Rogers Communications, Inc. 2026 TMT Conference

Look, Just about the game last night?

Oh, man. That's a lost opportunity.

Sure. It comes up once or twice.

Yeah. The first priority is closing on the Kilmer purchase.

We are expectant and hopeful that we will close that very early fourth quarter. We still have a couple of league approvals, NBA, which I think is meeting this week, and NHL, which I think they have a meeting coming up in the next few days. I don't expect those to be difficult approvals to obtain. We are a known quantity. The transaction's well-known. I expect those to go through, close the acquisition then early Q4. Once we close, we will bring MLSE, Blue Jays, Rogers Sports & Media together, consolidate into a single corporate entity. It will be a single corporate holding company with a few wholly-owned subsidiaries underneath it. That will be a single Rogers Sports & Media group. Then focus on two things.

One, running the revenue and cost synergies, and that's an exercise that we really are just at the starting point on. I expect those to run fairly quickly. We have run some changes through. Once we took control of MLSE, we were able to run some of the change priorities, some of the cost containment, and just change in approach with some of the teams. That exercise is one that I expect will take one to two years to come to full fruition like we had within Shaw. Then bring that to market. We have already started very early conversations with prospective investors. We have advisors in place. We have a CIM and a teaser deck that are with the leagues for final approval before we bring those to market. The intent is to move fairly quickly after acquiring control to then approaching to sell.

I expect it to be a private placement sale. We're not looking to create another public entity. I expect it to be probably institutional investors, but there are a number of private name individuals and families that have reached out as well, so we'll keep an open mind. Then hoping to bring that to conclusion, if not late this year, that might be pushing it on timing, but early in 2027. We bought the Bell stake on July, well, closed effective July 1st. So that was in 2025. So we have until mid-year 2027 under the two-year calendar that the credit rating agencies run by to delever. That gives us plenty of time to bring this to market, get it closed, get the valuation and the proceeds we're looking for. I've held off with continuing to estimate or to declare a valuation.

You've seen the transactions that have closed over the last few months. The valuations continue to go up. I'm optimistic. We'll see where the market pegs the valuation. Certainly, I expect it to be reflective of the quality of the assets that we're bringing. The significant difference between what we're selling and what we're buying, the purchase was under a call option arrangement that we have with our partner, so we were the only buyer. There was no ability for Kilmer to take this to a competitive bid exercise. We have the opposite on the other end of this, where I expect that it will be competitive. So I'm hopeful that we can drive a reasonable valuation on that combined entity. A very strong valuation. We'll see where the market comes. I'll leave it at that.