Spanish infrastructure firm Cellnex Telecom has closed its previously announced acquisition of CK Hutchison’s telecoms tower assets in Italy, which comprises around 9,100 cell sites. The deal closed following the receipt of a green light from the Competition Authority (Autorita Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, AGCM) on 17 June.
The Italian closing follows that of deals in Austria, Denmark, Ireland and Sweden; Italy is the fifth country out of the six covered by the EUR10 billion (USD11.9 billion) agreement with CK Hutchison that was announced on 12 November 2020. Cellnex has now consolidated 18,600 towers/sites out of the total of 24,600 included in the agreement, with only the UK component of the deal (scheduled for the first half of 2022) still outstanding.
Cellnex says it now operates around 20,000 towers in Italy, with a further 3,000 set to be deployed by 2030. In addition, it owns 2,194 Distributed Antenna System (DAS) nodes.