Following the acquisition of AT Australia Pty Ltd and AT Australia Operations Pty Ltd from American Tower Corporation, the Australian digital infrastructure owner Waveconn is to add new assets.
The transaction is subject to approval from the Foreign Investment Review Board and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The news comes after American Tower had sold 77,172 sites in India to Brookfield's Data Infrastructure Trust (DIT) in January 2024. DIT itself houses Brookfield’s other telecom tower and related infrastructure investments in India: Summit Digitel, Crest Digitel and the newly launched Roam Digitel. DIT now has a footprint of 257,000 towers as a result of the transaction, which has recently gained approval from India’s regulator.
American Tower’s Asia footprint
American Tower’s remaining tower footprint is in Bangladesh through its Kirktonkhola Tower operation, and a smaller scale tower operation in the Philippines through Transcend Towers Infrastructure. It currently owns 729 and 360 towers in both countries, respectively.
Waveconn was first conceived in 2022, brought about by a couple of transactions led by OMERS Infrastructure, when it acquired Stilmark Group. Both entities then established joint venture Symphony Consortium, with the intention of combining Stilmark’s tower expertise with the capital available to OMERS. OMERS closed both deals in August 2022 and rebranded their two new portfolios to form Waveconn.
Waveconn owns and operates around 1,400 tower and rooftop sites nationwide with hundreds more actively under development. Its clients include the three national MNOs – Telstra, Optus (owned by Singtel) and TPG Telecom (jointly owned by TPG Group and Vodafone Hutchison) – as well as government radio networks, and wireless internet service providers.
