The Asia Pacific represents over 70 percent of the global telecom towers market (3.8 million towers) while the Americas have about 400,000 towers, Europe 600,000 towers, and Middle East & Africa with about 200,000 towers.
In some markets in the Asia Pacific region markets such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, MNOs traditionally have owned and held on to their tower assets and limited tower infrastructure sharing in key regional areas as a differentiator in terms of mobile coverage, according to a report in ResearchAndMarkets.com.
The high Capex requirements for 5G network rollout are pushing leading mobile operators to revisit that strategy and consider telecom tower asset monetization to finance more tower builds to cater to the 5G mid-band and mmWave high frequencies rollouts.
Some of the MNOs transferred their tower assets into a fully or partially-owned towers such as Mitratel, edotco, and Digital Infrastructure Fund in Thailand.
Independent towercos and towerco joint ventures are viable and cash accretive business models as they generate a higher return on invested capital, with typically higher tenancy ratios and better operational efficiencies.
Tower companies offer investors an opportunity to diversify their infrastructure exposure to the communications sector. Tower installations are essential to the functioning of the growing range of wireless communications devices with minimal incremental costs to providing additional capacity.
