Crown Castle International Corp. reported growth in site rental revenues, although its losses widened year-over-year.
The company’s results included those of Global Signal Inc., which Crown Castle acquired earlier this year.
On a pro forma basis, site rental revenues jumped 7.3% year-over-year. The company’s total figures included $326.8 million in site rental revenue for the third quarter of 2007, compared to $179 million for the same period last year, prior to the Global Signal acquisition.
The company said that its U.S. site rental revenue increased nearly 86% to $309.8 million, up from $143.2 million during 2007’s third quarter.
Crown Castle reported a net loss for the quarter of $67 million, including a $57.7 million asset write-down charge and $3.1 million restructuring charge; a $63.4 million increase in depreciation, amortization and accretion expense mostly related to the Global Signal deal; $4.7 million in merger integration costs; and an income tax benefit of $32.5 million. The company lost $15.6 million for the same period in 2006.
John Kelly, Crown Castle’s president and CEO, said that with the spectrum clearing well underway for the advanced wireless services airwaves, the company expected to see new leasing revenues soon. However, the company removed from its guidance any potential impact from Sprint Nextel Corp.’s expected launch of a WiMAX network.
“We’re waiting for more clarity from Sprint as to what the specific deployment schedule, beyond these beta markets, will be before we are going to incorporate that into our outlook for 2008,” said Kelly.
Sprint Nextel executives said that they still plan to soft-launch three WiMAX markets by the end of this year, but were vague as to the extent of what commercial launches will take place in 2008. The company has said in the past that it plans to build out coverage for 100 million potential customers in partnership with Clearwire Corp.
SBA
Meanwhile, tower company SBA Communications Corp. said its site leasing revenue grew 12% year-over-year to $81 million, excluding a one-time benefit in the previous third quarter. The company’s operating income was off by $1 million compared to the third quarter of 2006 and although it continued to report a net loss, that figure decreased from a loss of $24.3 million in the third quarter of 2006 to $17.5 million this year.
“Operationally, our wireless carrier customers were materially more active in the third quarter compared to the first half of 2007,” said Jeffrey Stoops, president and CEO of SBA. He added that SBA expects its customers to “remain very active, at an elevated pace compared to the first half of 2007” through the end of this year and into 2008.
SBA said it bought 227 towers and built 17 towers during the quarter, and that it ended the quarter with more than 6,000 towers in its portfolio.
