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BPV completes successful exit from Tower Cloud
BPV portfolio company Tower Cloud has been acquired by Communications Sales & Leasing, Inc (NASDAQ: CSAL) in a stock and cash deal valued at $230 million plus milestone payments.
Here is today’s write up from the Tampa Bay Business Journal:
St. Pete fiber optics firm acquired in $230 million deal
St. Petersburg-based Tower Cloud is being acquired by Communications Sales & Leasing Inc. (NASDAQ: CSAL) in a stock and cash deal valued at $230 million.
Tower Cloud, founded in 2006 and backed by private equity investors, operates a fiber optic network in 15 markets in the Southeast United States, with nearly 6,000 route miles connecting large markets and Internet hubs with smaller markets and rural areas.
“Tower Cloud significantly expands our backhaul network and greatly accelerates our entry into the high growth small cell and dark fiber businesses,”Kenny Gunderman, president and CEO of Little Rock, Arkansas-based CS&L, said in a statement. “We continue to grow our wireless carrier relationships across all asset classes and are seeing an increasing number of opportunities arise as carriers densify their networks and look toward the deployment of 5G and related technologies.”
In an investor conference call about the deal Monday morning, Gunderman said, “Tower Cloud is very complementary to our strategy of acquiring and building mission critical communications infrastructure and becoming more and more relevant to the national wireless carriers in particular. The deal makes CS&L one of the largest owners of fiber in the country,” Gunderman said.
“We think that fiber is and will be the most critical component of the communications network going forward and Tower Cloud is an established provider of two of the biggest growth areas within fiber including dark fiber deployments and small cells,” Gunderman said in the call.
The acquisition expands CS&L’s national wireless carrier relationships because more than 90 percent of Tower Cloud’s revenues are from national wireless carriers. The deal also advances CS&L’s diversification strategy by increasing its exposure to the national wireless carriers with long-term contractual revenues.
Tower Cloud’s recent dark fiber and small cell awards with national wireless carriers will accelerate the company’s initiatives, the company said in a statement. Tower Cloud is currently constructing dark fiber routes in Florida and Georgia with total contractual revenues of $175 million.
Last November, Tower Cloud signed a contract with one of the “big 4” mobile carriers to expand its fiber network infrastructure and bring high-speed connectivity and capacity to Augusta, Georgia. It also announced last September that it would expand its fiber network into Jacksonville.
