Crown Castle Reports Second Quarter Earnings

Crown Castle was the first tower company to report their second quarter earnings. The company spent $219 million in capex during this last quarter consisting of $28 million in land purchases, $27 million sustaining capex, and $164 million of revenue generating capex. Small cells contributed to 8% of the company’s site rental revenue, up from last year’s 7%. “We had a terrific second quarter, allowing us to raise our Outlook for full year 2015,” stated Ben Moreland, Crown Castle’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “In addition to delivering great results during the second quarter, we also announced several strategic transactions that reflect our focus on delivering attractive long-term total returns for shareholders.  The completed sale of our Australian subsidiary, following a very successful fifteen year investment, allows us to redeploy capital toward an opportunity with a higher anticipated growth profile through our pending acquisition of Sunesys, further reinforcing our leadership position in wireless infrastructure in the U.S.  Our focus and continued investment in the U.S. is based on our view that the continuing growth in U.S. consumer demand for mobile data, which is projected to increase seven-fold between 2014 and 2019, will require significant investments by the wireless carriers to increase the density of their networks.  This positive long-term outlook, combined with our extensive mission-critical portfolio of towers and small cells, gives us confidence in our ability to achieve our stated goal of generating compounded annual growth in AFFO per share of 6% to 7% organically over the next five years.  We believe the expected growth in AFFO per share, half of which is comprised of cash escalations on our tenant lease contracts, together with our current dividend yield of approximately 4% represents an attractive long-term total return profile for shareholders.” View the entire report here.