DigitalBridge said that it has successfully completed its buy-out offer for Japanese infrastructure provider JTower, and that it now has a more than 75% controlling interest that was acquired for JPY 70.1 billion or about $466.4 million.
JTower is expected to be delisted from the Tokyo stock exchange in the first quarter of next year.
Justin Chang, senior managing director and the head of Asia at DigitalBridge, said that the strategic investment “underscores our confidence in JTower’s long-term potential and its critical role in advancing next-generation digital networks.”
DigitalBridge’s buy-out offer, which ran from August to mid-October, represented a more than 150% premium for the Japanese tower company and valued it at JPY93 billion or USD $630 million.
Atsushi Tanaka, representative director of JTower, said that with DigitalBridge’s “strategic expertise and financial backing, JTower is well-positioned to further enhance capital efficiency for its customers and drive the advancement of infrastructure sharing in Japan.”
The acquisition boosts DigitalBridge’s global infrastructure portfolio and is aimed at enabling JTower to meet market demand. JTower has said that it will maintain its business alliance with existing partners NTT, NTT Docomo and KDDI after the consummation of the tender offer.
“In the Japanese telecommunications industry, in addition to the deployment of new communication technologies for Beyond 5G and 6G, the burden on telecommunications carriers is expected to continue to increase due to the expansion of the coverage area required not only for disaster response and rural areas on land, but also for the sky, sea, and outer space. In addition, as the population continues to decline, a major issue is how to maintain and operate communication infrastructure in a stable manner with limited human resources,” JTower has said in a previous statement.
“In this context, there is a growing need to improve the efficiency of indoor and outdoor network development and the maintenance and operation of communication infrastructure through infrastructure sharing, and the company believes that the existence of infrastructure sharing business operators with sufficient systems and technical capabilities to take on this role is essential for the development of the telecommunications industry,” the company added.
