Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Rogers Communications Inc., Canada’s largest wireless carrier, reported third-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates as users of its handsets including Apple Inc.’s iPhone spent more on data.

Net income fell to C$485 million ($455 million), or 79 cents a share, from C$495 million, or 78 cents, a year earlier, Toronto-based Rogers said today in a statement. Excluding some costs, profit was 82 cents, exceeding the average estimate of 54 cents in a Bloomberg survey.

Wireless data revenue climbed 46 percent in the quarter as Rogers benefited from being the sole carrier of the top-selling iPhone in Canada. Rivals Telus Corp. and BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada this month reached agreements with Apple to begin offering the touch-screen handset in November. Those deals threaten Rogers’ most valuable source of revenue, said Dvai Ghose, an analyst with Genuity Capital Markets in Toronto.

“It was a good quarter but, fundamentally, the problem is you’ve lost your HSPA monopoly and you’re going to have market share pressure as a result as the other guys have the same devices as you do,” Ghose said, referring to high-speed packet access. He has a “hold” rating on Rogers and BCE and recommends buying Telus shares.

Rogers, which also provides cable-television and home- phone services, gained C$1.56, or 5.4 percent, to C$30.46 at 4:10 p.m. in Toronto Stock Exchange trading. The shares have fallen 17 percent this year.

New Subscribers

Rogers added 210,000 wireless subscribers in the quarter. Greg MacDonald, an analyst at National Bank Financial in Toronto, who rates the shares “outperform,” predicted that Rogers would add 215,000 wireless subscribers.

Total revenue climbed 1.8 percent to C$3.04 billion. Average revenue per user, a measure of how much each customer spends on calls and data monthly, was C$66.45 in the quarter, Rogers said. MacDonald estimated it would be C$65.67.

Rogers will depend on the reliability of its network and range of devices to fend off the competition, Chief Executive Officer Nadir Mohamed said on a conference call today.

“We’ve been in a competitive market for some time,” he said. “We feel very good about the asset mix we have.”

Canadian consumers continue to cut back on long- distance calls and mobile-phone roaming as they travel less, Mohamed said.

“I think we’re far from having seen any kind of turnaround” in consumer spending, he said.

Forecast Unchanged

Even as sales of ordinary phones stagnate, the iPhone has led growth in the market for Web-equipped smart phones. Apple’s share jumped to 13.3 percent globally in the second quarter from 2.8 percent in the same period a year earlier, according to Gartner Inc. Research In Motion Ltd., which makes the BlackBerry smart phone sold by all three carriers, held 18.7 percent of the market, up from 17.3 percent a year earlier.

“Bell and Telus are going to advertise this phone heavily and the share split of new subscribers will skew toward those two players,” MacDonald said, referring to the iPhone.

Rogers’s wireless unit, which accounts for about three- fifths of revenue, increased its operating profit 22 percent in the quarter from a year earlier. That helped offset a 16 percent decline in operating profit at the media unit, which publishes magazines including Maclean’s and Canadian Business.

Rogers said it had no revisions to its previous forecast for the year. The company said in July that it expects revenue to increase 2 percent to 4 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Hugo Miller in Toronto at hugomiller@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 27, 2009 16:19 EDT