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Ted Rogers was determined to outlive his father, who died at 38, and build a legendary communications empire.
He succeeded at both.
Rogers, who passed away early Tuesday at the age of 75, created a sprawling $11 billion media giant whose properties include small trade magazines, five TV stations, 53 radio stations and a professional baseball team, anchored by a cellular phone company with 7.5 million subscribers.
“It’s quite an extraordinary career,” said telecommunications consultant Iain Grant of the SeaBoard Group. Indeed the rise of Rogers Communications Inc. is almost an epic story.
Starting from an insignificant Toronto FM radio station in 1960, Rogers expanded the company into cable and publishing, defied his board by going into cellular and burdened it with enough debt that it came close to bankruptcy. But today RCI is considered one of the strongest publicly-traded companies in the nation, despite the current financial upheaval.
“Everything he touched was not pure genius, but by stint of hard work and considerable risk-taking he built up quite an amazing company,” said Grant. “It will be interesting how it evolves now that the firm hand on the rudder is now a committee and not just one man.”
One of his two smartest moves, in Grant’s opinion, was buying cable giant Maclean Hunter in 1994, which took Rogers from being a small regional cableco to almost a national media company. The other was Ted Rogers' determination to personally invest in a national cellular franchise after his board refused to get into the business itself because of its debt. Eventually Cantel was bought by the Rogers corporation, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today Rogers Communications can offer quad-play products – cable, wireless, IP TV and Internet – which makes it unique among North American providers. In fact, says Grant, wireless is so lucrative now that it supports the rest of the empire, which he described as “an interesting collection of assets.”
About 54 per cent of the conglomerate's revenues come from wireless, says Lawrence Surtees, IDC Canada's vice-president of telecommunications research. With Bell Canada in temporary disarray, he sees the race for telecommunications leadership is between Rogers Communications and Telus Corp. "What an achievement," he said. "Eleven years ago this would have been unthinkable. RCI had incurred massive debt."
David Neale, senior vice-president of products and services at Telus consumer solutions Inc., worked for Rogers for 12 years as a vice-president of Rogers Wireless, before moving to Telus about two years ago.
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