Topic: Dividend Stocks

Best Canadian Stocks: How Telus is making strides in the wireless wars

Income Investing

Telus continues to upgrade its wireless and Internet services, spending $2.2 billion on these improvements in 2014. That’s helping it attract more subscribers in a highly competitive market.

As well, last year the company bought $1.1 billion worth of wireless frequencies, or spectrum that should let it cover more of Canada, particularly smaller cities and rural areas.

TELUS (Toronto symbol T; www.telus.com) gets 55% of its revenue from its 8.0 million wireless subscribers across Canada. It also has 3.2 million phone customers, 1.5 million high-speed Internet users and 888,000 TV subscribers.

Telus also continues to expand its health care division, which helps doctors, pharmacies and hospitals convert patient records and other information to electronic formats.

In September 2014, the company paid an undisclosed sum for ZRx Prescriber, an app that lets doctors write prescriptions through their tablet computers and smartphones. The app can also access a patient’s drug-insurance information, which speeds up claims and cuts down on errors. Over 520 clinics in Ontario and Quebec use ZRx Prescriber to process 400,000 prescriptions a month.


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Dividend stocks: Newly raised dividend now yields 3.7%

In the three months ended September 30, 2014, Telus’s earnings per share rose 10.3%, to $0.64 from $0.58 a year earlier. Revenue increased 5.4%, to $3.03 billion from $2.87 billion.

Wireless revenue rose 6.6%, thanks to new subscribers and rising use of smartphones, which generate higher fees than regular cellphones. Revenue gained 2.5% in the the wireline (land line) division, where an increase in Telus TV and high-speed Internet subscribers more than offset customers cancelling land lines and switching to wireless devices.

Strong demand for wireless and high-speed Internet should let Telus earn $2.87 a share in 2015. The stock trades at 15.2 times that estimate.

The company raised its quarterly dividend by 11.1% with the January 2015 payment, to $0.40 from $0.36. The new annual rate of $1.60 a share gives the stock a 3.7% yield.

Telus is a buy recommendation of our advisory on conservative investing, Canadian Wealth Advisor.

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