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OMTEL gives up its Telecom towers!

After Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, the European telecommunications infrastructure giant Cellnex is setting out to conquer Portugal. On January 2, the company announced the acquisition of 100% of Portuguese tower operator OMTEL, valued at EUR 800 million, 25% of which was owned by Altice Europe, SFR's parent company.

 

The Portuguese company heads 25% of the tower network in Portugal and its main customer is PT Portugal, the operator owned by Altice Europe.

"With OMTEL, we are not only integrating one of the leading independent operators of telecommunications infrastructure in Portugal. We are also committed to consistent growth in Europe, integrating an eighth market - which naturally extends the current geographical coverage of the seven countries in which we are already present", says Tobias Martínez, CEO of Cellnex.

The management of the Spanish company has also indicated that it wants to strengthen OMTEL's network with an additional 350 sites by 2027, for an investment of 140 million euros.

An investment outburst that does not seem to frighten Cellnex. Since its IPO in 2015, the company has announced that it has committed no less than 12 billion euros of investment for the acquisition or construction until 2027 of around 48,000 telecommunications infrastructures in addition to the 10,000 or so that the company had at its disposal at the time. Its portfolio thus amounts to a total of 58,000 sites.

 

Cellnex's appetite also extends to France. After acquiring no less than 3,000 sites belonging to Bouygues Telecom in 2017 for a total of 800 million euros, the Spanish ogre finalised at the end of last year the acquisition of 70% of Iliad TowerCo, which operates some 5,700 mobile telecommunications sites in France, for a deal valued at 2 billion euros.

2 billion. The transaction with Free, which also included the sale of 100% of Free's Italian infrastructure subsidiary and 90% of Salt's antennas, enabled Cellnex to increase its number of masts from 3,000 mobile telecommunications sites to more than 8,000 sites in France.

This is enough to make the competition shudder, given that Hivory claims a fleet of more than 10,000 sites and TDF's fleet peaks at 13,900 sites.

 

 

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Source : ZDNet

 

 

 

 

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