American Tower Buys in Brazil

American Tower, who already owns over 6,900 towers in Brazil, is the buyer of Telecom Italia’s Brazilian unit as of Friday. This transaction is worth R$3 billion ($1.2 billion), according to Seeking Alpha. The deal, where AMT would be acquiring the 6,480 towers, was announced during Telecom Italia’s board meeting. According to Eric Johnsa at Seeking Alpha, the towers are expected to produce R$435 million/year ($171 million/year) in revenue, and R$191 million/year ($75 million/year) in gross margin. TIM has agreed to 20-year leases for the towers, and will act as their anchor tenant. “Similar to the U.S. we are seeing a very strong demand backdrop overseas especially in Brazil where we had another record quarter of commenced new business,” Tom Bartlett, EVP and CFO of American Tower said during the third quarter conference call on October 30. “Mobile data usage in Brazil is expected to grow 10 times over current levels by 2018,” Jim Taiclet, Chairman, President, and CEO said during the same conference call. “To support this type of mobile data expansion, we believe the Brazilian carriers will need to invest significantly in their existing networks. This need is illustrated further by our estimate that there are currently 4,400 subscribers for cell site location in Brazil compared to just 1,500 for cell site locations in the United States. The case of Brazil is representative of the state-of-wireless-networks in many of our international markets and we anticipate that we will be able to convert high levels of incremental carrier investment to strong core organic growth across our entire international segment.” In a completely separate transaction, BRT Holding announced that their sale of Brazilian tower construction and sharing company, BR Towers, to American Towers is now completed. BR Towers operates more than 4,300 towers across the country.