By Juan Pedro Tomás
IHS Holding Limited (IHS Towers), one of the largest independent owners, operators and developers of shared telecommunications infrastructure, has acquired Centennial Towers’ Brazilian and Colombian tower operations.
The acquisition brings IHS an additional 602 towers in Brazil and 217 towers in Colombia, strengthening the company’s position in both markets.
Centennial Towers’ portfolio includes towers, rooftops, distributed antenna systems, small cells and site colocation & leasing.
The firm said that this acquisition will allow it to support the upcoming rollout of 5G by offering customers new locations for signal transmission and distribution, as well as supporting fiber deployment.
“The addition of Centennial Towers’ Brazilian and Colombian operations adds scale to our IHS Towers Latin American portfolio and will further strengthen the deep expertise and solutions we can offer to current and potential customers in these markets,” said IHS chairman and CEO, Sam Darwish. “Latin America remains a key region for us with its high growth potential and, through these transactions, we will continue to increase our market presence and build on the momentum sparked by our initial entry into the region last year with the acquisition of Cell Site Solutions.”
“We are thrilled to enter into this transaction with IHS Towers as they recognize the uniqueness of Centennial’s diverse asset base in these two countries, which are primed for high levels of growth due to their strategic locations and quality construction. Centennial’s strong client relationships and proprietary management information systems will assist IHS Towers in advancing their drive to significantly increasing footprint and colocation growth in Latin America for years to come,” said CEO of Centennial Towers, Steven Moskowitz.
Centennial also has approximately 800 telecommunications towers in Mexico.
In January, IHS completed the acquisition of Brazilian firm Skysites, a specialist in small cells, cell pole solutions and urban telecommunications infrastructure. Skysites had access to tens of thousands of premium real estate locations and public light poles through partnerships with several large companies. Skysites had a total of 1,000 sites with telecom antennas installed as of the beginning of this year.
IHS Towers has 29,700 towers across nine markets namely Brazil, Cameroon, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Kuwait, Nigeria, Peru, Rwanda and Zambia.
