Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to BCE's Conference Call on Fourth Quarter results and 2010 guidance. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Thane Fotopoulos. Please go ahead Mr. Fotopoulos.
BCE Inc. (BCE)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 4, 2010
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Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to BCE's Conference Call on Fourth Quarter results and 2010 guidance. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Thane Fotopoulos. Please go ahead Mr. Fotopoulos.
Thane Fotopoulos
Management
Thank you, Ann. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining the call today. As you know earlier this morning we issued a news release announcing our Q4 and full year 2009 results as well as 2010 financial guidance. The release as well as the slide presentation for this call are available on the investor section of our website at www.bce.ca. As always joining me today is George Cope President and CEO and Siim Vanaselja, our CFO. Siim will begin with a quick overview of our Q4 results before he moves into discussing 2010 guidance and George will then take you through an overview of the business and strategies that we've laid out for this year before we open up the floor to Q&A. However before we begin I'd like to remind you that today’s remarks will contain forward-looking statements with respect to items such as revenue, EBITDA, adjusted EPS, free cash flow and capital intensity. Several assumptions were made by us in preparing these forward-looking statements and there are risks that our actual results will differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. For additional information on such assumptions, please consult BCEs Safe Harbor notice concerning forward-looking statements dated February 4, 2010, filed with both the Canadian Securities Commission and with the SEC and which is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Any forward-looking statements made today represent BCEs expectations as of today and accordingly are subject to change after such date except as maybe required by Canadian Securities Laws we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise and I'm making this cautionary statement on behalf of both George and Siim whose remarks may, will indeed contain some forward-looking statements. On that note I'll turn it over to Siim to get us started.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Great, thanks Thane and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us. So I'll start with a review of the results that we issued this morning on Slide 7. First I'd say that we're delighted to finish 2009 with a strong fourth quarter. Financially we met or exceeded all of the increased financial guidance targets that we set for the Company at the end of the second quarter and we balanced that financial performance with good subscriber growth from strong holiday sales. All of this then gives us excellent momentum as we begin the New Year and lets us set higher expectations for our performance for 2010. Revenue growth of 4.8% in the quarter was driven largely by the inclusion of The Source in our results as well as by progressively improving wireless revenue trajectory reflecting stronger post paid subscriber loadings and an improvement in the year-over-year trending of ARPU compared to the previous couple of quarters. While the economy continued to impact our business performance in the fourth quarter, I'd say it did so to a lesser degree this quarter. Our EBITDA growth of 1.1% this quarter included the reversal of our accrued obligation in respect of Part II broadcast license fees which I spoke of at the end of the third quarter. Those were for the last three broadcast years resulting from the industry settlement with the CRTC. Now, offsetting that was higher year-over-year Olympic expenditures, higher pension expense and higher FX charges, all of those amounting to an excess of $70 million of year-over-year impact in the quarter and this quarter we also incurred more marketing and acquisition spending on promoting the launch of our HSPA network and other growth services, so the result was that this quarter we activated 85,000 more wireless and TV subscribers year-over-year…
George Cope
President and CEO
Thanks, Siim. Good morning, everyone. I'm on Slide 31 and what I'd like to do over the next 15 minutes or so is take you through an update on our imperatives for 2010, some new announcements and a little insight into where I view the business at as well. So on Page 31, no surprise to our investment community I'm sure is our focus for 2010 continues on our five strategic imperatives. We had made measurable progress on all of these imperatives in 2009 and that will be the focus in 2010. Success on these five strategic imperatives drives our ability to sustain the dividend growth model which as you know is the strategy from the company from a shareholder perspective. Turning first of all to broadband network and services, Page 33, as Siim had mentioned we have had a step up in our RGU growth in the fourth quarter, 174% increase versus last year with the increase in wireless net adds, TV net adds strongest we've had in years and residential internet net adds up and a migration of our internet based more towards our FTTN network. It is clear to us that our strategy of a four piece strategy of execution across brand distribution pricing and product is starting to work in the marketplace for the company as we begin to regain share the last half of the year in a number of key areas of the company and the market. Turning to Page 34 and again, our imperative in investing in broadband networks and services as you know in 2009 we launched the new HSPA network, we continued our rollout of fiber to the node and announced in 2009 that we would deploy fiber to the condominium marketplace. For 2010 this morning we're going to make a…
Thane Fotopoulos
Management
Thanks, George. Before I hand it over to Ann to begin the Q&A session I would ask the participants limit themselves to one question and one brief follow-up so we can get to everybody on the queue. And with any time remaining, we'll then circle back for another round and it goes without saying I'm available for any clarifications, follow-ups or questions we don't get to in the call. So with that, Ann can you please explain the instructions? We're ready to start.
Operator
Operator
Certainly, thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Greg MacDonald from the National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
Greg MacDonald - National Bank Financial
Analyst · the National Bank Financial. Please go ahead
Higher level capital structure question what's different about BCE to a certain extent is that you don't have a lot actually quite marginal debt maturities in the next few years, you have just shy of $700 million of cash on the balance sheet right now, free cash flow 2 to 2.2 net of dividends and buybacks, you'll produce probably a couple hundred million maybe as high as $400 million suggesting kind of $1 billion in cash at the end of 2010. 20 million share buyback looks like there could be some upside. Is that still an option in the second half of the year if things turn out to be the high end of that range or is there another reason to stockpile cash? Thanks.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Yeah, Greg, we are forecasting that we will finish 2010 with a cash balance in the range of $500 to $600 so your number of $1 billion is on the high side. One of the things you may recall is that we have a debt maturity in 2010 in the amount of $600 million that needs to be funded. That might be one of the differences or sorry, $400 million, that might be the difference to reconcile with your numbers but we're happy to work with you on that, so with regard to the share buyback that we announced, our intention is to execute that evenly over the course of 2010 and as I said in my remarks we'll continue to evaluate the performance of our business, how our cash surplus cash position builds throughout the course of the year and where our credit metrics are and we'll make further decisions on the use of that surplus cash as it builds.
Greg MacDonald - National Bank Financial
Analyst · the National Bank Financial. Please go ahead
Thanks, and a quick follow on I guess I got the answer you plan to pay down the maturities in 2010 and so I would ask the question on top of that, where are you guys thinking about in terms of your targeted leverage ratios, particularly given how attractive the market is right now. I might suggest that there's an opportunity here, a quite unique opportunity to refinance. Is that something you're considering, if that's the case does it change your answer?
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Well, yeah, Greg, we're always looking for interesting refinancing opportunities in the marketplace and we took advantage of an attractive market last year when we raised the $1 billion of debt that we did, so we're using that debt that we raised towards debt reduction, we repaid $600 million of one series of debt in 2009 from those proceeds so I said the remaining $400 million will be repaid in 2010. That refinancing saved us approximately $25 million of interest expense annually going forward. As we look at the markets today and what the breakage costs would be with other debts, we don't see particular opportunities today to do further debt re-financings but once we will continue to monitor that, to your question on at what point are we comfortable with the credit metrics and capital structure of the company, I think we're kind of there. Once we pay off this remaining $400 million, our credit ratios are very comfortably at the higher end of our policy is where we want to be. As you commented our debt maturities are way out in the future so I think it really puts us into a strong position to execute when it comes to surplus cash more in line with our capital markets objectives to return cash to shareholders.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Simon Flannery of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead
Thanks very much, good morning. You've had about a month when there was wind in the market. Perhaps you could obviously put some of the implications there in your guidance. Could you talk a little bit about where you think the pressure will be in 2010? Is it more prepaid than post paid, the extent is wireless substitution on the land line versus the wireless share loss and any ARPU impact, what are your early thoughts on the impact on wind and the likely other competitors over the rest of the year? Thanks.
George Cope
President and CEO
Well I think as we think through the question and it's obviously an important one and one that we're going to have to gauge as we see in the marketplace, our strategy as I mentioned is pretty clear and that is the new network we have, the advantages we have, the distribution we've put in place, the new branding, all of those elements are there and the acquisition of Virgin were driven the Virgin particularly by the anticipation of the new entrance and making sure we had a new strong flanker brand to compete. Clearly a new entrance sets the floor on pricing generally based on what they're all saying so the ceiling is a gap between their product price and what our top products can charge well and then our flanker brands can compete head-to-head and we're just going to have to monitor it. At this Pont it's having literally no impact at all but there are a number of new players coming and in Quebec one of our significant competitors, so we'll have some implication for sure for us in the market and that's reflected obviously in our guidance and we're certainly very happy we've got our new network launched and out prior to the first quarter which had been our initial plan and we've begun as I've said on the distribution side with the new channels that we've put in place, so that point it's going to be straight on competition and we're ready to compete at every level and that's why we've got the different products and portfolios we have.
Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead
And any early lead on The Source as part of that strategy?
George Cope
President and CEO
The Source we were not allowed to go in with Bell product until January and so the rollout every night we do 20 to 30 stores, I think we're close to 350 to 400 stores as we ended January. Training the people, we've now just announced Virgin with HSPA and Virgin’s now in the stores and we would anticipate a momentum on The Source building into March and start to see some of the sales from that that used to go to our competitor going our way and we're already seeing early positive results.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Vince Valentini of TD Newcrest. Please go ahead.
Vince Valentini - TD Newcrest
Analyst · TD Newcrest. Please go ahead
Yeah, thanks very much. The question is on the smartphone subsidy. I was very surprised to see your COA down 6% in the fourth quarter and wondering also if you can flush out what retention costs may have been, I didn't see that in the note yet and looking forward into next year, was there anything unusual in Q4? Did you have some tremendous procurement savings or other savings to your distribution chain that came into offset the initial costs of the iPhone and the other expense of smartphones because every other carrier we've seen launch it had sort of a wave of people upgrading to the device that costs money and then obviously a surge of new customers taking it. It's a nice problem to have given the lifetime economics but still it creates a bit of a near term depression on margins that doesn't seem to be impacting your numbers in Q4 or your guidance for 2010 so just wondering if you can talk about that a bit.
George Cope
President and CEO
First of all not to highlight a negative but we didn't have EBITDA growth in wireless this quarter, so clearly that's part of what's driving it. A couple things happened on COA and it's a good question. Our gross adds were the strongest we have ever had and of course you amortize your advertising expense over your gross adds and so that's helped us even though I think people would say we've certainly seen the campaign knows we're pretty aggressive in spending advertising dollars, or amortizing over a gross add number that quite frankly we were thrilled to achieve helped us out. Secondly, we did and it's a good question, Vince, we did over the year enter into some new agreements on the distribution side with some of our key channels to lower our cost of commissions and so that's in there and that will be for us that's a continuing new agreement for us and so that was helpful as well, and then it is important, there was only two of the three months that we had the new network up and so I don't think we've discovered some magic bullet to this issue for sure and so that's part of it and we don't really report our upgrade cost but there's no doubt they're increasing and that is what the pressure you see on the EBITDA that's there. Our expectation in 2010 is to really aggressively continue to manage our costs in the ILEC to give us the flexibility to drive the market share we're looking to achieve on wireless and as Siim said the 2% to 4% guidance left us if you will wiggle room there in terms of the amount of gross adds we may do as a result of the new network.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Vince, I'd just add that the big benefit that we got was the Part II tax savings that helped offset the increased subscriber acquisition cost, the additional spending on the Olympics, the higher pension and the higher FX in the quarter.
George Cope
President and CEO
That wouldn't obviously be in our wireless EBITDA.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Wouldn't be in the metrics.
Operator
Operator
Thank you? Our next question is from Bob Beck of CIBC. Please go ahead.
Bob Beck - CIBC
Analyst · CIBC. Please go ahead
George, could you please talk a bit more about the decision to do the Fiber-to-the Home in Quebec? Obviously, the aerial construction is an opportunity there. How much of this is geared toward your expectations for competing in that market for a quad play fairly soon and related to that are there any other larger markets in your footprint that would have a similar or at least advantageous aerial construction makeup?
George Cope
President and CEO
I'm glad you asked actually. We looked at this for quite a while. Quebec City we had actually just started to do fiber to the node and we've got to relook at this because of this 85%, 15 issue. And when we ran the numbers and believe me we ran them over and over for obvious reason, the CapEx is higher and it's on Page 35 to do a new neighborhood Fiber-to-the-Home with aerial versus the fiber to the node of existing neighborhoods to the tune of a couple hundred dollars, $250 per home past. The issue is there is an operating savings that we will benefit from through doing the entire city, Fiber-to-the Home. By the it won't just be home but all of business as well that we will do so the entire city is done and once we've done that city we believe based on our discussion with other companies have done fiber there's an OpEx savings that can be as high as $80 to $100 a year per household that you have as a subscriber and so you have to present value that that back again so then you say okay now you're at this choice and one is Fiber-to-the Home and one is fiber to the node and any small assumption of any type of improvement in market share or ARPU swings the business case because of the 85% aerial to doing the Fiber-to-the Home and that's why we've done that and then your second question, there are other areas, principally in Quebec that have the same type of footprint and rather than disclose that today for competitive reasons we really would like to see the Quebec rollout learn, we'll follow what Karen is doing at Bell Aliant where she has a similar type of 85%, 15% footprint and use some of those early results to look at other areas in the province of Quebec where quite frankly it is more aerial than anywhere else we have footprint.
Bob Beck - CIBC
Analyst · CIBC. Please go ahead
Thanks and notwithstanding the aerial makeup and your comments about your CapEx spending relative to your North American Telco peers, any thoughts? You've got tons of cash, the balance sheet is in great shape, is there any thoughts to accelerating CapEx just for the prospect even know withstanding Fiber-to-the Home but even further on the fiber to the node?
George Cope
President and CEO
Well at the moment, the pace that we're going at is frankly, we've accelerated the pace on all areas. You can tell with IPTV, there's some additional operating cost to launch that business and our sense is success of RGUs can obviously breed a different discussion with our shareholders and investment community but right now we're pretty comfortable that 16 is where we want the discipline and the target and the company and frankly we benchmark still a little high to other carriers on a global basis. There are carriers in Europe as people on this line will know we're running 12%, 13%, 14% now there are differences, clearly in every market and so at this point we find it hard to justify spending more than the 16 and it's what we can execute successfully on as well given the resources we have in the company and that's an important new discipline that we've tried to bring to the organization and of course obviously surplus cash as we're going to constantly look at uses of that cash with a key strategy obviously to making sure we can grow our dividend model.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Phillip Huang of UBS Securities. Please go ahead.
Phillip Huang - UBS Securities
Analyst · UBS Securities. Please go ahead
Great. Thanks very much. Just wanted to make sure I understand your thoughts on the dividend. I know it's still early in the year but given your strong EPS guidance the payout looks quite conservative. Is it fair to assume that you will not rule out a dividend increase in the second half if everything goes according to plan and maybe you can identify some of the major items that you need to have greater visibility on before making that decision.
George Cope
President and CEO
We won't rule it in or rule it out. We're just going to operate the company with the strategy of a dividend growth model that keeps us within our EPS results and so obviously one way or another our earnings were better than we had anticipated it would be inconsistent to not consider that. Likewise if we're in our pay out range it would be inconsistent to consider increasing it, and so we've got to see the year unfold and hopefully people have seen over the last year and a half we are committed provided we are executing real growth, that means real EBITDA and real cash flow growth and executing all these fiber strategies first and foremost to then return money to shareholders as we can in a prudent and timely way.
Phillip Huang - UBS Securities
Analyst · UBS Securities. Please go ahead
Got it and maybe just a quick follow-up on the residential line erosion. Heard you say accelerate this year in Q4, was just wondering if you could give us a sense how much of the erosion this quarter or in 2009 is related to wireless substitution and what your view on or assumption on wireless substitution?
George Cope
President and CEO
We're about 10% on wireless substitution is what we see in the market today in Canada, our acceleration as you use the term and NAS erosion has not been our retail franchise. What has accelerated is wholesale NAS additions for us, have just basically dried up in the economy, so we were actually having some if you will NAS adds through wholesalers that just aren't happening now and so our consumer product division, we call BRF, actually had its ninth quarter of improving NAS. So where we actually need to see some turnaround from our perspective in 2010 is in the business side and I've mentioned on every call that until we see some economic growth in the small medium business that has an impact on our NAS, because organizations just aren't adding offices, resources, etc. and so we basically said here today that we would like to see and I think Kevin who is our President was on the line he wants to see an improvement year-over-year. We would like to see it stable given the uncertain surroundings around the substitution that everyone keeps talking about and we're obviously a large NAS service provider so if that does accelerate we would be impacted and that's why we would like to see that line be stable on the consumer side.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Dvai Ghose of Genuity Capital Markets.
Dvai Ghose - Genuity Capital Markets
Analyst · Genuity Capital Markets
Good morning its Dvai Ghose I just want to revisit Vince's question on HSPA sales in the quarter because I'm seeing contradictory data and I'm very confused as to how many HSPA devises you actually sold. On the one hand as you said you had good gross in net adds and equipment sales are up 43% all suggesting you did pretty well. On the other hand I assume HSPA is focused on smartphones and post paid so if 43% of gross adds are prepaid and 33% of the net which is pretty much as it was a year ago. Your COA is down and I believe that your COR from your IRP was about 4.5% of network revenue in the quarter versus 10% to 12% for peers and also on the subside you did write off 37,000 subscribers which may have artificially boosted the subscriber growth in the quarter so I'm very confused and was wondering if you could clarify the issue by telling us how many HSPA devises you sold in the quarter.
George Cope
President and CEO
First of all I'm sorry you're confused but let me try to clarify it for you. The sub write off had nothing to do at all with the results, didn't artificially inflate anything those are prior period. We went right across all of the organization and you'll see other areas too where we did the same thing opening sub adjustments for stuff from previous years with just a consistent scrub through our controllers office to get every one of the measurements consistent across all the BDUs so it had no impact whatsoever on our fourth quarter results. I'm not going to disclose our HSPA sales because no one would like to know more than our competitors. All I can tell you is for our gross adds to be up as we said year-over-year to the number that we're focusing on, really happy so I don't know why there would be confusion. The confusion might be our COAs lower because our handset prices are higher than our competitors and that could be part of it as we're now actually if you look at BlackBerry pricing we have the highest BlackBerry pricing in the market yet we were able to grow our gross sales, I indicated that we re-executed our distribution contract with one of our core channels which lowered our COA and so by large, we are absolutely ecstatic with the quarter from a wireless perspective with the 60 days of the 90 taking place, so and obviously, the higher COA and gross adds flow through and impacted our EBITDA an on COM, it is up. There's no doubt. We're not disclosing it but there's no doubt that our cost of upgrades went uptick largely with the iPhone where we've had people who have access to that unit now and we would rather have them move to us obviously than move the competitor.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
And Dvai while we do not disclose the number of smartphone activations, we did, I did say in my comments that we had a 67% year-over-year increase in smartphone subscribers in the fourth quarter so I think that's pretty indicative of the kind of mix we had in our activations in Q4.
George Cope
President and CEO
I think maybe that Dvai, helped on the wireless for the first time in a while we saw a little bit of network service revenue increase and that's been pretty tough to come by with the decline in ARPU, so maybe that's the difference.
Dvai Ghose - Genuity Capital Markets
Analyst · Genuity Capital Markets
Just a quick follow-up to Siim. You mentioned also on a consolidated basis how the impact of the subsidy is offset by the Part II fee rebate it expresses you as George pointed out to a different line item but when consolidated offset. Can you qualify that as well? You said 40 million on a previous call but based on your earlier comments it seems less.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Yeah, the total amount of Part II fee recovery was $54 million of which $40 million related to past period because this was a settlement in respect of the prior three regulatory periods.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Glen Campbell of Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.
Glen Campbell - Merrill Lynch
Analyst · Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead
Yes, thanks very much. A question on pensions, Siim, you gave helpful information on the balance at the end of the year and outlook for 2010. I was wondering if you could give us a sense of what the solvency deficit would be excluding the impact of smoothing and if there's no change in assumptions and if the plan delivers what it's supposed to this year, in line with assumptions, what would funding be like over the next couple of years? How much would it rise from the 2010 level? Where would it peak, and so on? Thanks.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Yeah, so on an unsmoothed basis as I said, the deficit is $1.2, $1.3 billion. We haven't finalized the valuation. On a market value or unsmooth basis, that would increase by close to a further $1 billion. Now, under the new pension reform measures that came into effect, what they did was eliminate the use of smoothing or that market related value methodology, but they replaced it with a calculation that enables us to use a three year average of solvency ratios in calculating pension funding and in addition, they allowed that past deficits will effectively get a fresh start for purposes of the five year funding rule, so what we do now is take the remaining old deficit at the end of a particular year and rather than amortizing that straight line over the next four years, you add to it or deduct to it in the following year what the incremental change in deficit is and then that new deficit, you get a fresh start in amortizing it over five years, so that actually gives us a benefit in our pension funding and with that, we would expect that our level of pension funding, although highly dependent on what asset returns are and what interest rates, if those sort of stay within the range that we're in, we could see a modest increase in pension funding going forward for the next couple of years but nothing of substance if you go from the $500 to the $600 million level.
Glen Campbell - Merrill Lynch
Analyst · Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead
And I guess a way to think about that is all things being equal to present value of that funding would equal say roughly $2.2 billion that you outlined?
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
It would be under the new rules it would be less.
Glen Campbell - Merrill Lynch
Analyst · Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead
Okay and then just a quick follow up. You talked about some benefits by changing the entitlements of retirees, getting rid of the post retirement benefits and so on and the changeover to defined contribution. If we look out two or three years what sort of savings on annual operating expenses could we expect from that?
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Yeah, the biggest one is the change in post retirement benefits that begins in 2011. I think that sort of gets fully phased in by around 2012, 13 and if I recall correctly, that should add something in the range of $5 to $7 million of EBITDA pick upper year for us.
Glen Campbell - Merrill Lynch
Analyst · Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead
Okay, so not a big number. Thanks very much.
George Cope
President and CEO
And the only last thing that I think is important to Siim's point, the discount rate had such an impact, if we do see an increase in interest rates as Siim said I think a 1% change where you don't have any? Any deficit funding so that's how significant that is.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Just to give you an indication, if you go back only a few years, we were using a pension discount, a solvency discount rate of 5.5%. In 2008, that had gone down to 4.85%. In 2009, we're going to have to use a rate of 4.5%, so we're at very, very historic low levels of discount rate and if we over the next few years manage to get anywhere back up to the 5.5% range our deficit would be eliminated.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Maher Yaghi of Desjardins Securities.
Maher Yaghi - Desjardins Securities
Analyst · Desjardins Securities
Yes, good morning this is Maher Yaghi. Just have a question on your top line revenue growth forecast for 2010. Can you strip out any of the acquisition numbers in there and give us maybe what is your expected organic growth on the top line?
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
We've acquired The Source in the middle of 2009. I indicated that for the first two quarters of 2010, we will get some benefit from incremental pick up in revenues from The Source. There's not a lot of contribution if any that that delivers to EBITDA and certainly none to our earnings but when you look at The Source’s performance quarter by quarter, their year being in the retail business is really all about the fourth quarter and as we've put our 2010 plan just like all our other business units, The Source’s now integrated and consolidated into those results so we're just providing our overall revenue guidance of 1% to 2%.
George Cope
President and CEO
The only other thing I'll add and Siim said at the beginning and it's on Page 7, there's two core areas of revenue growth that we're looking, obviously one we get the benefit you've raised which is The Source and the other is with the improvement in post paid momentum in our wireless business in the last half of the year and again an outlook that would say we don't expect ARPU to continue to decline at the rate it did from 09 versus 08 and 09 to 10, those are the two key areas of revenue growth we're looking for.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Yeah, and what you'll see each quarter as we customarily do in our reporting is our service revenues which is really the contributor, the real contributor to the profitability of the business and those service revenues do not include any source in it.
Maher Yaghi - Desjardins Securities
Analyst · Desjardins Securities
Okay, great and just a follow up question on maybe if I can ask you guys about your views and how BCE approaches potential change in ownership rule in the telecommunication sector in Canada, if that were to happen as some suggest as early as a step wise manner, how do you expect BCE to benefit from that change?
George Cope
President and CEO
Well, I think rather than speculate on that, but in the industry as many years as I have, if the government looks at a review of foreign ownership rules then obviously we would be a key participate or in that process and at the end of the day we would just have to respond to what the government made a decision on and increase in foreign ownership, theories would say it will bunch up access to more capital and I would say that Bell doesn't suffer from access to capital, so we would just have to follow that development to be as transparent as I can be.
Maher Yaghi - Desjardins Securities
Analyst · Desjardins Securities
Would you change your capital allocation in case the foreign ownership rule is open only to new incumbents, new entries in the wireless sector and would that impact how you plan to spend your capital into deploying FTTH and other wireless ventures?
George Cope
President and CEO
Well as I said, it's such first of all I can't imagine but that would be a very, very poor decision by a regulator to do that, it would be not in the interest of any of the major Canadian companies and employ the majority of the people in the industry if they were to have two sets of rules is what you're implying and then secondly we have to react accordingly but my instincts are strategy wouldn't change at all but that's an instinct to your question. We would have to think about it.
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
Ann as we're running out of time this will be our last question.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our last question is from Peter Rhamey of BMO Capital Markets.
Peter Rhamey - BMO Capital Markets
Analyst · BMO Capital Markets
Hi good morning. Thanks for taking the question that got in under the wire two questions if I can since it's the last question. George, maybe I was hoping you could address the whole issue of pricing power in the market. I think we're hearing from other carriers that the ability to increase prices has been somewhat reduced and so people are treading lightly yet you've got upgrades in terms of services in IPTV of course into richer packages and on high speed internet speed packages into higher speeds so I was hoping you might be able to give us some additional color in the Bell territory, both in Quebec and Ontario and what you're seeing there and what are your prospects and what are you assuming on the second half of 2010 in terms of any improvement, thank you.
George Cope
President and CEO
Well the thing we're seeing is people using more of our services is what's driving the increase in household ARPU for our consumer business. The migration of people to our higher speed FTTN products drives higher ARPU because people are using the service obviously more and more and our usage based billing model is starting to generate some revenue for us as well so it's not necessarily price increases so much as it also is people using a services more and then generating more revenue. Best example that's probably our TV product. We've had a $10 increase in revenue per customer in the last two years. We've not had a $10 ARPU price increase over that period, so it is certainly that's what we're seeing driving the revenue for the Company on some of the improvement in our household ARPU. On top of that depending on each of the markets on a competitive perspective we have in some cases been able to pass price increases through in the marketplace and it's a function of whether or not the market absorbs them and if we go too far then we have to adjust accordingly and some of those price increases that we do happen on an annual basis and some happen in January on some of our products in the area of our internet and some of our phone services and likewise some of our competitors I guess I have done some different things. But yeah, you've got to be, it is so competitive, it's really about getting your customers using the services to drive the incremental revenue.
Peter Rhamey - BMO Capital Markets
Analyst · BMO Capital Markets
Great, thank you and just more of a factual question here for Siim, on the tax rate 22% statutory in 2010 is your call. What would it be if Bell Aliant was fully taxed because I'm looking to transition in 2011 and trying to model out effective tax rates in that year, thank you.
George Cope
President and CEO
Do we have it or could we get it fir Peter?
Siim Vanaselja
CFO
We can get that for you. It would be closer to the statutory tax rate adjusted for approximately $0.20 of EPS upside from one-time tax adjustments that we're expecting in 2010.
Peter Rhamey - BMO Capital Markets
Analyst · BMO Capital Markets
Great. I'll get the details off line, thank you.
George Cope
President and CEO
Thanks for your time everyone time and it was a long call but I appreciate everyone listening in.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time.