American Tower and Brookfield Mull Cellnex Takeover; Shares Up 8%; Maintaining EUR 52 FVE

Narrow-moat Cellnex shares are up 8% at the time of the writing given news reported by El Confidencial about a potential takeover offer from American Tower and Brookfield. The two firms have reportedly hired Morgan Stanley to evaluate an offer. We are not surprised by this announcement given several U.S. firms and private equity funds have been laying their hands on European infrastructure in the past two years. American Tower already acquired 30,000 sites from Telefonica in early 2021 in Spain, Germany, and Latin America, in a EUR 7.7 billion deal. Brookfield acquired a stake in Telia’s towers in Sweden, Norway, and Finland during 2022, as well as a 51% stake (together with DigitalBridge) in Deutsche Telekom’s 40,000 towers in Germany and Austria. Other U.S. private equity funds like KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners are currently participating in the acquisition and delisting of Vantage Towers, Vodafone’s tower division, a deal that was announced in November 2022. We maintain our EUR 52 fair value estimate for Cellnex.