Altius Telecom Infrastructure Trust is fundamentally a landlord for India’s mobile networks - it owns the physical towers, rooftop mounts, and in-building antenna systems that telecom operators rent to hang their radios and beam signals across the country. It was born in 2019 when Reliance Jio sold its tower assets into a newly created infrastructure investment trust, and it later transformed into a fully independent platform by acquiring two other large tower portfolios - Crest Digitel and the former ATC India business - under the sponsorship of Brookfield, one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers. The recurring approach that explains everything else is a simple, operator-agnostic model: build or buy passive infrastructure once, lock in blue-chip tenants on multi-decade contracts with built-in rent escalations, and then add more tenants to the same steel at very little extra cost - turning fixed assets into an annuity-like stream of distributions for unitholders. # Business segments A single engine with two complementary halves - a macro tower portfolio that provides wide-area coverage across all of India, and an in-building solutions business that fills in the dense urban gaps where big towers cannot reach - both running on the same landlord economics. ## 1. Macro towers: the wide-area backbone that carries India’s mobile traffic **Over 250,000 ground-based towers and rooftop sites, each a multi-tenant steel structure where every additional operator that hangs equipment drives profit straight to the bottom line.** - **Paid by the month, locked in for decades** - the trust earns a monthly site premium from each tenant on every tower, with 55% of all tenancies secured under a 30-year non-cancellable contract with Reliance Jio and the remaining 45% locked in for up to 10 years, giving a weighted average lease expiry of nearly 16 years. - **The neutral-host advantage** - it is the only major tower company in India not owned by or tied to a single mobile operator, so it can serve all of them without conflict, marketing empty space on its towers to any carrier that needs coverage. - **Co-location is the growth flywheel** - adding a second or third tenant to an existing tower generates extra revenue while costs stay largely flat, which is why the tenancy ratio across the portfolio provides headroom for low-capex expansion. - **Two portfolios, one playbook** - the Summit Digitel arm (roughly 174,000 towers) was built for Jio as the anchor tenant and is concentrated in rural areas with over 60% of sites on the ground; the Elevar Digitel arm (roughly 76,000 towers, acquired from ATC in 2024) brings a multi-operator urban and suburban portfolio that added relationships with every major telecom player in the country. - **Costs are contracted too** - a large share of towers across the platform have O&M contracts that lock in key operating costs, protecting margins as revenue grows. ## 2. In-building and small cells: filling the urban signal gaps **When macro towers cannot punch through concrete and steel, Crest Digitel runs the antenna systems inside malls, airports, metro stations and tunnels - a specialist business where it already holds roughly 60% market share in metros and airports.** - **Built into the building, not beside it** - Crest installs passive Distributed Antenna Systems (networks of cables and antennas threaded through large commercial complexes) and outdoor small cells (compact, low-power base stations on walls and poles) that operators plug into, paying an IP fee for the shared infrastructure. - **High-barrier, high-density locations** - the portfolio covers more than 700 million square feet and reaches over 10 million daily touchpoints, including 275-plus kilometers of tunnel coverage, with nearly 100% network uptime on metro sites. - **A bolt-on that deepens the moat** - Crest was acquired in 2021 and expanded the trust’s offering from macro towers into indoor solutions, giving it a presence in the dense urban locations where macro sites are hard to permit and where data demand is growing fastest. # Group structure and partners **A Brookfield-sponsored InvIT that holds its operating companies directly, with no intermediate holding layers - so all acquisition upside flows straight to unitholders.** - **Direct asset ownership** - the trust holds 100% of its three operating SPVs (Summit Digitel, Elevar Digitel, and Crest Digitel) directly at the InvIT level, with no developer or sponsor affiliate sitting in between. - **Sponsor alignment** - Brookfield entities act as sponsors and the investment manager, but management fees are charged on a cost-plus basis rather than as a percentage of revenue or assets, removing the incentive to grow assets for fee income alone. - **Institutional co-investors** - alongside Brookfield, the unitholder base includes GIC, British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, and a range of domestic mutual funds, pension funds, and family offices. - **Diversified funding, fixed-rate bias** - the trust borrows from over 40 lending institutions across domestic bonds, term loans, foreign debt and a USD bond, with 72% of its borrowings at fixed rates and a consolidated cost of debt of 8.09%. - **Distribution discipline** - it is required to distribute at least 90% of its net distributable cash flows to unitholders, and since inception has cumulatively returned ₹77.6 per unit.