Canada’s communications industry took in $55.4 billion in revenue in 2009, the CRTC said Thursday, a 2.1 per cent increase from the previous year’s level.
The figure represents 4.6 per cent of Canada’s total gross domestic product.
Within that, the telecom industry in particular took in $41 billion in revenue, a 1.8 per cent increase from the previous year.
“The wireless and internet sectors posted positive results, while revenues for long-distance and local residential telephone services continued to decline,” the regulator said in a release.
Established players did well, bringing in $18.1 billion in revenues, which accounted for 44 of all the industry’s revenues as a whole. Cable companies increased their share of local telephone and internet subscribers in particular to 27 and 57 per cent of Canada’s total.
Despite the topline gain, advertising dollars were down, in part because Canada was in the grip of a recession for much of the year. Conventional television and radio stations saw their revenue decline by 7.4 and 5.2 per cent, respectively. But that was offset by specialty and pay channels, which saw revenue increase by 7.4 and 5.8 per cent each.
Revenue in the broadcasting industry as a whole hit $14.4 billion for the year, an increase of three per cent.
Mobile devices were a key revenue driver in 2009, as 25 per cent of anglophones reported watching some sort of television program on their mobile devices during the year. The figure dropped to 17 per cent for radio programs.
By the end of the year, there were 23.8 million wireless subscribers and 8.3 million broadband internet subscribers. The number of Canadians with the ability to access the internet on their cellphones jumped from 91 to 96 per cent in 2009.
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