Owner of wireless towers reaches higher
Rising demand for data services meshes with growth in portfolio
WIRELESS tower owner and operator Crown Castle, which boosted the size of its tower portfolio by one-third through its December 2013 acquisition of nearly 10,000 towers from AT&T, is focusing on leasing its additional tower space to wireless-carrier “tenants” just as demand for data services for wireless devices is booming.
Over the last two years, Houston-based Crown Castle, which operates and leases towers and other infrastructure for wireless communications, has grown from 22,000 towers to 40,000, including its nearly $5 billion AT&T acquisition.
“That acquisition meant a big change in size, revenue and profits for us,” said Crown Castle’s president and CEO, Ben Moreland.
Moreland said this growth in the company’s tower portfolio dovetailed perfectly with an increasing demand for data services as consumers turn to cellphones and tablets for video, email and other activities that take up more bandwidth on towers.
As a result, wireless carriers are in need of a larger amount of leased space on Crown Castle’s towers. Moreland said the demand for data services is expected to grow sevenfold by 2020.
Its small-cell business, which consists of antennae on light poles and other structures connected by fiber, is also growing, according to Moreland. Crown Castle has about 14,000 small-cell nodes supported by 7,000 miles of fiber.
The company, the nation’s largest provider of so-called shared wireless infrastructure, grew earnings per share 300 percent last year over the prior year and had a total shareholder return of almost 10 percent. Those figures, along with the fact that it grew revenue by 22 percent – to nearly $3.7 billion last year, landed Crown Castle at No. 7 on the Chronicle’s list of top public companies, up from No. 96.
Moreland said because most of the large tower portfolios have now been acquired by infrastructure companies including Crown Castle and others, the company will focus its attention on leasing up available space on the towers, then expanding their capacity through additional investments to reinforce the structures to support more bandwidth.
He expects that the projected jump in data service demand to spur the next phase of growth for Crown Castle, which has over 2,300 full-time employees, including 150 in Houston.
In the next five years, Moreland said, 70 percent of data traffic is expected to include some sort of video component, boosting demand to new highs.