American Tower Corporation (ATC) has acquired the telecom tower assets of KEC International Ltd for ₹81 crore.

The BSE-listed KEC International has 381 towers in Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya and Mizoram. This is the fourth acquisition by ATC in India, taking its total number of towers to 13,000.

Speaking with BusinessLine , Amit Sharma, ATC’s Asia operations President, said that the deal has been done with a long-term view, to cater to network requirements, as Internet services start rolling out to non-urban areas. “As the digital India campaign picks up, operators will start needing more towers in semi-urban and rural areas. The tower assets in Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya and Mizoram help us to be ready to meet that demand in the long term,” Sharma said.

In 2009, ATC had acquired 1,700 towers of Xcel Telecom, founded by former BPL Mobile Chief Executive Officer Sandip Basu, for an undisclosed amount. In the same year, it announced the acquisition of 400 towers from Kolkata-based tower company Transcend Infrastructure for about ₹95 crore.

The biggest deal, however, came in 2010 when ATC acquired 4,630 towers from the Essar Group for about ₹2,000 crore.

However, it has not been able to close any major deals in India since then as it has in other markets. Recently, it bought nearly 11,300 towers from Verizon in the US for just over $5 billion.

In India, valuation has been the main issue. The company has been in talks with Viom Networks since June but so far nothing has come out of it. Though ATC and Viom started negotiating seriously in October, the talks have not yet yielded results. Viom is a joint venture between Srei Infrastructure and Tata Group and has over 42,000 towers.

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