Growth rates have been on the minds of tower investors lately, according to Nick Del Deo, Senior Analyst for MoffettNathanson. “Or to put a finer point on it, relative growth rates have been on the minds of tower investors of late,” he said. “American Tower’s domestic growth appears to be gapping away from that of peers Crown Castle and SBA.”
The company started the year guiding to 2018 growth of better than 6 percent, and after stepping that up to ~6.5 percent with Q1 earnings, raised it further to ~7 percent with its Q2 results. “In contrast,” Del Deo said, “Crown Castle is guiding to growth of 5.6 percent this year and SBA is guiding to just 4.8 percent. Moreover, American Tower has posted much stronger domestic net growth over the past couple of years. Why is this? And more importantly, will this performance gap persist?”
Del Deo said by digging deeper they can understand the root causes of the differences in these results and whether they will persist. “There are three areas we need to assess – definitional differences, variances in gross growth, and churn performance – and taken together they go a long way towards explaining what has happened, and what is likely to happen,” he said. Comments? Contact editor@insidetowers.com
September 6, 2018
