Vince Valentini: The second question maybe for you as well, Glenn, but whoever wants to chime in. I think your underlying ARPU performance is extremely encouraging given what we’ve seen in the market in terms of advertised pricing. I know you’re doing a great job migrating and focusing on the Rogers brand, but I mean, I think you would admit you do have some customers coming in at these lower-end flanker prices. So to be able to offset that and show ARPU growth the way you are is great. I just don’t want that to be overshadowed by these subscriber write-downs. I mean it makes sense if they’re nonperforming subscribers, they’re businesses that have been discontinued. It’s logical, but it would really help us if you could adjust for it. Like if that 1.4% ARPU growth you put up, if you didn’t have the 166,000 subscriber write-downs, would that still have been slightly positive, do you think?
Glenn Brandt: Absolutely. It would still have been positive, Vince. We have consistently had ARPU growth on the right side of 0 for the last several quarters. Without those write-downs, it still would have been positive. And on an organic basis, we still would have had growth north of 1%. It would have been in the range of 1.5% or so without those write-downs. The write-downs are just a reflection of how we’re going to market. We’ve discontinued those business lines. And just to be — to clarify and to be clear, we put that in our release. But very clearly, yes, we would have been positive without those write-downs, Vince.
Operator: Our next question comes from Maher Yaghi of Scotiabank.
Maher Yaghi: I wanted to congratulate you on attaining your $1 billion cost synergies well ahead of plan. Now Tony, I know for some reason, probably you don’t want to keep updating us on those synergies going forward. But can you tell us what other additional projects you could be working on to improve on that $1 billion cost-cutting effort, which has been significant? And how should we think about margins going forward as you continue to break the silos and, I think, bring together operating systems, et cetera, et cetera? Will we continue to see the margin improvement on the Cable side? Or you will use most of those to go — for your go-to-market strategy and growing the subscriber base on the Cable side, like you said, and fixed wireless, et cetera?
Anthony Staffieri: Very good question, Maher. A couple of things here that I’ll unpack for you. As what you’ll see from us going forward is a couple of things. Having hit the $1 billion of synergy savings doesn’t mean we’re taking our foot off the gas pedal in terms of continued efficiency improvements. And so rather than reported in the context of $1 billion and what it grows to, you’ll see that come through in expanding margins, and Glenn will provide a little more color for that in a moment. And so we continue to see opportunities in working with our vendors. There are still some systems and IT integration projects that need completion, and those will provide some additional synergies. But the other piece we’re focused on are the revenue synergies.
And what we’re seeing is very good traction in terms of enterprise or business space as — particularly in the West as we bring together our wireless and now wireline offering in a complete bundled package for businesses. And so we see that segment of the market in terms of geography probably our fastest growing right now. And so that revenue synergy is certainly one. The second piece relates to new construction. While it has slowed a bit, the pace of new construction, particularly in major markets like Vancouver and Toronto, continues to be strong. And we said we would overindex in that space in the West, and our strategies there are starting to yield good results that you’ll see come through in future quarters. So it’s a combination of both the revenue side as well as the cost side that you’ll continue to see in quarters, both through margin expansion.
But also as we talk about exiting the year with top line growth in Cable, those pieces I talked about are going to be crucial to that strategy, and that’s what we’re focused on executing on.
Glenn Brandt: And then, Maher, just filling in the remaining targets that we’ll be going after. We have largely completed the people side of our cost synergy targets. And by far, that’s the category that we have accelerated the most. It had the benefit of driving dollar cost savings. It had the larger benefit of moving through the integration of the combined operations faster and settling people into their new responsibilities quicker. And so that’s, by far, the largest piece that we’ve accelerated. In terms of targets that we’re still looking to get at, I’ll highlight a few of the Media content costs we have started on, but there’s still more to factor in over the coming, I’ll say, 1 to 2 years as some of it’s going to take a longer effort in terms of reflecting changing viewing habits and fully rolling those in.
One of the other initiatives that I had highlighted early on was the prevalence of fiber that we picked up, particularly in the West, with the acquisition of Shaw and the ability to replace microwave backhaul with fiber-connected backhaul over more of our cell towers. That is underway, but it’s earlier days. And as we move that through over the coming year, I’m anticipating pulling out a significant number of — significant amount of costs for that microwave spectrum backhaul and replacing it with own fiber infrastructure. And so that will involve construction over the next 1 to 2 years and beyond as we build towers. And then I think in terms of where I anticipate margins going over time, particularly as we reverse the current negative trend on Cable revenue, I expect that we will see some additional upside on our Cable margins.
We’re at 56% now. I think over time, you could see that move up by somewhere in the range of another 1% or 2% as we settle in the revenues and continue to drive some of those cost savings.
