Macquarie consortium to buy Australia telecom tower business

Other consortium members include domestic pension fund UniSuper and UBS Global Asset Management, acting through UBS International Infrastructure Fund II. A number of other bidders were said to be contention, among them Morrison & CO, Providence Equity Partners and Brookfield Asset Management.

Crown Castle Australia (CCA) is the country's largest independent owner of mobile communications infrastructure with approximately 1,700 wireless communications towers nationally. Its largest customers are the three major mobile network operators - Optus, Telstra and Vodafone Hutchison Australia - which between them account for approximately 85% of revenue.

Most of the towers were acquired from Optus in 2000 and Vodafone in 2001. Crown Castle holds a 77.6% stake in the business. For the year ended December 2014, CCA generated $151.1 million in net revenues - around 4% of the parent company's global total - and net income of $29.2 million. Projected EBITDA for 2015 is $97-102 million, with net income expected to reach $41-67 million.

Crown Castle is the largest provider of share wireless infrastructure in the US with a network of around 40,000 cell towers. The company said in a statement that it is divesting CAA in order to focus on the US market with a view to developing small cell networks. This involves taking areas that see particularly high mobile data usage - such as shopping malls and train stations - off the macro-cell network and serving them through smaller, localized networks.

"The CCA business has the qualities that infrastructure investors around the world seek: stable revenues backed by long-term customer contracts, predictable cash flows, strong operating margins and growing customer demand," said Frank Kwok, co-head of MIRA Asia Pacific, in a separate statement.

MIRA has more than $134 billion under management globally across real estate, agriculture and energy. UniSuper is one of Australia's largest pension funds, with assets of A$49.7 billion as of April. Its infrastructure and private equity allocation was 4.2% in 2014.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2015. It is the second major Australia telecommunications infrastructure deal involving private equity in the last couple of years. In 2013, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) bought Leighton Holdings' Australian assets, which include one of the country's largest fiber-optic cable networks.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Infrastructure
• Infrastructure
• Infrastructure
• Australasia
• Buyouts
• buyout
• Infrastructure
• Australia
• Macquarie Group
• UBS
• UniSuper