Boston-based American Tower Corp. said Thursday its third quarter earnings were up 13.9 percent or $1.31 per share (AFFO-adjusted funds from operations) to $558.1 million. The results, from the quarter that ended September 30, caused the tower operator to boost its 2015 outlook from $2.12 billion to $2.14 billion, reflecting a 17.1 percent growth. That’s up from the July guidance that ranged from $2.09 billion to $2.13 billion.
What’s caused this explosion of new income? “Continuing exponential growth in mobile data demand in both the U.S. and in our international markets,” American Tower’s CEO Jim Taiclet said. “We believe that this growth in demand will go on for many stated, years to come, driven by a combination of lower cost smartphones proliferating around the world, additional spectrum being deployed for mobile data and the competitive imperative for mobile operators to steadily invest in their networks.”
Taiclet said the company’s strategic objective is to “capture this long-term growth opportunity by building strong positions in the world’s largest free market economies with attractive wireless industry structures. So far in 2015, we have made tremendous progress on expanding American Tower’s global growth platform through our acquisitions of rights to the Verizon towers in the U.S Telecom Italia’s towers in Brazil, Airtel’s portfolio in Nigeria and our recently announced Viom transaction in India. We expect that these strategically located assets will further lengthen and strengthen our AFFO per share growth trajectory well into the future.”
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