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Vodafone revealed that it recently created one of Europe’s largest telecommunications infrastructure platforms, Vantage Towers, and is already on its way to an IPO in Frankfurt next year.
Vantage Towers launches with more than 68,000 towers in nine markets. Many of these projects are the result of a merger with the Greek company Wind Hellas and a 50% stake in the UK’s largest telecommunications infrastructure company, CTIL, the latter manages 14,300 towers.
All these new infrastructures will be “part of the consolidated network of at least two of the largest mobile operators in markets where Vodafone has already entered into nationally active exchange agreements, adding Italy, Spain, Greece, the Uk and Romania,” Vodafone said. .
The length of Vantage towers should not be underestimated. Without delay, it represents the first or largest percentage of the market in terms of number of sites in “almost all” the nine markets in which it operates, and generated 950 million euros ($1.1 billion) in profits last year.
Vantage Towers will first be headquartered in Dusseldorf, which for now explains its selection to trade on a German inventory exchange above London. Vodafone inventories fell more than 4% after the announcement.
As noted by the Financial Times, the spinoff is a culmination of more than a year’s worth of efforts, with its execs chasing rising valuations for infrastructure assets.
But this resolution, however, positions Vantage Towers as the hub of the towers in Europe, and in time for the imminent deployment of 5G, which Vodafone notes that its new activity in the towers is “well positioned to benefit”.
[Read: Anatomy of FANTAMAN, the amalgam of technological values rather than German GDP]
Now a component of Vantage Towers, Wind Hellas demonstrated its 5G verification network in Greece in September last year, and with Vodafone and Cosmote, paid $234 million earlier this year to download 1.8 GHz licenses through the end of 2035.
CTIL is also on your knees in the 5G game. A lease agreement reached last year between Vodafone and O2 saw the 5G active cellular device added to the network agreement shared between the two companies.
At the time, Vodafone UK’s leading executive, Nick Jeffrey, said: “We are proceeding to our 5G deployment with this agreement, and we are bringing our consumers, our company and the UK total with us. Greater autonomy in major cities will allow us to drive and, with active network sharing, we’ll ensure that our consumers get ultra-fast 5G benefits in even faster locations, with fewer masts.
Currently, the 5G advertising service is available in 10 European countries, while tests and pilots are active in dozens of key European cities. Vodafone’s 5G service is now available in 44 UK cities.
July 26 update at 09:20 UTC: This article has been updated to explain Vantage Towers’ market position in the first paragraph, which misconscribed it as the “largest” telecommunications infrastructure platform in Europe. We apologize for the mistake.
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