DigitalBridge Group, headed by CEO Marc Ganzi, has announced that it has formed a tower platform focused on the Southeast Asia market, known as EdgePoint Infrastructure. To date, EdgePoint has secured more than 10,000 sites across Indonesia and Malaysia and is evaluating additional growth across the Asia-Pacific region.
EdgePoint has a controlling stake in PT Centratama Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk, which owns and manages over 4,000 sites, and it purchased 4,247 towers from Indosat Ooredoo. In addition, EdgePoint has acquired Asiaspace in Malaysia and is considering further acquisitions. The company has also engaged in build-to-suit programs with carrier customers in Indonesia that will soon extend this to Malaysia as well.
S&P Global Market Intelligence estimated that the Asia-Pacific market accounted for 5.4 million towers and small cells at year-end 2020, slightly up from 5.3 million in 2019. About 3.5 million of these are macro cell towers, while the remaining 1.9 million were a mix of small cells and indoor or rooftop DAS.
While the Asia-Pacific market is known for high growth, supply chain disruptions, cost concerns and infrastructure sharing in the last year have slowed tower and small cell growth, according to S&P Global, which lowered its projections to a 3.74 percent CAGR through 2031, even as network demand surged due to the pandemic.
“2020 was supposed to be a year of increased spending on networks, both for operators that have already launched 5G and for those that are still trying to expand their 4G coverage. Restrictions in the early days of the pandemic, however, disrupted both the movement of people and the flow of goods and services, which hampered tower rollouts,” wrote Julber Osio, S&P Global.
EdgePoint was formed in partnership with Suresh Sidhu, a telecom tower executive who served as CEO of edotco, the Malaysian-based regional tower operator, from 2014 to 2020.
“With the support of DigitalBridge, we have made a very fast start in the region and we are focused on building on the strong foundation we have in Indonesia, through Centratama. In Malaysia, our current pipeline of acquisitions and projects positions us to be a major player in the urban centres of the West Coast, the country’s economic heartland,” said Suresh Sidhu, Founder and CEO of EdgePoint.
DigitalBridge was formerly known as Colony Capital, a global investment firm in real estate, before it was rebranded in June of this year. DigitalBridge is a global digital infrastructure REIT, headquartered in Boca Raton with offices in Los Angeles, New York, London and Singapore.
EdgePoint is not DigitalBridge’s first Asian venture. It owns Agile Data Centers, a data center company based in Singapore. The company’s other international holdings are in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Finland and Europe.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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