| | By Subhankar Kundu @ Wednesday, March 18, 2009 7:27 AM
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| | Many stand-alone telecom tower companies are looking for potential mergers and acquisitions with the big players like Bharti Infratel, Reliance Infratel or Indus Towers.
 The smaller players have less than 6,000 towers each with some of them lacking funds to increase the number of towers.
American Tower Corporation (ATC) has acquired Indian telecom infrastructure firm Xcel Telecom Private Limited. Both the companies have issued a joint statement saying that ATC's Mauritian subsidiary, American Tower Mauritius has entered into an agreement with Horse-Shoe Capital, Mauritius and Xcel Telecom.
Xcel Telecom owns and operates around 1,700 wireless communications towers, plus a number of towers that are under construction.
However, both companies have declined to reveal their financial details on the deal.
'This deal will strengthen our base in India and give us access to a new set of clients and geographies where Xcel has established connections,' said ATC's executive vice president Amit Sharma.
Meanwhile, the state-run Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) is reportedly planning to follow up its $1.2 billion mobile towers business into a separate firm. This move might help the telco to raise funds to back its expansion plan.
Smaller players in the telecom infrastructure field to attract bigger players as these companies are growing fast and opened up rooms for bigger players for better market shares.
For example, Tejas Networks has deployed the nationwide network for one of Bangladesh’s leading telecom providers, Dhaka Telephone. The deal also indicates that the smaller telecom infrastructure firms have the potential to provide services in untapped foreign markets.
“Overall Tejas perceives Bangladesh as a rapidly growing market and looks forward to providing superior products and continued support to this market” said Anil Batra, president – sales, marketing & support of Tejas Networks.
Tata-Quippo tower is now reportedly eyeing Essar telecom infrastructure for a possible merger but both the companies have declined to comment.
Last year, Essar had also been in talks with GTL Infrastructure for $2 billion deal which didn't materialise. X
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