Phoenix Tower International is boosting its U.S. presence and small cell site portfolio with the acquisition of Syscom Telecom, a small cell deployment specialist. Phoenix Tower said that the purchase gives it 80,000 marketable small cell sites in the U.S.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. PTI recently closed on a $200 million line of credit to finance its activities in the U.S., and company CEO Dagan Kasavana said in a statement that PTI sees “various opportunities to expand in the United States through traditional macro tower construction and acquisitions as well as through small cell deployments.” PTI secured a $485 million loan in October to fund its international expansion. The company is backed by investors including Blackstone and John Hancock.
Boca Raton, Florida-based PTI owns and manages 6,000 towers, nearly 1,000 kilometers of fiber and other wireless infrastructure in the U.S. and Latin America, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, French West Indies, Jamaica, Argentina and Ecuador. It has been growing through a series of recent acquisitions late this year, including more than 1,000 towers in the Dominican Republic that it purchased from a local Altice subsidiary; 451 sites acquired from Digicel that brought the company into the Jamaican market; and Costa Rican infrastructure start-up FastSite.
Syscom Telecom, founded in 2007, focuses on leveraging “unconventional infrastructure” for wireless infrastructure and has sites across the U.S. as well as a few in Canada. PTI had previously invested in Syscom’s Latin American operations.
Kasavana said that his company “has been evaluating opportunities to back a small cell focused team in the United States as a way to help our customers with their next generation deployments.” He went on to say that Syscom’s focus on locating sites on billboards, rooftops and other sites has helped the company to make “significant inroads with all wireless operators.
“As PTI focuses on delivering solutions for future network needs, we believe that having a strong small cell-focused group, backed with capital alongside our traditional macro-focused sales and operations team, is the right approach to better serve our customers collocation and network connectivity deployment needs,” Kasavana added.
