American Tower Likely Buyer of Verizon’s Towers

Seeking Alpha reported that American Tower is considering purchasing Verizon’s tower portfolio, which could net $6 billion for Verizon. This purchase would help American Tower’s scale and increase its exposure to Verizon as an anchor tenant. Jennifer Fritzsche, Senior Analyst at Wells Fargo, and her team spent the past week travelling with Tom Bartlett, CFO of AMT, and Igor Khislavsky, Investor Relations of AMT. She noted, “No surprise, management was asked about its desire to do more M&A. Bartlett indicated the first place it wants to do M&A is in the markets it is already in. The gorilla in the room was clearly AMT’s interest in the VZ tower portfolio (~13K towers). While management would not offer many specifics, they did indicate the company could be interested in the portfolio at the right terms and price but it would come down to math and terms of a potential deal. In our view, there is no question that the addition of this portfolio, which is one of the last carrier portfolios of size left, would add significant scale to AMT’s already large U.S. portfolio. Continue reading here.