Anthony Staffieri
Analyst · Genuity Capital Markets.
Dvai, it's Tony. I'll capture most of it. When you look at our dividend growth, well, let me start with our capital allocation. We've been very consistent, and what we've said is, job one is to grow cash flow -- free cash flow on a consistent, sustainable basis. And this year has been a transition year in a number of respects. And so what you see, particularly on our CapEx line, is it increased slightly year-on-year, is that focused investment. We will continue to make the right acquisitions. And for the most part, they have been tuck-in and our largest capital expenditure has been on spectrum, which is critical as we look at it over the long term. So nothing there has changed and then to the extent there's cash left over from that, we will then have a very balanced view of return of cash to shareholders. In the last little while, we've steered away from share buybacks as we're focused on reducing our leverage on the balance sheet from where we are today and to focus it to get it back down to under 2.5x, and we'll augment that with dividends. And looking at dividends, we're looking at 2 things in our view. One is, what does it look like in terms of our long-term outlook and to the extent that we long term have a view that cash flow will increase, then it makes sense to increase dividends; and two, it really gets up to sustainability, what does our payout ratio on free cash flow look like. And when you look at our free cash flow for 2014 payout ratio, we came in at about 65%. When you exclude the one-time cash tax items that aren't representative of long-term cash taxes, we come in at under 60%. And as we model it out for 2015, again, as we adjust for cash taxes, which really is the only single biggest item besides CapEx that's increased significantly over the last few years and that's just as a result of our cap -- our operating loss carryforwards for tax purposes having been used up. And so when you take into account recurring cash taxes, our payout ratio for 2015 continues to be at a relatively conservative number and in line with what you saw in 2014. And so I would say the dividend is really part of our strategy and not necessarily as a result of any type of pressure that we see out there for a dividend increase.