Crown Castle International Corp. (NYSE: CCI) yesterday at the close of the bell reported results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2019, updated its full year 2020 Outlook, and announced the restatement of previously-issued financial statements.
“In 2019, we experienced our highest level of tower leasing activity in more than a decade as the continued growth in mobile data demand is driving our customers to make significant investments in their existing 4G networks, while they are also positioning their businesses for 5G,” said Jay Brown, Crown Castle’s Chief Executive Officer. “We believe our ability to offer towers, small cells and fiber solutions, which are all integral components of communications networks and are shared among multiple tenants, provides us the best opportunity to generate significant growth while delivering high returns for our shareholders.
We believe that the U.S. represents the best market in the world for communications infrastructure ownership, and we are pursuing that compelling opportunity with our comprehensive offering.”
Highlights for the Year
- Site rental revenues. Site rental revenues grew approximately 6.2 percent, or $298 million, from full year 2018 to full year 2019, inclusive of approximately $290 million in Organic Contribution to Site Rental Revenues and a $9 million increase in straight-lined revenues. The $290 million in Organic Contribution to Site Rental Revenues represents approximately 6.1% growth, comprised of approximately 9.9% growth from new leasing activity and contracted tenant escalations, net of approximately 3.8% from tenant non-renewals.
- Capital Expenditures. Capital expenditures during the year were $2.1 billion, comprised of $53 million of land purchases, $117 million of sustaining capital expenditures, $1.9 billion of discretionary capital expenditures and $9 million of integration capital expenditures. The discretionary capital expenditures included approximately $1.4 billion attributable to Fiber and approximately $454 million attributable to Towers.
- Common stock dividend. During 2019, Crown Castle paid common stock dividends of approximately $1.9 billion in the aggregate, or $4.575 per common share, an increase of approximately 7% on a per share basis compared to the same period a year ago.
“Further,” Brown said, “we delivered another strong year of results for full year 2019, despite a noticeable slowdown in activity in the fourth quarter of 2019. We anticipate that this slowdown is temporary in nature and see a return to significant activity in the second half of this year. We believe the industry fundamentals are improving further with the competitive landscape for our existing customers coming into focus, the prospect of new customers looking for access to our tower and fiber infrastructure at scale, and additional wireless spectrum auctions on the horizon. As we look forward to what will likely be another decade-long investment cycle for our customers with the deployment of 5G, I am excited about the opportunity we see for Crown Castle to deliver long-term value to our shareholders while delivering dividend per share growth of 7 percent to 8 percent per year,” he said. See the full report here.
Reader Interactions