Cellnex buys British Shere Group 9 million

Cellnex buys British Shere Group 393 million The agreement reached with the Arcus infrastructure fund, implies the acquisition of 100% of Shere Group should bring 1.004 sites to Cellnex Telecom consolidated its presence in United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Cellnex Telecom It has reached an agreement for the acquisition of 100% of Shere Group, group that manages towers and sites in the Netherlands and United Kingdom, and which is controlled by the British Fund for infrastructure, Arcus Infrastructure Partners. The operation, with an investment of 393 million, involves the acquisition of the portfolio of 1.004 mobile sites operated by Shere.

Francisco Reyn s, President of Cellnex Telecom, highlighted that "the consistency of the agreement with our initial strategy with small operations and further consolidation in the markets that focus the priority interest of Cellnex in Europe. The effort deployed by the team of Cellnex in the last 18 months, now focussed on this new operation in the Netherlands and United Kingdom, has given recognition and personality on the market model of neutral operator of telecommunications infrastructure".

For his part, Tob as Mart nez, CEO of Cellnex, has pointed out how the acquisition of Shere Group "reinforces Cellnex both in terms of expansion and diversification of our customer base, which include a majority share of the large European operators; and expansion and diversification of our geographical base. The data translation is a company that already generate 40% of their income outside of Spain, and, once formalized the closing of the transaction of purchase of Shere, it will feature a "backlog" (sales contracted for the next few years) of 8,400 million euros".

464 sites that Shere manages in the Netherlands are located uniformly throughout the territory of the Netherlands. Likewise, and without redundancies, complement the network of 261 sites that Cellnex already manages. Data sharing infrastructures located in Shere Group in Holland sites ("tenancy ratio") reached a ratio of 2, 7 x.

In terms of 540 sites located in United Kingdom, these are concentrated mainly in England and Wales. In these locations, the sharing ratio rises to 1, 6 x.

"With United Kingdom not only add a new country in Europe, strengthen also the geographical continuity of the markets in which we operate, they access a market especially significant and dynamic for the operators of infrastructures sector, with a high degree of externalization of the management of the same", says Tob as Mart nez.

The Dutch market

The Dutch market of infrastructure for mobile has five operators which manage a total of 1,500 sites (among which are the 725 Cellnex will now be managed in the country), which complement the own network deployed by three major telephone companies in the country (KPN, TMobile and Vodafone), which is compounded by Tele2, which offers its services only in 4 g. Holland has a total of 15,200 sites throughout its territory.

The Netherlands is one of the European countries with greater penetration of mobile broadband based on the 4G. Coverage for the four mobile phone operators in the country, which ranges from 92% to 99%. This deployment is has led to out, fundamentally, on the base of those sites already existing for the 2 G and the 3 G. As in the majority of European countries, the improvement of the coverage to make reality the experience of mobility access to contents of broadband in areas with large numbers of concurrent users is one of the challenges for the future. In this sense, a higher density and capillary network through the deployment of the "small cells" and distributed antenna systems (DAS in English) will be one of the vectors of growth in the Dutch market in the coming years.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the country has a total of approximately 46,000 sites, of which 21% are managed by independent operators, as it is the case of Shere Group or Arqiva, and also by two "joint ventures" MBNL (formed by Three and us) and touch (formed by Vodafone and O2).

The data traffic, similarly to what happens in all European countries, is the segment that is growing faster. It is estimated a growth of 49% until 2020, compared to the stability in what are voice services. Nationwide 3G coverage is wide, while in the case of the LTE (e.g. 4 G) technologies there is still tour. Operators have launched the first deployments of "small cells", networks of antennas that must guarantee the quality of mobile broadband to the increase in the consumption of data in the future. Also in United Kingdom and in other European countries these deployments are one of the vectors of growth for infrastructure operators.

LINK:	http://www.panoramaaudiovisual.com/en/2016/09/30/cellnex-the-British-s...
	See more stories from panoramaaudiovisual

Most recent headlines