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SBA to buy 2,300 towers from Mobilitie
22 February 2012
SBA to purchase tower sites and indoor and outdoor distributed antenna system assets for $1bn
Read more:
towers
base stations
SBA
Mobilitie
Barclays
JP Morgan
Tower operator SBA Communications has agreed to buy over 2,300 tower sites in the US and Central America plus some indoor and outdoor distributed antenna systems from Mobilitie, for around $1.09 billion.
SBA said it will pay $850 million in cash and 5.25 million shares to acquire the tower sites plus the distributed antennas, which are in Chicago, Las Vegas, New York City and Auburn. The company plans to sell on the distributed antennas.
The transaction — likely to close in the second quarter of 2012 — will be funded by available cash, existing credit facilities and $500 million from Barclays Bank and JP Morgan.
Jeffrey Stoops, president and CEO of SBA, said: “We believe these assets are high quality, relatively new, well located and have ample capacity for additional tenants. The towers will be very complementary to and readily integrated into our existing portfolio, as they are all located in areas where we are currently conducting business. We are particularly excited about the prospects for these towers to serve the future cell-splitting needs of US wireless carriers, which needs we anticipate will flow from the continued growth in consumer demand for wireless data services. We expect this transaction will be immediately accretive to equity free cash flow per share.”
In accordance with an earlier agreement, SBA will look to sell the DAS assets to ExteNet Systems, but the closing of the current deal will not depend on the sale of the DAS assets. GTB
Further reading from Global Telecoms Business:
Indosat to sell 2,500 towers for $519m 09 Feb 2012
Etisalat plans selling African towers 02 Feb 2012
Batelco to sell towers to fund acquisitions 06 Dec 2011
American Tower and MTN in Uganda JV 12 Dec 2011
KPN to offload Dutch mobile towers 12 Dec 2011