In an effort to find the necessary revenue to fund its ambitious, and slightly confusing, proposed foray into LTE, T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is apparently prepared to leverage the farm, developing a plan to sell off key T-Mobile assets to generate more income. In fact, Bloomberg recently reported that T-Mobile has hired a strategic advisory group to assist in selling off one of T-Mobile’s only real assets, its wireless towers…they didn’t really need them anyways.
While I’m sure a selloff of the company’s wireless infrastructure will generate much needed revenue for both Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile, two companies who have see their fortunes flag over recent years, the timing certainly strikes me as odd, given that it was just over a month ago that T-Mobile announced its plan to invest in a “network modernization” strategy that included a network upgrade to 4G.
That said, there are rumours that such a selloff is part of an overall strategy to make T-Mobile self-sufficient, alleviating the current financial burden on Deutsche Telekom (DT) and allowing the American wireless carrier to hopefully find its wings in an increasingly competitive market.
To be fair, though, T-Mobile isn’t the first company to consider selling off its wireless infrastructure to third party tower operators, and there is some upside to such a deal as well. First the obvious one, with the sale of its towers analysts anticipate that T-Mobile will be able to generate upwards of $3 billion, how much of that is earmarked for network upgrades and how much will line DT’s pockets, however, remains to be seen.
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