Crown Castle International Corp. (CCI) saw its fourth quarter revenues jump nearly 20% year-over-year and it anticipates continued strong growth.
Total revenues were up 18% to $798 million, and site rental revenue increased 14% year-over-year to $651 million. However, the company did record a net loss for the quarter of $23 million due to income taxes, compared to a loss of $10 million during the same period last year. However, net income for the year was positive at $94 million, despite being down considerably from the $201 million the company reported in the prior year.
“Our 40,000 towers and 11,000 nodes within our small cell networks uniquely position us to accommodate growing carrier demand for network quality and capacity enhancements through increased cell density,” said Ben Moreland, president and CEO of Crown Castle. In reflection of that growing demand, he added, the company’s 2014 outlook assumes a 30% increase in new leasing activity compared to last year.
Total revenue for the full year was up 24% to $3.02 billion, and full-year site revenues increased 18% to $2.5 billion.
Crown Castle completed a deal with AT&T to buy about 9,700 of the carrier’s towers for $4.85 billion. Crown Castle said that the AT&T towers contributed about $18 million in site rental revenue during the fourth quarter. Overall, the company said that it made $182 million in capital expenditures during the fourth quarter of 2013, including $24 million in land purchases, $79 million in expenditures on existing sites and $58 million on constructing new sites — which the company said was “primarily small cell construction activity.”
Crown Castle’s outlook for 2014 assumes that about $50 million worth of site leases will not be renewed, accounting for about 2% of site rental revenues. About half of that is typical churn, it said, and the other half comes from Sprint’s decommissioning of its iDen network, which will cause impact spread out between 2014 and 2015.
