitive pressures.”

Also on Friday, the company announced it completed the purchase of U.S.-based employee health services company Workplace Options for around $500 million.

Chief financial officer Doug French said that as part of the transaction, Telus signed a non-binding agreement with a third-party investor who will invest $285 million in the business.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 9, 2025.

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