Colony Capital, through its flagship private equity fund, Digital Colony Partners II, and specifically, portfolio company Edgepoint Infrastructure, today announced the acquisition of Asiaspace’s 178 Towers in Malaysia. Indeed, Asiaspace offers shared towers infrastructure, counting Malaysia’s wireless carriers Maxis, DiGi, Celcom (Axiata), and Unifi (Telekom Malaysia) as tenants.
While valuation details were not disclosed, Dgtl Infra assumes that the valuation per tower was $100k or less. In turn, at a transaction value of less than $20m, this represents a relatively small purchase for Edgepoint Infrastructure and Digital Colony. Therefore, today’s announcement with Asiaspace in Malaysia likely represents a platform acquisition from which Edgepoint Infrastructure will buy and build further tower assets through.
Malaysia Towers – Edgepoint Infrastructure
Overall, the Malaysia tower market has ~25k sites, providing Digital Colony’s Edgepoint Infrastructure ample additional acquisition targets. Specifically, additional towers could come from sale-and-leaseback agreements with the country’s largest wireless carriers. These wireless carriers include Maxis, DiGi, Unifi (Telekom Malaysia), and U Mobile (ST Telemedia).
At the same time, a number of other companies also own smaller tower portfolios in Malaysia. These companies include Inforient, KJS Group, Naza Communications, OCK Group, Omnix, Sacofa, Touch Matrix (Touch Mindscape), and YTL Corporation.
Additionally, Malaysia is a market Edgepoint Infrastructure CEO, Suresh Sidhu, is familiar with, given his former CEO role at edotco, the largest tower owner in the country. Specifically, in Malaysia, edotco currently has a portfolio of 12.8k towers and managed sites.
Southeast Asia Portfolio – Edgepoint Infrastructure
Edgepoint Infrastructure is currently in the process of acquiring control of two distinct tower portfolios in Indonesia. Firstly, in March 2021, Edgepoint signed a 10-year sale and leaseback agreement with Indosat Ooredoo for 4.2k towers in Indonesia. Secondly, Edgepoint is in the process of building up to a 51% stake in Indonesia’s publicly-traded tower company Centratama.
Following completion of both transactions, Edgepoint Infrastructure will be the controlling shareholder of entities owning 7.5k towers throughout Indonesia.
Beyond Indonesia and Malaysia, Dgtl Infra notes that the Philippines is another attractive and logical market for Edgepoint to enter.
