If 2020 will be remembered due to COVID-19, then 2021 will be the year when all telecommunications companies sell their towers.

The mast now appears to be expanded to Malaysia, and U Mobile is now considering selling its tower for US$120 million.

People who may be interested include Edgepoint Capital Advisors and Edotco Group.

Flush and repeat: Malaysia's U Mobile is the latest operator to consider cashing out its tower infrastructure to improve its books in the short term. (Source: Pixabay)

Like any self-respecting telecommunications company, U Mobile is seeking to add some additional resources because it has invested heavily in 5G, and its goal is to launch in Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya by the end of 2021 and nationwide in 2023.

At the same time, U Mobile, which is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and is the country's fourth largest mobile operator, is also preparing its books before planning an IPO, hoping to raise about US$500 million.

U Mobile has more than 7 million users and 1,611 wireless signal towers. Shareholders include Straits Mobile Investments from neighboring Singapore and local tycoon Vincent Tan.

A few weeks ago, Dutch telecommunications company VEON agreed to divest 15,400 mobile towers in Russia at a price of US$970 million (70.65 billion rubles).

The company also signed a cooperation agreement this month to use the fiber optic broadband of Allo Technology, a subsidiary of Tenaga Nasional.

This allowed U Mobile to launch its first 100Mbit/s, 500Mbit/s and 1Gbit/s fiber optic products as pilot projects in selected residential areas in Malacca, Cyberjaya, Perak and Kedah this month.

As an additional incentive, and focusing on the difficult economic environment, it provides customers with a 50% discount on optical fiber plans for two years, and the first month is free.

At the same time, Ericsson yesterday and the state-owned Digital Nasional Berhad reached a ten-year US$2.6 billion partnership to provide a nationwide 5G wholesale network throughout Malaysia.

So far, Malaysia and Brunei are the only two countries in Asia that have chosen to form a nationalized single wholesale network, own towers, backhaul and spectrum assets, and sell access to retail operators in a wholesale manner.

DNB hopes that the end-to-end strategy of adopting Ericsson's suite (including radio, spectrum sharing and support systems) will help it achieve its goal of allowing 80% of the Malaysian population to use 5G by 2024.

After Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin's government came under fire for its improper 5G spectrum allocation, Malaysia established a state-owned dedicated vehicle Digital Nasional Berhad in February.

The spectrum was originally awarded to Altel without public bidding, and Altel is controlled by a politically close businessman Syed Mokhtar.

When this decision drew a lot of criticism, Yassin subsequently cancelled the allocation and announced that the spectrum would be nationalized.

The GSMA warned afterwards that “Malaysian operators have made a lot of infrastructure investment.” Although the country has a “booming mobile economy and a growing digital industry,” a single wholesale network model is “risky”.

GSMA, which represents mobile operators, said that there is also no evidence that “the obvious market has failed to justify intervention in the 5G market.”

In other Telecom Malaysia news, the central banks of Malaysia and Singapore announced on Monday that by the last quarter of 2022, the people of the two countries will be able to make real-time payments using only their mobile phone numbers.

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This cooperation is expected to make it easier for travelers between the two countries (12 million people per year before the coronavirus outbreak) to make payments and spend in each other's jurisdictions.

Malaysia has also announced a similar cooperation with the Reserve Bank of India in recent weeks to connect Malaysia’s PayNow with India’s unified payment interface to enable real-time payments between the two countries by July 2022.

Related post: VEON sells its Russian tower Vantage Point for US$970 million: Vodafone spins off 200 leases in FY21

— Pádraig Belton, Contributing Editor of Light Reading

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