Two of Canada’s biggest telecom providers are raising the fees they charge customers when they use their devices outside of Canada.
Starting March 8, Telus will charge customers $14 a day when they roam on their devices in the United States, and $16 a day when they do so internationally. That’s an increase from $12 and $15, respectively. Customers of the Telus-owned discount brand Koodo will see a similar fee hike.
Rival Bell is making a similar move starting the following day, raising its U.S. roaming rate from $12 to $13, and going from $15 to $16 internationally. Those increases will also be in effect at Bell-owned subsidiaries including Virgin Mobile.
There’s no indication that Rogers has similar plans to raise roaming rates, but as it stands, customers at Rogers and its flanker brands including Chatr and Fido pay $12 to roam in the U.S. and $15 internationally.
CBC News reached out for comment to all three companies for this story, asking for an explanation for the move.
A spokesperson for Telus said the company needed more time to respond.
Bell cited Statistics Canada data showing that overall wireless prices have declined in the past year, despite “price increases from our suppliers” and “increasing costs to our business,” without elaborating.
Rogers outlined the company’s roaming rates, but declined comment as to whether they had increased recently or were about to.
High prices
Canadians pay some of the highest telecom bills in the world, according to numerousinternationalreports. Multiple federal governments have pressured providers to bring prices down, especially for basic plans with limited data, and while official data shows wireless prices have come down by some metrics, that’s not the case for high-end packages.
A recent report by CBC’s consumer affairs program Marketplace found that, on average, Canadians pay seven times more for a gigabyte of data than people in Australia, 25 times more than people in Ireland and France, and 1,000 times more than people in Finland.
Commuters use their mobile phones near St. Pancras International railway station in London in February 2019. Europeans are protected from high roaming rates, but that’s not the case for Canadians. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg)
Wall Communications Inc. publishes an annual report on Canadian telecom services and, while this year’s version has not yet been released, on the whole company founder Gerry Wall says the public perception that wireless prices keep going up is unfair, as providers have created many more low-cost plans targeting basic users.
“At the very, very low level — I think you can say it’s relatively affordable in Canada,” he said. “It’s when you get up into sort of the mid-level and the higher-level plans that Canada doesn’t look as good.”
A service such as roaming is one of those high-level perks, and prices are going up because consumers have shown that they want that service, Wall says.
“When I look at [those companies’] annual reports … they do point to the fact that that people are traveling a lot more,” he said.
“If you look back three or four years, all the Big Three were charging considerably lower per-day roaming fees for Canada and U.S. … I expect it goes up every year and it will continue as traveling continues.”
Wireless mobile plan costs around the world
Cellphone users in Ireland, France and Australia react to cost-per-gigabyte price differences in Canada.
Last summer, the European Union passed a law which will ensure that cellphone customers in the EU are entitled to the same quality and price for wireless service when they travel in Europe as they get from their domestic carriers.
But Canadian wireless users have no such legal protection.
Canada’s telecom providers spend billions of dollars every year to grow, maintain and improve their networks, expenditures that have made the country’s wireless networks, on the whole, more robust than those in other countries. Cellular users bear the brunt of those costs and improvements in higher bills, but none of those costly infrastructure expenses — on things like cellphone towers and new spectrum — are a factor for roaming internationally, when calls piggyback on existing networks for a small fee.
Keldon Bester, an analyst on competition policy and co-founder of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, says it’s hard to know if the carriers are facing some sort of cost increase that would justify the rise in roaming rates, since the deals that they sign with their international partners are a closely guarded secret.
“[They can say] ‘Our partners are are demanding this of us and and we’re trying our best but we can’t really do anything,'” said Bester, “but because we don’t have access to these roaming agreements we really can’t test the validity of that.”
He says it’s not hard to imagine that the major telecom providers may see roaming costs as a way to boost revenue without as much of the scrutiny they face for their domestic plans.
“It’s a situation where consumers have even fewer options than they might domestically,” he said. “It’s like buying food at a sports arena — they’ve got you … your options are really limited, so there’s an opportunity to squeeze more out of the consumer.”
Janine Rogan has felt that squeeze first hand.
On a recent trip to Mexico, she was hit by a roaming charge of more than $100 from her telecom provider, Telus. “From a consumer perspective kind of feels like price gouging,” she said. “They’re just trying to make every possible dollar they can off of us.”
She has plans to travel to Europe this summer, and given her recent experience, she says there’s no way she will use her phone normally while she’s there, and will instead get a short-term phone plan from a local provider for a fraction of the cost.
“It’s always amazed me how cheap it is to get a SIM card over there and just pop it in while you’re traveling,” she says. “To see that they’re not allowing roaming charges while Canada’s increasing them just makes the average person’s phone bill go up [by] an exorbitant amount that really isn’t necessary.”
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
