Brookfield to purchase American Tower’s India ops for $2.5 billion

(Reuters) -Canada’s Brookfield Asset Administration will purchase American Tower’s Indian operations for $2.5 billion, which can make the asset supervisor overtake Indus Towers to turn out to be the nation’s largest operator of telecom towers.

The deal, one of many largest telecom infrastructure offers within the nation, can be Brookfield’s third telecom acquisition in India during the last 4 years and marks American Tower’s exit from the nation.

Brookfield operates round 157,000 telecom towers in India through its home affiliate Knowledge Infrastructure Belief, whereas American Tower operates some 77,000 towers. Indus has roughly 193,000 towers.

The tower corporations are all vying to get enterprise from India’s high three telecom corporations. However whereas Bharti Airtel and Reliance Industries’ Jio have been rising their operations, Vodafone Thought is struggling each operationally and financially.

“The acquired websites are anticipated to diversify DIT’s (Knowledge Infrastructure Belief) revenues and improve contact factors with all cellular community operators in India,” Brookfield stated in a press release.

Knowledge Infrastructure reported revenues of 111 billion rupees ($1.33 billion) within the fiscal yr ended March 2023, in comparison with Indus Towers’ 283.8 billion rupees.

The transaction is anticipated to be accomplished within the second half of 2024. ($1 = 83.2150 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru; Modifying by Savio D’Souza and Rashmi Aich)