Crown Castle said today that it has agreed to sell its 1,800 Australian towers to a consortium of investors led by Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets. The sale price is roughly $1.6 billion, and Crown Castle expects to net about $1.3 billion since it owns 77% of the Australian subsidiary. Crown Castle CEO Ben Moreland said his company will use the sale proceeds to invest in its outdoor small cell network.
“We believe we are in the early stages of small cell deployment and are excited by the opportunities that we see ahead of us,” said Moreland. “The sale of CCAL [the Australian subsidiary] allows us to redeploy capital toward our growing small cell networks, which we expect will be accretive to our long-term AFFO and dividend per share growth rates.”
Crown Castle has historically used the term small cells to include the nodes on distributed antenna systems. The company is a leader in the deployment of outdoor systems in the U.S., and to date Verizon Wireless has been its primary tenant.
“We have a strong belief that really all the carriers will ultimately include the small cell technology and the architecture,” Moreland told RCR Wireless News earlier this year. “It’s very difficult to cover environments in the urban areas or high-end residential areas, places where a macro tower isn’t sufficiently adding the capacity that people need. We believe everybody’s ultimately going to get there.”
U.S. focus
After the Australian sale closes Crown Castle will no longer hold significant assets outside the United States. While its largest competitors (American Tower and SBA Communications) have expanded internationally, Crown Castle has instead focused on increasing the returns on its U.S. assets. Last year it increased its dividend by more than 100%. Crown Castle’s goal is to create a set of assets that offer predictable, growing returns with low volatility.
“While we pursue growth every day – what we all work on around here is to add as much as we possibly can – the relative range of outcomes is pretty narrow,” said Moreland. “That’s a point that seemingly is very important with investors.”
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