You see in the fundamentals of retooling of the business in terms of bringing in simplicity in our operations. We’ve actually invested more in customer experience than we have in any previous year, yet our overall cost structure has come down for cable and that’s really a reflection of that transformation to the fundamentals in that business. We’ve also at the same time and we’ve talked about this on previous calls, are re-indexing from our Flanker Fido internet, back to the Rogers main brand. It’s a much better customer experience in terms of a better modem, and a whole bunch of things related to that. And you see that when we look at the churn in the Flanker product versus our main brand. Rogers Internet has substantially by a wide margin lower churn than Fido internet.
So what you see us is trying to move to the more value add brand for us of Rogers. And we’ve been making that change. In the short term our main competitor has launched, I would describe aggressive, competitive promotional pricing, especially in the higher tiers of one gig and above, which is fine, we’ll compete with that. But as Glenn said in his opening remarks, our response to that will be very measured at the right time in terms of competing on that basis. But right now, there were a few things we wanted to focus on in the fundamentals in that business and so that’s what you’re seeing play out and how we think about our outlook for this year.
Glenn Brandt: And then Drew in terms of the Shaw transaction and our balance sheet, when we received the regulatory approval, and close on Shaw, I’ll start with we have all of the permanent funding in place to close. We have $13 billion in cash held in reserve from the proceeds from our $13 billion in bond issues from last March 2022. That those bonds, as you’ll all recall, are in place and extended out through to being available through the year end €˜23. So we have plenty of runway there. We also have $6 billion in committed bank term loans, with terms ranging from three to five years, split evenly across three, four and five years. So that takes our cash funding up to $19 billion dollars available. And then there is a portion of the purchase price, of course, it’s done in shares for the Shaw family.
And then finally, there will be proceeds that come in, from the transaction into Shaw communications before we close from Shaw’s sale of Freedom to Quebecor and so all of that netted together, we have all of the funding in place to close the transaction and meet all of our liquidity needs through the year without touching the $4.9 billion of liquidity I mentioned we had on hand at year end. So the balance sheet is strong in terms of corporate funding. We will meet all of our maturities and Rogers specific commitments as well as being able to close on Shaw without needing to come back to the capital markets. In terms of where we will be on leverage when we close, we’ll be right around five times maybe a tick over five times when we close depending upon timing.
We’ve taken advantage of the time that we’ve had to have strong organic growth within the Roger standalone business. We have had some expenses come in along the way, which we now have to cover on our balance sheet, not the least of which was the cost of extending those bonds because we did not close in €˜22. Even with those added expenses coming in, we will still be closing right around five times, low five times when we close on the transaction I anticipate and then going forward, we haven’t given a forecast as to schedule around delivering. But if you look at where our EBITDA rolls up with Shaw’s EBITDA and then you look at where our path is on synergies, I think you’ll see through earnings growth alone, we generate some significant de-levering on an annual basis.
