Rogers Communications Inc. saw earnings soar in the first quarter, but indicated Wednesday that Canada's smartphone wars might crimp future financial results.

Rogers, which owns cable television and wireless and other communications assets, made $380 million, or 64 cents a share, for the period ended March 31. Its earnings represented a jump of 23 per cent versus net income of $309 million, or 49 cents for the same period one year earlier.

The Toronto-based company said decent quarterly sales growth, five per cent for the first three months of the year, was driven by an explosion in its wireless data revenue.

Rogers says competition in the smartphone market is heating up. (Apple Inc)

Cash from this segment grew 40 per cent in the January-to-March period, assisted by 348,000 smartphone activations or upgrades in the period. Data revenue now comprises 26 per cent of total wireless money, Rogers said.

Overall wireless revenue grew by eight per cent in the first quarter, topping out at $1.66 billion versus $1.54 billion in the one-year earlier period.

Still, Rogers president and chief executive officer Nadir Mohamed sounded a warning that squeezing extra revenue from the smartphone segment will become tougher as competitors aggressively pursue new customers.

Rogers added only 47,000 postpaid subscribers — the category which contains iPhone users — in the first quarter.

That figure was a drop of nearly 60 per cent compared to net additions — the number of new wireless customers minus those people who turned off their Rogers phones — in the prior year's Q1.

Rogers' problem is that the company gets a large portion of wireless cash from postpaid customers, 70 per cent of total wireless revenue in 2009, while mobile users constituted 57 per cent of Rogers' total overall cash intake.

By contrast, Rogers received 34 per cent of first-quarter revenue from its cable television operations.