Europe Towercos Slow M&A, Eyeing Organic Expansion and Increasing Tenancy Rates

M&A activity in the European towers market has continued to slow in 2025, with only three transactions announced in the first nine months. This was a drop from six in the same nine-month period and 10 overall in 2024.

In July 2025, French telcos SFR and Bouygues Telecom announced the sale of their 3,700-site rural tower joint venture Infracos to Phoenix Tower for an estimated €960 million, a deal that would make France the towerco's largest global market. The following month, Sweden's Tele2 sold a 50% share in its Baltic tower operations to Manulife Investment Management-backed Global Communications Infrastructure (GCI) for €280 million, with a 20-year master service agreement (MSA) to remain as anchor tenant.

On Aug. 15, Kyivstar, Ukraine's leading mobile operator, became the first Ukrainian company to list on a US stock exchange (NASDAQ). This was after its spinoff from Veon, an international telecom group headquartered in Dubai, and its combination with Cohen Circle Acquisition Corp. I, also a subsidiary of VEON. The IPO includes Kyivstar's 8,690 mobile towers, valued at an estimated $175,268, and VEON will continue to hold an 89.6% stake in Kyivstar Group.

Another two transactions are still expected in 2025. Regional towerco Cellnex Telecom has announced plans to sell its Swiss operations, after recent sales in Austria and Ireland, as well as a 49% stake in Cellnex Nordics. Meanwhile, Dutch telco VodafoneZiggo aims to reduce debt by divesting its tower infrastructure along with other noncore assets in the second half of the year.

The Vodafone-Liberty Global joint venture is the only mobile network operator (MNO) in the Netherlands to have retained its portfolio of towers. Odido (then branded T-Mobile Netherlands) merged its 3,150-tower T-Mobile Infra spinoff with Cellnex Netherlands in 2021, while KPN completed the merger of its passive mobile infrastructure assets with NOVEC in 2025 to form Althio, a towerco JV with pension fund ABP. By year-end 2024, VodafoneZiggo reported a total of 5,000 macro sites, followed by the Cellnex/Odido JV with 4,013, while the future Althio held 3,800 sites. In its 2024 annual report, Liberty Global also announced plans to "finance and monetize network infrastructure" in the United Kingdom, Belgium and Ireland.

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The deals are representative of the wider trend among European telcos to spin off and/or sell their infrastructure to better monetize assets. This led to a regional sell-off, wherein private equity firms entered both the mobile tower and fiber network markets, and neutral players emerged such as Spanish group Cellnex or Russia's New Towers.

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Cellnex entered the telecom tower segment in 2012, and has since expanded through acquisitions from regional MNOs, such as CK Hutchison 's Three operations, as well as smaller towerco competitors. The Spanish group has since become Europe's largest towerco, with a total of 110,155 macro sites in 11 markets, representing a 14.5% market share in 2024. Cellnex CEO Marco Patuano has said he plans to complete his overhaul of the company by the end of 2025, which includes divesting its Irish, Austrian and Swiss operations and the sale of data center assets in France. After which, the focus will be "non-M&A growth," especially in France, the UK and Poland.

Diversifying into adjacent opportunities, such as Edge and private networks and data centers, has not worked out. The company has decided to refocus on its main business, towers and densification via small cells. Vincent Cuvillier, chief strategy officer at Cellnex, said, "We're good at working with MNOs [mobile network operators], not industries such as IT or automation; it's not our expertise and end up clashing with MNOs." Among its key projects, Cellnex France, with 30,000 towers, supports major fiber growth and densification using small cells, connecting towers with fiber for fiber and 5G interconnectivity. Cuvillier added that Cellnex aims to focus on simplified activity across 10 countries — France, the UK, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and the Nordics — markets where it is "the number one or two player," with plans to consolidate its business in Spain and the Nordics.

Cellnex's business includes towers and colocation, accounting for 80%, with the rest focused on radio access network densification in Poland for instance (6%-7%) and broadcast (6%-7%). Notable examples of real estate and commercial projects include small cells in La Rambla, Barcelona's most famous street, as well as the football stadiums Manchester City's Etihad, Atletico Madrid's Riyadh Air Metropolitano and Inter and AC Milan's San Siro. Cellnex plans to lead in metro coverage and get there in what Cuvillier describes as an "economically efficient and sustainable" way. In June 2024, Cellnex created a new vehicle, Celland, to accelerate land acquisitions in its main markets to reduce lease costs for land use rights.

New Towers, on the other hand, was a JV formed in 2022 with the merger of Kismet Capital Group's towerco Vertical (5,000 sites) and telco MegaFon's First Tower Company (17,000 sites). It later added Russia Towers' 7,200 sites, acquired from UFG Private Equity, to become Russia's largest towerco. Megafon first spun off its tower assets in 2016, followed by VEON, which sold its National Tower Company (15,400 sites) to independent towerco Service-Telecom in 2021, while market leader Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) would carve out its Tower Infrastructure Company (23,000 sites) in 2022. Both VEON and MTS have since also spun off networks in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine.

Tenancy rates

Towercos face challenges with the increasing consolidation of European mobile markets, such as MásOrange in Spain and VodafoneThree in the UK. On the other hand, there is an emerging trend of broadband operators branching out into mobile through the acquisition of spectrum, such as 1&1 in Germany and Digi Communications in Spain, Portugal and Belgium. But so far, European neutral hosts have struggled to expand their tower occupancy beyond anchor tenants.

Cellnex, for instance, reported an average customer ratio of 1.6x in 2024 across 11 markets, with only Spain and Italy at tower occupancy over 2x, the towerco's two oldest markets, where they grew through acquisitions from multiple MNOs. The Spanish group entered the telecom tower market in 2012 and grew its footprint through a series of acquisitions from Telefónica, MásMóvil's Yoigo and Orange Spain (now MásOrange), expanding to Italy in 2015, where over the years it acquired towers from Wind, Iliad and Three (since merged with Wind). In other markets, Cellnex's main portfolio came from a 2021 multi-country deal with Three owner CK Hutchison, with the brand remaining as anchor tenant. Cellnex's average revenue per tower (ARPT) grew 3.3% year over year in 2024, from €27,010 to €27,900.

Vodafone Group's Vantage Towers had a tenancy ratio of 1.46x in 2023, when it last reported results before its delisting. Italy's Vodafone-TIM joint venture INWIT reported a tenancy ratio of 2.32x in fourth quarter 2024, up from 1.88x in 2020, with the two anchor tenants representing 73.8% of total tenancies.

Tenancy rates also vary across Europe, with Eastern Europe having lower tenancy ratios, on average, than Western European markets. The observation is largely due to the slower pace of tower spinoffs and market consolidation, compared to Western Europe. For instance, CETIN Group's reported tenancy ratios were between 1.1x and 1.4x in the second half of 2024 across its four markets of Czechia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Serbia. The ratios have remained virtually unchanged since 2022. Telekom Austria's EuroTeleSites reported a blended tenancy ratio of 1.24x across six markets in fourth quarter 2024, five of which are in Eastern Europe.

Other transactions

In May 2025, Finland's Digita announced plans to split into two separate companies: Digita Towers and Digita Oy, with the latter focusing on the company's broadcasting and telecom businesses. In June 2025, reports emerged that parent company DigitalBridge Group was considering a sale of the tower business for €1 billion.

Also in 2025, Swedish 3G tower JVs Sunab (Tele2/Telia) and 3GIS (Three/Telenor) are set to be dissolved by the end of the year when their spectrum licenses expire. Similarly, the BT Group and Hutchison 3G UK joint venture in the UK, MBNL, is also set for dissolution in 2031. The two companies ceased jointly upgrading sites in 2023.