100% of the equity in Site Seven Media, trading as TowerXchange, was acquired by Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC in a deal announced on Monday, 4 December. The existing TowerXchange management team will all be staying on and transitioning to Euromoney. TowerXchange will maintain its unique focus on the global telecom tower industry, enhanced by the relationships, footprint and business intelligence expertise of FTSE-250 giant Euromoney, which owns some of the world’s most respected investment journals and connectivity infrastructure events.
Over the last five years, TowerXchange has established itself as the leading source of business intelligence and events for the US$300bn global telecom and broadcast tower industry. The renowned TowerXchange Journal has become the industry’s ‘Journal of Record’, analysing tower markets in 95 countries, and tracking 275 tower companies who between them currently own 68.7% of the world’s 4.3mn towers.
The heart of the TowerXchange community are annual Meetups for tower industry leaders in Africa and the Middle East, Central and Latin America, Asia and Europe, which attract over 1,000 attendees. Local events for the emerging tower markets in China and MENA are under development.
The acquisition of TowerXchange represents the continuation of Euromoney’s strategy to evolve into provision of ‘B2B Information 3.0’ – moving beyond advertising-centric, product and print driven publishing to become part of the structure of the industries they serve, with business intelligence and information services that are genuinely embedded in customer workflows. TowerXchange exemplifies this vision, taking its lead from an ‘inner circle’ advisory board of 35 industry leaders. Since inception in November 2012, TowerXchange has been committed to providing outstanding content through deep community engagement, from tracking the propagation of the independent towerco business model beyond its roots in the USA and India, to hosting industry working groups for operational excellence and regulatory liaison. One of TowerXchange’s greatest achievements has been to make the formerly opaque tower industry more transparent to its investors, customers and suppliers, a goal which will be extended as TowerXchange develops an holistic set of data and business intelligence services.
Founder Kieron Osmotherly will be staying on as CEO of TowerXchange, along with his management team. Osmotherly said “TowerXchange are excited to be joining the Euromoney family, enabling us to extend our events’ growth trajectory, cultivate new business intelligence services, and expand ours and our customer’s insights into adjacent segments of telecom infrastructure.”
Ros Irving, Euromoney Divisional Director responsible for Euromoney’s telecoms businesses, said: “TowerXchange is an excellent business which serves an increasingly important part of telecoms infrastructure. It is strategic for Euromoney because it is highly complementary to the markets served by TelCap, BroadGroup and Layer123. We look forward to working with the expert TowerXchange team.”
The acquisition of TowerXchange by Euromoney places the world’s leading community for telecom towers alongside the leading communities for wholesale carriers, cloud, data centres and network transformation, part of a unique portfolio of business intelligence products and events focused on connectivity infrastructure. TowerXchange will retain their commitment to dedicated coverage of the passive infrastructure space, while offering its community members increased access to the intelligence and insights from these adjacent verticals.
Euromoney’s telecom and technology division, of which TowerXchange will now be part, also organises the annual International Telecoms Week (ITW), while the portfolio also includes the long-established series, Capacity Conferences, organised by TelCap and the respected source of information for the international carrier market, Capacity Media.
The acquisition of TowerXchange will amplify the visibility of the tower industry asset class to tens of thousands of investors worldwide. Euromoney publishes the renowned Euromoney magazine, GlobalCapital and IJ Global (the Project Finance and Infrastructure Journal), as well as providing information services like BCA Research, Ned Davis Research and Institutional Investor.
Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC recently posted their FY17 annual results, reporting a 4% rise in profits to GBP £106.5mn and a 6% jump in revenue to GBP £428.4mn. Euromoney employs over 2,200 staff across 20 offices worldwide.
