Explosive worldwide growth in the wireless industry means more Canadians than ever — an estimated two million — will buy a wireless phone for the first time this year, predicts the president and CEO of Telus Mobility.

George Cope painted a rosy picture of a society increasingly dependent on connectivity at a meeting of the Canadian Telecommunications Consultants Association held in Calgary last week.

“The key word these days is ‘adoption’ — getting people to adopt and utilize (wireless services),” said Cope, citing statistics showing 550 million handsets will be sold this year around the world, an increase of 35 per cent. “In Canada, we expect the industry by 2003 to have about 16.6 million clients, a continued growth rate.”

An estimated $4 billion in capital will be invested in the Canadian wireless industry this year, up a billion dollars from last year’s figures, he added.

George Cope

“Despite a lot of talk about capital expenditures being reduced, every wireless carrier in Canada based upon what I’ve heard, including Telus, are spending more capital this year than they have historically.”

But even with the rapid growth in wireless technology adoption, said Cope, Canada still has one of the lowest penetration rates in the world at 28 per cent, compared to 70 per cent in Europe. “From my perspective, that’s good news, not bad,” he added. “It means 72 per cent of Canadians don’t have wireless phones. That’s a much better opportunity than if only 30 per cent of Canadians didn’t have wireless phones.”

But phone users better not get used to having free phones in exchange for signing up on a airtime plan. Cope said zero-priced phones “aren’t going to be a mainstay under my leadership,” noting that consumers are willing to pay $300 for a cordless phone in their homes.

“The industry challenge, quite frankly, is to focus on the clients seeing the value of the product . . . the challenge is to get the marketplace to understand there is value in that product beyond just the airtime,” he said.

Cope outlined different services coming on stream at Telus Mobility within the next few months, including a wireless phone with MP3 capability that allows users to have CD-quality tunes downloaded to their handsets, location services which can pinpoint the position of a user’s phone and high speed third-generation wireless devices with video capability.

He also described how the company’s $6.7 billion acquisition of national digital wireless company Clearnet Communications Inc. last fall has legitimized Telus as a national player in the fast-growing telecom industry in Canada. Under the leadership of Telus CEO Darren Entwistle, he said, the company has taken an aggressive and focused approach to the market, and is now the largest wireless carrier in the Canadian market in terms of revenue.

Integrating the networks of Clearnet, QuebécTel Mobilité and Telus into one corporate entity with more than two million clients “is working extremely well,” Cope said, with very low employee turnover.

“We’re inward-focused on a merger, at the same time remaining market-focused which is an enormous challenge, and at the same time we must maintain our leadership position in the industry in terms of revenue growth,” he said. “That’s what we’re focused on on a national basis.”