Brookfield Asset Management and Cellnex Telecom are in talks about going in on a joint bid for German telco Deutsche Telekom’s tower unit for €20 billion, sources have told Bloomberg.
Bloomberg reports that the sources, who don’t want to be identified, said any deal could value the towers business at something in the region of €20 billion. Brookfield could also swoop for the towers on its own, while other private equity and infrastructure funds – such as Stonepeak and DigitalBridge Group – are ‘studying offers for either a minority or controlling stake in Deutsche Telekom’s towers unit’, say the sources.
The anonymous sources also whispered in Bloomberg’s ear that Vantage Towers has been considering making an offer in the next round, that Deutsche Telekom has asked for binding bids in the next few weeks, and that potential buyers haven’t made final decisions about whether to submit offers.
Obviously all of this is unconfirmed, but we’ve had similar reports trickle down the grapevine before. In April sources told Reuters that Deutsche Telekom was reviewing bids for its tower business from multiple suitors including Vodafone’s Vantage Towers, KKR, GIP, Cellnex and America Tower Corp, and that it aims to land a deal by the middle of the year.
Selling off towers is a path many telcos have taken recently, and there seems to be plenty of cash to be made from doing so. At the beginning of the May, Australian MNO TPG Telecom announced it is offloading what’s left of its passive mobile tower and rooftop infrastructure inventory to OMERS Infrastructure Management for $950 million, and in April Australian Tower Network agreed to acquire Axicom and its 2,000 telco towers for A$3.58 billion.
In March alone, US-based real estate investment trust DigitalBridge agreed to pay $820 million for Telenet’s footprint of 3,322 sites in Belgium, the Competition and Markets Authority approved the Cellnex acquisition of 6,000 cell sites from CK Hutchison in the UK, and in Italy Tim announced it was going to sell off its towers.
And that’s just in the last few months…
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