Madrid-based Cellnex announced this week it has reached an agreement with Altice France and Starlight to buy Hivory, a French towerco that manages 10,500 sites according to BroadbandTV News. Hivory’s primary anchor tenant is SFR, a regional carrier.
The deal is estimated to be worth US$6.23 billion, to be followed by an eight-year roll-out of up to 2,500 new sites estimated at a cost of US$1.08 billion. In the past six months, Cellnex has acquired additional tower inventories of Altice France, Spain’s Telefonica, Poland’s Play and more portfolios of CK Hutchison towers in Sweden, Austria, Ireland and Denmark.
“With the acquisition of Hivory, which will have to receive the green light from the competition authority,” said Cellnex CEO Tobías Martínez, “we will now be working in France with three of the big mobile operators in this market as anchor tenants, fostering infrastructure sharing; freeing up financial resources for those MNOs; enhancing rationalisation processes of existing sites; and accelerating the deployment of new sites that ensure both an efficient and seamless extension of 5G coverage in the country and the effective fulfilment of an objective that is also shared by the players in the sector: eliminating “non spot areas” or zones without proper coverage in the country.”
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