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Sources suggest the US wireless giant is looking to offload between 5,000 and 6,000 mobile towers
This week, reports from Bloomberg suggest that Verizon is exploring the potential sale of up to 6,000 of its telecoms towers situated across the US.
While discussions are still in the early stages and potential suits have not been named, the anonymous sources suggest that the deal could be worth up to $3 billion.
The divestment should not come as a huge surprise. This decade has seen many of the world’s largest telcos divest of or spin off their tower portfolios, including the likes of Vodafone (Vantage Towers), Telefonica (Telxius), and Orange (Totem). More recently, Austria’s A1 has announced it will spin off its tower unit, while Greece’s OTE looks likely to follow suit.
Towers are typically seen as low-risk, long-term investments by the investor community, with both indendent infrastructure companies and private equity showing a strong appetite for the towers in recent years. For the operators, on the other hand, sales or spin offs offer an excellent opportunity to monetise their passive assets. At a time when operators are still spending heavily on rolling out fibre and 5G networks, this cash injection often comes as a much-needed boost.
In the US, however, much of this divestment already took place around 20 years ago, subsequently leading to the rise of a cadre of independent tower giants such as American Tower, Crown Castle, and SBA Communications, which now own and lease access to the majority of the US’s tower infrastructure.
The most recent tower divestments from Verizon themselves came in 2015, when the company sold 11,000 towers to American Tower for $6 billion.
AT&T had similarly sold 9,700 towers to Crown Castle in 2013 for $4.8 billion.
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