By Arno Schuetze
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Deutsche Telekom The German company has appointed Goldman Sachs Deutsche Telekom is planning to send out first information packages on the business to prospective buyers after the summer break and will, depending on their feedback, decide on whether it sells all or just a stake in the business, or ultimately decides to keep it. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Telekom declined to comment.
The group, which in 2012 sold its U.S. towers business to Crown Castle Telefonica Deutschland Telecom Italia said in May that it would decide within months on options for its remaining 60 percent stake in Infrastrutture Wireless Italiane (INWIT) And last year Carlos Slim’s America Movil Deutsche Telekom is expected to approach infrastructure investors as well as insurers and pension funds, whose appetite to buy regulated assets with secure cash flows has grown in the recent low-interest rate environment, the sources said. Separately, Deutsche Telekom will approach private equity groups after having made good experiences with buyout groups in several situations, for example its online classifieds unit Scout24 Groups specializing in managing mobile masts, such as American Tower Deutsche Telekom is still in the process of separating out its German masts as a business and has not produced pro-forma standalone earnings figures yet.
“Despite certain shared usership agreements for individual sites, Deutsche Telekom has a certain freedom in defining how much it pays its towers subsidiary for the use of the service,” one of the people said. The person added that the details of the leasing contracts as well as the assessment of how easily additional users for the masts can be attracted will also be factors in determining a potential valuation of the assets, they said. (This version of the story was refiled to delete duplicate sourcing in final paragraph)
(Additional reporting by Harro Ten Wolde and Peter Maushagen; Editing by Greg Mahlich)