2019 Is Looking Good For The Tower Industry

December 16, 2018

The good times appear set to continue for the nation’s tower companies—including Crown Castle, SBA Communications and American Tower—at least according to some Wall Street analysts.

“Overall, we believe the current environment bodes well for 2019,” wrote the analysts at Morgan Stanley in a recent note to investors.

“We maintain our Overweight rating on the towers sector,” wrote the analysts at Wells Fargo in a recent note to investors. “The towers subsector was one of the strongest under our coverage universe YTD2018 (+8.0% vs. S&P -1.7%). Despite the continued multiple expansion seen in 2018, we believe further growth drivers exist as we head into 2019. We expect the U.S. market to remain strong and see a number of tangible catalysts (i.e.: FirstNet, T-Mobile’s 600 MHz deployment, 5G densification efforts, edge computing, etc.), which should more than offset expected choppiness in international markets (particularly India) and impact from carrier M&A (namely Sprint and TMobile) in the short term.”

During their recent quarterly earnings call, executives from the nation’s largest publicly traded tower companies essentially said the same thing.

“Unlimited data plans and increasing mobile video consumption continue to drive additional spectrum deployments and equipment installations by our domestic tenants to support 4G network technology, and that's leading to those elevated growth rates,” American Tower’s James Taiclet said in October, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “Moreover, our major U.S. customers are beginning to embark on tangible plans for 5G technology, which provides a relevant backdrop to our usual third quarter topic of technology development.”

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