(Bloomberg) — Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and DigitalBridge Group Inc. have reached an agreement for a majority stake in Deutsche Telekom AG’s tower business, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Brookfield teamed up with DigitalBridge Group in a last-minute bid for the stake after its previous partner, Cellnex Telecom SA, dropped out, Bloomberg was first to report. The group bypassed the earlier frontrunner, a KKR & Co.-led consortium, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information was private.
The deal for a 51% stake in the business values the portfolio at about 17.5 billion euros ($17.6 billion), one of the people said.
The sale could be announced as soon as Thursday, said the people, who added that a final agreement hasn’t been reached and might not be. The deal is set to be one of the year’s biggest digital infrastructure transactions, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Representatives Brookfield and DigitalBridge declined to comment. A spokesperson for Bonn-based Deutsche Telekom didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
Europe’s phone carriers used to insist on ownership of their infrastructure including masts and fixed networks, but facing pressure to share the bill for expensive investments into fiber optics and 5G, with large debt piles and stagnant share prices, they’ve started to spin off or sell the businesses.
DigitalBridge, which has a market value of about $3 billion, manages almost $47 billion of assets solely focused on digital infrastructure such as wireless towers, data centers, fiber networks and edge infrastructure, according to its website.
(Updates with DigitalBridge’s assets in seventh paragraph. Cellnex’s earlier partner was corrected in an earlier version of this story.)
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