Cellnex, the management company of telecommunications towers and one of the greats of the IbexHe lives in troubled times. After announcing his CEO last January, Tobias Martinezthat on June 3, two days after the celebration of the shareholders meetingwill leave office, various events have occurred that have put the company in the forefront of today and not for the purchase of assets, as it has been in recent years.
In this context, on March 27, the council dismissed the current president, Bernard Kan and chose to name Anne Bouverot. From a profile more linked to investment banking, he moved to a more industrial one to face a new stage of business consolidation and organic growth, after a few years of purchases and the digestion of the integration of assets. The company has invested 35,000 million in purchases since it went public after splitting from Abertis in 2015. All this effort, half through debt, which amounted to 16,900 million as of December 31, and the other half through four capital increases carried out between 2019 and 2021 , you have to make it profitable in the new stage.
The change in the presidency and the pressure to accelerate the election of the CEO have occurred at the request of the new main shareholder, the British investor Chris Hohn who, through the activist fund TCI has raised its stake from 7.08% to 9.03%, above that owned by the Benetton family through its company Edizione, with 8.2%, as well as the Singapore sovereign fund (7.03%) and other shareholders such as Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (5.19%), Blackrock (5.071%), CK Hutchison (4.828%), Criteria Caixa (4.774%) or Norges Bank (3.003%), among others.
This same week Kan, who had chosen to continue as a counselor and Peter Shore have tendered their resignation, effective immediately for “irreconcilable differences” with the board of directors of the company “in relation to the management, direction and the succession process” within the company. And in the middle of this storm, JP Morgan has announced that it has 5.5% of the capital. With Hohn, the shareholder structure has been revolutionized and the board is pushed to choose a CEO as quickly as possible.
Although Hohn has political rights for around 3% of the capital, since the rest are derivatives, “I am sure that at the shareholders’ meeting he will assert the 9% he owns,” market sources highlight. In any case, the choice of CEO will not be entirely easy. If he is someone outside the board, as everything seems to indicate, he will first have to become a member of it with the endorsement of 8 of the 11 directors of the company’s governing body.
One of the names that has been considered to occupy the position of CEO is that of Marco Patuano, who already held the presidency of Cellnex for about a year, until 2019, with the sale to the Benetton family of 29.9% of the capital by Abertis. The one who was the main executive of Telecom Italia was a proprietary director representing Connect, the main shareholder of Cellnex, belonging to the Edizione Group (industrial holding company of the Benetton family).
Cellnex, with a stock market value of around 27,000 million and in the ascent phase in recent days since the Hohn offensive, will reach a portfolio of around 135,000 locations by 2030 in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. Last November, during the presentation of the results for the third quarter of 2022, the company announced that its two new objectives were to stop growing through acquisitions, since there are few interesting opportunities left in the European market; and started a new cycle of rising interest rates; and obtain investment grade from Standard & Poor’s. That requires debt reduction and may require selling assets. The answer, when the new boss is incorporated, may not have landed yet for the shareholders’ meeting on June 1, according to some sources.