Boldyn pauses M&A – after a rapid acquisition spree, and despite rumours in the market, Boldyn says it has shelved future deals (on paper); its new $1.2bn debt facility in the US is for organic growth, it says.
Neutral and private 5G – with major wins across transport systems, sports stadiums, and smart cities – including with TfL in London, the LA Lakers in the US – Boldyn is betting on neutral-host and private 5G to drive sales.
Enterprise mindset shift – but industries have to learn (and trust) to invest in connectivity, says group CEO Igor Leprince – rather than relying on cash-strapped telcos to foot the bill every time.
Fiercely-acquisitive shared infrastructure provider Boldyn Networks is done with acquisitions, it says – for now; unless something juicy comes up. This is the line from Igor Leprince (pictured), chief executive at the firm, speaking with RCR Wireless in a back room at MWC in Barcelona some weeks (months?) back. He laughs, and responds: “Look, I know it sounds disingenuous to say we don’t have an M&A plan, and then announce another deal, three months later. But that is the reality: we are in all the industries and all the markets we want to be in.”
At the time (early March), the ink has only just dried on Boldyn’s January purchase of private 5G integrator Smart Mobile Labs (SML) in Germany. It is the firm’s umpteenth acquisition in a couple of years, following shrewd deals for Finnish private network pioneer Edzcom and US higher-education specialist Apogee Telecom in March last year (2024), plus a whole rush of activity prior to its rebranding from BAI Group in 2023 – which saw it variously pick up Mobilitie, ZenFi Networks, and Transit Wireless in the US, and system integrator Vilicom in the UK during 2021/22.
In the meantime, gossip about merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity in the private 5G scene, starting to consolidate, has name-dropped Boldyn at every turn. But Leprince says his firm – with some of the choicest neutral-host deployments in transit systems, smart cities, and sports venues, plus an expanding roster of 110-odd private 4G/5G network implementations – has no particular agenda to speak of, but to drive organic growth. “We have the scale and the scope. We don’t need to make acquisitions for those reasons. If there are opportunities, we will look at them.”
The point of the company’s new $1.2 billion debt facility in the US is to support its plans for organic growth in the region, ostensibly – to supply private networks, neutral-host systems, and other connectivity solutions to new enterprises and new venues – as well as to consolidate debt inherited variously via its acquisitions in North America. It is not just to buy up the local reseller market, implies Leprince. “It is to fund growth and not to fund acquisitions,” he says. “We have strong growth [opportunities] and we need capital [to pursue them].”
He restates: “Today, right now, we don’t have an active M&A strategy.” Which puts those rumours about new deals in the US to bed, then – sort of, but not really. The SML acquisition has clearly filled a hole in the group’s mixed networking portfolio, which now covers the five largest European economies, plus the US. “Because we didn’t have any presence on the ground in Germany; it was the only big European country we didn’t have covered for private networks.” SML is a serious player, with a long-term supply deal with Nokia and a bunch of Industry 4.0 wins.
It deployed the Finnish firm’s first private 5G SA system in Germany, at the University of Kaiserslautern, and is engaged with Verizon Business on a major private 5G project with Audi – which also leverages equipment and services from Nokia and AWS. It has ties with operators in Germany to organise inter-public/private 5G roaming, and to dovetail with wider Industry 4.0 campus projects, and a specialism, alongside, in the “transmission and distribution of video signals” with its own proprietary live streaming software, called Edge Video Orchestrator (EVO).
Leprince zooms out, and puts the pieces together. “The story has been as much about building organically, as through acquisitions. But the acquisitions have been important, and, through them, we are established as a global neutral-host supplier, covering the whole digital infrastructure market – except for data centres, which are separate, and towers, even though we have a few hundred in the US. But we do everything else – DAS, Wi-Fi, small cells, fiber – and we are best known for deploying [in] metro systems in London, New York, San Francisco, Rome, Hong Kong.”
He adds: “But we are in a lot of other verticals, too.” Those others include entertainment and sports venues, real estate properties, universities and hospitals, military bases and wind farms, shipping ports and airports, factories and warehouses – and most places between, whether served by neutral-host or private networks (or both). He zooms-out further: “Our strategy is about shared infrastructure – beyond the tower market. Because five years ago, the [macro] tower market was largely done. But there was this segment where you can’t deploy multiple systems.”
The best example, of restricted mono-networking environments, are subway systems, he says; hence the firm’s pursuit and capture of flagship projects in the world’s biggest subterranean urban train networks, as listed. Asked to reel off his favourites, of Boldyn’s roster of customer deals, he references its work on ‘tube’ networks in Rome and London. The first, older, mixes public ‘smart-city’ Wi-Fi access, alongside, and follows substantial “vision and investment” by the city itself; the second, ongoing, is “one of the most difficult projects you will ever do in your life”.
Besides shared small-cell access infrastructure, it factors in extensive new fibre rollouts through a Victorian tunnel system and maps-in the Emergency Services Network (ESN) for mission-critical blue-light comms. Transport for London (TfL), in charge of public transportation in the UK capital, is running the installation in parallel with an upgrade of its signalling infrastructure. It is a complex piece of work – is the point. Is there a private-5G attachment, as part of the brief – to connect depots and such? “No, but there could be down the line,” responds Leprince.
“When we are 60-percent live, then a lot more can be done, for sure.” There is neat strategic overlap, it might be noted, with SML’s latest monster win: a €10m deal with Deutsche Bahn in Germany, signed before Boldyn swooped, which puts private 5G at the heart of the action, and extends to a new network operations centre (NOC) to manage it all. Leprince says: “But more and more, we have deployed in stadiums and places where there are restrictions on space, and where there is a benefit to share infrastructure – and where operators are prepared to pay to do it.”
He cites the horribly-branded Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, formerly the Staples Center, home to the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings basketball and hockey teams, as another loose top-five reference. Boldyn has rigged it with neutral-host cellular, plus public Wi-Fi, and probably various other digital componentry to run as a ‘smart’ stadium – and really as a modern multi-purpose complex, also covering the LA Convention Center next door. But these venues – major metro systems, centralised city operations, big entertainment venues – draw crowds.
Which means the return-on-investment (ROI) calculation for operators to share the cost to build neutral-host systems is simpler. “Everyone wants to be there; they see the benefit, and they are ready to pay,” says Leprince. But the challenge, in less-iconic or more-private environments, is to convince owners and landlords to foot the bill – for operators to piggyback on the new infrastructure. He goes on: “People want connectivity everywhere, but many enterprises – think real estate, think tier-two venues – don’t want to pay for it. That mindset has to change.
“The city of Rome, say, put real money into it – to have the best-connected city. And if you pay for it, we will come in with the operators and help to monetize it. But if you want connectivity – to drive efficiencies, and to drive the customer experience – then it costs money. You can’t rely on operators to pay for it. If you have a big football stadium or conference centre, then yes; but most venues have to commit themselves. That is where this industry slows down; there has to be better education, and better [collaboration] between government and enterprise money.”
The business case is rather different for private 4G and 5G networks, he notes – as it is, even, between operator- and enterprise-led neutral-host cases. “The driver is a little different,” he says. “A stadium is a kind of crossover example for different neutral-host interests, but then you get into Industry 4.0 [where the requirement is mission or business-critical, which often makes the business case] – and where there could be an opportunity for both private network and neutral host [systems].” How much of Boldyn’s sales are from its private network engagements now?
Leprince responds: “It is still a relatively small part, and it is difficult to define, but it is also not an insignificant part – and, more importantly, it is something we believe will grow. That’s why we bought [Vilicom, Edzcom, SML]; we had enough expertise to build private networks, but we need the enterprise references – to speak the language of wind farms and ports, and whichever verticals. The growth is exciting, and very real. A couple of years ago, these were all pilots. There is no such thing today; they are large scale deployments – at 20 or 25 ports, for example.”
But the supply market reckons sales are not going fast enough, and is arguably starting to consolidate as a result. “It never goes fast enough,” says Leprince. “The market is always optimistic; it has to realise that we are talking about industries, which don’t always have the resources to drive this topic. They need support to understand what it is, and how to manage it – and even to understand sometimes it is better for us to manage it. But it is a process, and a dialogue. You can’t just sell technology to enterprises. Because technology is meaningless by itself.”
The discussion gets into the minutiae of co-creation and problem solving – and how solution builders have to learn to listen better if they are to build impactful solutions for enterprises. “That is where we come in,” says Leprince. He talks about Boldyn’s work in the City of Sunderland as one of his top-five picks (“because you’re British, and because it’s good”), as well, which marries city-wide broadband (Wi-Fi and 5G) and monitoring (LoRaWAN) networks, plus neutral-hosts and private-networks to map-in the football ground (Stadium of Light) and the Nissan factory, as well.
And he finishes by brushing off a question about whether its private equity ownership – the company is 86-percent owned by CPP Investments (Canada Pension Plan Investment Board) and 10-percent owned by AIMCo (Alberta Investment Management Corporation) – puts short-term pressure on its long-term fortunes in a notoriously complex, fragmented, and slow-moving global-industrial economy. “Exactly the opposite, actually. Because unlike typical private equity, our shareholders are comfortable with our longer term plans,” he says.
He closes: “Traditional private equity would struggle, I can assure you, with the sort of project we have with TfL – where you invest for three-to-five years before the project eventually delivers and you get a return. We have pressure, like every company; but they are long-term partners compared to most of our competitors.”
