One Million for China  

The new Chinese tower infrastructure company, China Communications Facilities Service Corporation, formed by China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom, could start off with one million towers. The new company is being formed with assets owned by the other three companies, and the South China Morning Post reported that this milestone development is expected to spur continued growth in the world’s second-largest telecommunications services market behind the United States. “We are taking the view that all ground-based towers of all three operators are to be injected into the tower company at one go,” said Anand Ramachandran, the report’s lead author and head of Barclays’ telecommunications, internet and media equity research for Asia, excluding Japan. “We estimate the number of towers at 999,000 among the three telecommunications network operators as of the end of last year. Based on our mid-range replacement value of 250,000 yuan [~$40,325] per tower, we estimate one-time extraordinary gains of 81 billion yuan [~$13 billion], 25 billion yuan [~$4 billion] and 42 billion yuan [~$6.7 billion] for China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, respectively,” Ramachandran said. (South China Morning Post)