Annual report - About TELUS

subscriber base compared to 1999. Total pro forma revenues were more than $1.7 billion,
making TELUS Mobility the leading wireless company in Canada in terms of revenue. We also
led the Canadian wireless industry in revenue growth, with annual pro forma revenue growing
by $346 million in 2000 compared to 1999, capturing a phenomenal 40 per cent of incremental
revenue growth of the four major wireless service providers in the Canadian market.
TELUS Mobility has the largest CDMA footprint in Canada and, with our differentiated iDEN network,
marketed under the Mike brand, we are the only iDEN ESMR operator in Canada. Our digital
networks now cover 73 per cent of the Canadian population, up significantly from 16 per cent at
the beginning of 2000. At the end of 2000, 57 per cent of our subscriber base was on one of
our digital networks – believed to be the highest percentage digitization of any Canadian operator
which also offers incumbent analogue cellular services. Of these digital subscribers, approximately
56 per cent were equipped with dot-com-ready phones, allowing those customers to take
advantage of TELUS Mobility wireless Internet services introduced across Canada in 2000.
> Moving Forward
In 2001, we will continue to successfully integrate TELUS Mobility’s national operations. We
plan to activate approximately one million new customers in 2001 and contain churn on the
subscriber base so as to yield approximately 500,000 net additions.
We will focus on profitable customer growth. We intend to continue achieving industry-leading
revenue growth through network expansion and digitization, improved distribution, new national
Internet products and services, and management of our PCS postpaid/prepaid mix. We plan to
expand our digital network to cover an even greater proportion of the Canadian population, and
to further increase the penetration of our subscriber base with dot-com-ready phones to ensure
that an increasing number of our customers can benefit from our quickly expanding roster of
wireless Internet services.
1 Pro forma numbers reflect combined current and historical results for TELUS Mobility, Clearnet and QuébecTel Mobilité for the full year 2000
TELUS Mobility – The Industry
In 2000, the Canadian wireless industry experienced a record 5.9 per cent penetration gain, bringing the penetration
of wireless services across the Canadian population to 28.4 per cent. This compares to 22.5 per cent
penetration at the end of 1999, which resulted from a then-record five per cent penetration gain over 1998.
To put the year 2000 net additions of 1.8 million in the context of overall industry growth, it took almost 10 years
for the industry to add its first 1.8 million customers following the 1985 launch of wireless service in Canada.
Industry analysts generally expect robust growth in the wireless sector to continue over the next five years.
Current estimates for wireless penetration in 2005 range from 57 to 70 per cent, representing a gain of 8.8 to
12.8 million new wireless subscriptions over this period.
It is considered likely that future wireless subscriptions will reach, or possibly even exceed, 100 per cent of the
population over the longer term. While the addressable market for mobile wireless devices, excluding the very
young and old, is in the range of 80 to 85 per cent of the population, it is possible for customers to utilize two
or even more wireless devices. Making such penetration increasingly possible is the emergence of wireless
telemetry applications providing machine-to-machine communications.
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mobility
Our digital networks now cover 73%
of the Canadian population