Crown Castle International Corp. announced its second-quarter earnings, reporting a net loss of $227.5 million, which includes $198.5 million in losses caused by the early retirement of debt. Last year, the company reported a net loss of $50.8 million during the second quarter.
Net loss was $1.09 per share, which includes 91 cents per share in losses caused by the early retirement of debt. Last year during the second quarter, net loss was 27 cents per share.
The company, which owns 11,000 wireless communications towers in the United States and 1,300 in Australia, said its U.S. site rental revenue was $133.5 million, an increase of 10.3 percent compared with last year’s second-quarter site-rental revenue of $121 million.
The company said it completed a $275 million credit facility under which the company can borrow for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditure acquisitions and common stock purchases and dividends.
“We are very pleased with the growth we continue to see in our core business reflected in our strong second-quarter results,” said John Kelly, president and chief executive of Crown Castle. “Comparing the second-quarter 2004 to second-quarter 2005, we have achieved $48.8 million growth annualized site rental gross margin on $57.4 million on additional annualized site rental revenue. The growth in our core business coupled with annualized interest expense savings of $84.7 million, which we’ve achieved through various refinancings over the last year, resulted in annualized recurring cash flow growth of $132.4 million. Our tower leasing business is benefiting from the addition of new tenants to our existing tower portfolio caused by the continued growth in wireless minutes and introduction of new data services by wireless carriers in the U.S. and Australia. Further, we expect to see similar to slightly higher levels of leasing activity in the second half of 2005 as we saw in the first half.”
Crown Castle expects site rental revenues of $149 million to $151 million during the third quarter and site rental revenues from $153 million to $156 million during the fourth quarter. Full-year site rental revenues are expected to fall between $590 million and $595 million.
At the close of the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday, prior to Crown Castle’s earnings announcement, its stock traded at $21.40 per share. The stock opened at $21.65 per share Wednesday morning.
