Through its subsidiary DB Pyramid Holdings, DigitalBridge confirmed the successful completion of a tender offer of JTOWER late last week, according to a filing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Effective 18 October, DB Pyramid will become JTOWER's new parent company and largest shareholder, with a 81.82% stake. JTOWER Representative Director and President of the Company Atsushi Tanaka as well as Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. and its mobile unit tendered their combined stake of roughly 26% to the take-private deal at ¥3,500 (US$24.46) per share, valuing the company at ¥93bn (US$630mn). The offer, which ran from 15 August to 10 October, resulted in 19.5mn shares tendered.
DigitalBridge originally submitted a non-legally binding letter of intent back in July to take JTOWER private, having bought out the stakes of Tanaka, and JTOWER’s other previous shareholders Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, NTT DOCOMO and KDDI Corporation and others for ¥75.7bn (US$505.90mn) on 8 July. Cultive will also lose its status as the largest shareholder.
JTOWER previously had a varied ownership structure, with NTT-DOCOMO owning 21.6% and KDDI 2.5%, as Tanaka revealed during last year’s presentation session at TowerXchange Meetup Asia 2023. Tanaka will continue to lead the new organisation upon its official completion.
A new market takes shape
The announcement of DigitalBridge’s shock takeover comes after Japanese MNO Rakuten Mobile in August having announced a sell off of part of their mobile network to Macquarie Asset Management.
TowerXchange estimates that there are 220,515 towers in the country, with Japan’s MNOs owning the vast majority of tower assets. Over 6,700 towers and 589 in-building solutions are owned by JTOWER, according to its latest public investor presentation. The Japanese firm also owns 243 in-building solutions in Vietnam.
Japan is one of the world’s most advanced mobile markets in term of 5G rollout, with four MNOs operating – namely DOCOMO, KDDI, SoftBank and new market entrant Rakuten (Rakuten’s network being based upon Open RAN technology).
JTOWER’s has long sought to promote shared infrastructure for both indoor and tower businesses, which requires long term future investment.
On the transaction, the company stated: "We expect that we will be able to raise funds for growth in an agile and stable manner from DigitalBridge. As a result, we will be able to respond flexibly to future additional funding needs and make up-front investments from a long-term perspective, thereby appropriately being able to seize growth opportunities in the infrastructure sharing market and further increase the speed of business growth."
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