BUSINESSCLASSIFIED
TOPLACEANADCALL: 1- 866 -999-9237EMAIL:[email protected]
DIVIDENDSNOTICE OF DIVIDENDS
On October 30, 2019, the Board of Directors
of BCE Inc. declared the following dividends, payable
to holders of its shares at the close of business
on the record dates indicated:
Dividend
No. Amount Record Date Payment Date
Per Common Share:
145 $0.7925 December 16, 2019 January 15, 2020
Per Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Share:- Series S 237 Floating November 29, 2019 December 12, 2019
- Series Y 223 Floating November 29, 2019 December 12, 2019
- Series AB 147 Floating November 29, 2019 December 12, 2019
- Series AD 141 Floating November 29, 2019 December 12, 2019
- Series AE 155 Floating November 29, 2019 December 12, 2019
- Series AH 155 Floating November 29, 2019 December 12, 2019
- Series AJ 100 Floating November 29, 2019 December 12, 2019
- Series AK 34 $0.184625 November 29, 2019 December 31, 2019
- Series AL 12 $0.22168 November 29, 2019 December 31, 2019
- Series AM 21 $0.17275 November 29, 2019 December 31, 2019
- Series AN 15 $0.23492 November 29, 2019 December 31, 2019
- Series AO 21 $0.26625 November 29, 2019 December 31, 2019
- Series AQ 21 $0.30075 November 29, 2019 December 31, 2019
Dividends paid by BCE to Canadian residents are eligible dividends for
Canadian income tax purposes.
Michel Lalande
Senior Vice-President – General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, BCE Inc.
NOTICETOALL
THEHOLDERSOF
COMMONSHARES
OFRECORDON
NOVEMBER14, 2019
O. October31, 2 019,
Gildan Activewear Inc. (the
“Corporation”)announcedthat
its BoardofDirectorsdeclared
adividend of USD$0.1 3 4per
commonshare(Canadian dollar
equivalentforCanadianregis-
teredshareholders)on all out-
standing commonsharesofthe
Corporation. Such dividendwill
be paid onDecember9, 2 019,
rateably and proportionately
tothe holdersofrecordon
November14, 2 019.HaveTheGlobe
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toyouRdooRCALL 1- 800 -3 87 -54 00
TGAM.CA/SUBSCRIBEB2| REPORTONBUSINESS O THEGLOBEANDMAIL| WEDNESDAY,NOVEMBER6,2019
Q
uebec City entrepreneur
Louis Têtu has become
one of the few Canadians
to create two different bil-
lion-dollar technology compa-
nies after his latest firm,Coveo
Solutions Inc., raised $227-mil-
lion in an equity financing led by
the Ontario Municipal Employees
Retirement System.
The financing values the 550-
employee software company –
which generates $100-million in
annual revenue selling artificial-
intelligence-powered cloud
search tools known as “insight
engines” to corporate customers
ranging from Cenovus Energy
Inc. and American Express Co. to
Salesforce.com Inc. – at more
than $1.3-billion.
Past investors Evergreen Coast
Capital of Silicon Valley, Quebec’s
FTQ Solidarity Fund and the Que-
bec government’s Investissement
Québec investing arm also partic-
ipated in the financing. Mr. Têtu
invested in Coveo in 2005, then
became chief executive after his
former company, Taleo Corp., was
purchased by Oracle Corp. in 2012
for US$1.9-billion.
Mr. Têtu said Coveo, which still
has money left over from its pre-
vious financing in early 2018,
plans to use the cash for acquisi-
tions, particularly if the economy
sours. “Right now the play for us
and one of the reasons we’re rais-
ing money is we think the climate
might get very favourable to peo-
ple sitting on a pile of cash, from
an acquisition perspective,” he
said. “This rally will end. I think
the odds are that within 24 to 36
months, there will be a down-
turn.”
The deal is the second time
OMERS has led a large, late-stage
financing of a Canadian software
firm since the pension giant
launched a growth equity unit
last year. OMERS invested $90-
million in Coveo, slightly less
than it deployed in a $158-million
financing of Toronto restaurant
software firm TouchBistro Inc. in
September.
“Coveo is an exceptional op-
portunity,” said Mark Shulgan,
managing director and head of
growth equity with OMERS, who
added the pension fund “moved
very quickly” to invest after meet-
ing Coveo management in Sep-
tember. “We knew right away this
was something we wanted to do”
thanks to Coveo’s accomplished
management team, the quality of
its products and the fact it com-
petes in the surging data and ana-
lytics space, he said.
Coveo is a leader of an emerg-
ing category of enterprise soft-
ware that builds on the limited
capacity of past search tools used
internally by corporations by of-
fering enhanced AI-driven capa-
bilities. “It’s way more than
search,” Forrester Research Inc.
analyst Mike Gualtieri said.
The tools offered by Coveo and
rivals such as Attivio, Sinequa
and Lucidworks can extract more
relevant, personalized and im-
mediate data than past internal
search engines, resulting in busi-
ness operating improvements.
For example, business intelli-
gence software provider Tableau
Software saves US$18-million ayear using Coveo by increasing
client self-service on its website,
which reduces the volume of calls
to customer service representa-
tives and increases customer sat-
isfaction. Computer company
Dell Technologies Inc. uses Coveo
to provide better recommenda-
tions to customers on its e-com-
merce site.
Canadian recreational vehicle
maker BRP Inc. uses Coveo for its
dealer self-service portals. “It’s
like Google for me – I see no
gaps,” said Krystel Perreault,
BRP’s customer insights lead,
who said visits by dealers to the
portal increased by 45 per cent
over two years as they were able
to find answers to their questions
online rather than calling in to
the company. “It’s a better user
experience for the dealer – user-
friendly, intuitive and easy to
browse,” she said.
Mr. Têtu said revenue has been
increasing by more than 50 per
cent a year and that the company
has been able to expand revenues
at existing clients every year
while losing relatively few cus-
tomers. “It’s a strong company,”
said Mr. Shulgan of OMERS. “It’s
not very often we see the type of
metrics Coveo is able to demon-
strate.”
The Coveo financing is the lat-
est in a string of nine-figure, late-
stage financings of emerging Can-
adian companies led by domestic
funders, including iNovia Capital
and the Caisse de dépôt et place-
ment du Québec.
“The headline here is that Can-
adian funds are now extremely
competitive with the best and
brightest in Silicon Valley,” Mr. Tê-
tu said. “For us Canadians, that is
great news, that we can keep the
wealth creation in this country as
opposed to exporting it.”CoveoCEOLouisTêtu,seeninQuebecCity,saysthecompanyplanstousethe$227-millionitrecentlyraisedin
equityfinancingforacquisitions,especiallyiftheeconomysours.RENAUD PHILIPPE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
QuebecsoftwaretitanLouisTêtu
markssecond$1-billionvaluation
Enterpreneurreaches
milestonewithlatest
firmCoveo,whichsells
AI-poweredsearchtools
SEANSILCOFF
TECHNOLOGYREPORTER
A new Canadian-focused biotech venture fund spun out of
Business Development Bank of Canada has raised more
than $100-million as it aims to woo reluctant domestic in-
vestors to an asset class that has enjoyed one of its strongest
years in Canada.
Amplitude Venture Capital, led by former BDC fund man-
agers Jean-François Pariseau and Dion Madsen, said it has
secured financing from a handful of Quebec institutions
that have been Canada’s most active funders of domestic
biotech venture capital. They are Teralys Capital, Caisse de
dépôt et placement du Québec, FTQ Solidarity Fund and the
Quebec government’s investing arm, Investissement Qué-
bec.
Now, the pair hopes to reach their $200-million target by
convincing other investors in Canada and abroad that there
are more opportunities like the string of investment suc-
cesses they’ve had at BDC. “We want to expand and amplify
what we are doing,” said Mr. Madsen, who joined BDC in
2013 to co-manage its first dedicated closed-end life sciences
fund.
Amplitude’s official launch follows a windfall from one
of the pair’s first investments, through BDC earlier this dec-
ade, in Montreal-based Clementia Pharmaceuticals Inc. Mr.
Pariseau was Clementia’s first funder, which helped founder
Clarissa Desjardins secure a licence from Roche Pharmaceu-
ticals to redevelop a failed emphysema drug as a treatment
for a rare, debilitating tissue disorder. The company went
public in 2017 on the Nasdaq and was sold this year to
Paris-based Ipsen Pharma for US$1-billion. BDC’s stake, an
investment of less than $20-million, netted the bank a prof-
it of more than $110-million at the time of Clementia’s IPO.
That amounts to the biggest return by any BDC invest-
ment ever. Combined with its investments in other Cana-
dian biotech developers that went public in the United
States – Zymeworks Inc., Milestone Pharmaceuticals Inc.
and Profound Medical Corp. – the BDC health-care fund
became “one of the highest per-
forming funds in Canada [of any
type], full stop,” said Jérôme
Nycz, executive vice-president of
BDC Capital.
“Amplitude has great poten-
tial to be successful,” Teralys
partner Cédric Bisson said.
“They’ve done it before, they
know what they’re doing, they
know how to guide companies
and to finance them properly to
success.”
But other than Amplitude’s
initial backers, Canadian institu-
tions, including pension funds
and insurance companies, have
been absent from the early-stage
biotech sector in Canada, raising
questions about how much
more the new fund can raise at home. “I think institutional
investors here still don’t have the confidence yet to invest
locally,” Clementia’s Ms. Desjardins said. “I think they
should look at the track record of these individuals and at
the maturity of the various companies we now have, be-
cause now we have a bunch of foreigners coming to invest.”
Mr. Dion said he and Mr. Pariseau “feel pretty confident”
they can reach at least $150-million from Canadian backers.
But they also plan to target foreign investors, who have
increasingly invested in Canada alongside the country’s
handful of domestic biotech funds.
Canada’s domestic biotech sector used to consist primar-
ily of small, underfunded early-stage drug developers, many
of which struggled or sold out earlier.
But the industry has changed. Pharma giants that once
might have funded early-stage research and development
in-house, instead use the money to help selected startups
through the lengthy process of getting drugs approved and
to market. This way, Big Pharma offloads some of the devel-
opment costs, while at the same time sharing its risk with
venture capital funds.
Nowadays it’s more typical for early-stage Canadian drug
developers with promising science to raise $100-million or
more in funding rounds to advance their discoveries and
then to list on the Nasdaq.
The Amplitude spinout is part of a shift by the federal
Crown corporation in how it finances Canada’s technology
sector. Under the arrangement, Amplitude will continue to
manage BDC’s existing biotech venture portfolio.
BDC struck a similar deal last year when two BDC venture
capitalists left to run their own information technology
fund, Framework Venture Partners. BDC is focusing on in-
vesting in areas that have had difficulty attracting funding,
including women-led startups and clean-technology com-
panies.FundspunoutofBDC
lookstoboostinstitutional
investmentinbiotech
SEANSILCOFF
TECHNOLOGYREPORTERAmplitude has great
potential to be
successful. They’ve
done it before, they
know what they’re
doing, they know
how to guide
companies and
to finance them
properly to success.CÉDRICBISSON
PARTNER WITH
TERALYS CAPITALThe Federal Communications
Commission on Tuesday re-
leased its order approving
T-Mobile US Inc.’sproposed
US$26.5-billion tie-up with
Sprint Corp.in a vote split along
party lines.
Chairman Ajit Pai and two
other Republican commission-
ers voted to approve the deal,
while two Democratic commis-
sioners voted against it. The FCC
commissioners voted earlier this
month, but the order was not
made public until they could cut
confidential information and
give commissioners time to
draft statements.
The two companies, the third
and fourth largest U.S. wireless
carriers, have been fighting for
government approval since
April, 2018, and still face a law-
suit brought by a group of state
attorneys-general, headed by
New York.
The lawsuit – against Sprint
and its parent company Soft-
bank Group Corp. and T-Mobile
and its parent Deutsche Telekom
AG – argues the deal will lead to
higher prices for consumers. A
trial date has been set for Dec. 9.
Mr. Pai said in a statementthat the deal would allow T-
Mobile to deploy the next gener-
ation of wireless, called 5G, even
in rural United States, where
connectivity has lagged.
“While Sprint is not on the
brink of financial collapse, there
are serious questions about how
strong a competitor it can be in
the years to come on a stand-
alone basis,” he said in a state-
ment accompanying the order.
Democratic FCC Commission-
er Geoffrey Starks said in his
dissent, “the most likely effect of
this merger will be higher prices
and fewer options for all Amer-
icans.” He added the deal “is
exactly the type of merger that
the Justice Department and the
Commission have discouraged
and rejected in the past.”
The U.S. Justice Department
approved the deal in July.
Under the Justice Department
deal, the companies would
divest Sprint’s prepaid busi-
nesses, including Boost Mobile,
to satellite television company
Dish Network Corp., and provide
it with access to 20,000 cell sites
and hundreds of retail locations.
That deal is worth about US$5-
billion.REUTERSFCCRELEASESORDERAPPROVINGT-MOBILE,
SPRINTMERGERINVOTESPLITDOWNPARTYLINES