BSNL set to sell 10,000 towers to monetise assets

State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) has started the process of selling 10,000 telecom towers to meet the asset monetisation target set for it by the National Monetisation Pipeline set up by the central government.

The enterprise value of the towers is pegged at around Rs 4000 Crore and KPMG has been selected as the financial consultant for the administration of the deal. The list of Potential buyers for the towers includes Brookfield-owned Data Infrastructure Trust and American Tower Corporation.

BSNL has operations in 20 of India’s 22 telecom circles and owns over 68,000 towers, 70% of which are fiberized and capable of supporting 4G and 5G services. Of these BSNL is scheduled to sell 13,567 towers which are co-located in areas where it has infrastructure sharing agreements with Jio and Airtel, in tranches till 2025. MTNL which has operations in Mumbai and Delhi circles is scheduled to monetise 1350 towers in a phased manner.

Earlier, every telecom operator preferred to own and operate its towers, but now they prefer to operate in an asset-light model where they sell their captive towers to a third-party company and lease them back and pay as per the contractual agreements.