(Bloomberg) -- Vantage Towers AG, an owner and operator of telecom towers backed by KKR & Co., is considering a sale of its assets in Spain, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The Duesseldorf, Germany-based company is working with Morgan Stanley to gauge interest from prospective buyers, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. A sale of the Spanish towers could fetch about €1 billion ($1.1 billion), the people said.
Deliberations are at an early stage and Vantage Towers could decide against a sale, said the people. Representatives for Vantage Towers and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
Vantage Towers is also jointly owned by Global Infrastructure Partners and Vodafone Group Plc. It has more than 8,000 towers across Spain, the country’s third largest by the number of sites, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Vodafone set up a 50:50 joint venture with KKR and GIP to co-own Vantage Tower via Oak Holdings in 2022. Vodafone in July sold a 10% stake in Oak Holdings for €1.3 billion, cutting its effective stake to 44.7%, a press statement shows.
Vantage Spain is facing calls from Vodafone Spain, its main local client that’s now majority-owned by Zegona Communications Plc, to review its contract and lower the annual fees, Bloomberg News reported this week.
Spain’s tower market is split between American Tower Corp, Cellnex Telecom SA, Vantage and Orange SA’s Totem.
Cellnex, which controls more than 11,000 towers in Spain, has repeatedly said it sees itself as a market consolidator and Chief Executive Officer Marco Patuano claimed earlier this year it wasn’t a question of “if” it would happen but “when and how.”
(Updates with market details from paragraph seven. A previous version of this story corrected a reference to Vantage’s position in Spain in paragraph four.)
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