Carrier-Neutral Operator Market Review, 4Q24: Capex Surge - Cnnos' Investments Rise By 6.8% Despite M&A Slowdown

(MENAFN- GlobeNewsWire - Nasdaq) The carrier-neutral network operator (CNNO) market shows significant growth, with revenues reaching $106.7 billion in 2024, despite a slight YoY increase of 0.2%. CNNOs play a crucial role in owning and operating key infrastructure such as cell towers, data centers, and fiber networks. The market experienced a 6.8% YoY rise in capex to $42.9 billion, driven by strategic acquisitions and expansions, especially in energy and data centers. This growth enhances network efficiency and cost structures for telcos and webscale operators, supporting sectors like finance, media, and energy.

Dublin, June 17, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Carrier-neutral Operator Market Review, 4Q24: GenAI Hype Speeds Up Private Equity's Push into Sector" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This report reviews the growth and development of the carrier-neutral network operator (CNNO) market. The report tracks a wide range of financial stats for 47 CNNOs across the globe, from 1Q11 through 4Q24. For the full-year 2024, the companies covered by this study represented $106.7 billion (B) in revenues (+0.2% YoY), and $42.9 B in capex (+6.8% YoY). At the end of 2024 (EOY24), these CNNOs had $261.1B of net plant, property and equipment (net PP&E) on the books (-0.5% YoY), and employed approximately 112,000 people (-2.0% YoY).

The CNNO market is the smallest of three operator segments tracked, alongside telco & webscale, but CNNOs play a crucial, complementary role in the communications sector and own and operate a large portion of the world's cell towers, small cells, data centers, and wholesale fiber networks. In the old days, telcos did it all: they owned all the network infrastructure, they manufactured the switches and transmission gear deployed in the network, and even provided CPE. That model is long since extinct.

The telco of 2025 cobbles together its physical network from a mix of owned and leased or rented resources. Over the years, many telcos have raised funds by selling off parts of their physical plant to private equity funds with infrastructure arms, or to public CNNOs. Usually there is a leaseback provision as part of the sale, enabling the telco to effectively turn capex into opex. Cloud providers in the webscale world also rely heavily on CNNOs; while they spend heavily on capex ($304B last year), they generally lease fiber or transmission bandwidth, and only own a portion of their data centers. CNNOs do serve other end markets, including various enterprise verticals (finance, media, and energy), and government. But telcos and webscalers are the biggest targets. CNNOs play a vital role in the network design and cost structure of these operators.

CNNOs are constantly reshuffling their asset base to optimize costs and position for growth. The most effective CNNOs have mastered the art of acquiring companies and/or discrete physical networks or facilities, and integrating them smoothly and quickly into existing operations. Finding cost benefits from the greater scale is key, as is being able to cross-sell across a larger universe of customers. This study attempts to focus on the purely 'neutral' CNNOs, i.e. the ones that do not have key customers also show up as key shareholders. China Tower, for instance, is majority owned by its top 3 customers, the big local telcos. This is an exception to the rule; we do include China Tower, because of its size and China's unusual networks ecosystem.

The figures in this study are based on a thorough bottoms-up assessment of the global CNNO market, focusing on companies that are either publicly traded now, or were public in the recent past. We cannot credibly track a company if it is purely private and reports no audited numbers to regulatory authorities.

This is also a challenge in other markets, such as webscale, where we are not able to track ByteDance/TikTok officially because it produces no reliable numbers. In the CNNO world, the biggest challenge is private equity. PE's rising interest in assembling digital infrastructure portfolios is a big reason for the growth of the CNNO market over the last decade. They're attempting to create synergies across their digital investees, sometimes through mergers, and synergies with other parts of their investment portfolio.

With the rise of GenAI, for instance, some PE firms are investing directly in energy supply in order to ensure competitive rates and terms (e.g. renewable sources) for the data center players in their portoflio. We include some PE-owned companies in this study, if it's possible to estimate their financials from past reported data. But we also have to exclude some major players; Airtrunk is a good example. It was acquired by PE giant Blackstone late last year, for $16B. This is the CNNO market's biggest M&A deal in 2024, but we have no realistic way to capture Airtrunk in our database.

Key Topics Covered:

• Report Highlights
• CNNO Segment Overview
• Analysis
• Operating Metrics
• Key Stats
• Company Drilldown
• Company Benchmarking
• Raw Data
• Exchange Rates

Figures & Charts

• Revenues by CNNO type (US$M)
• Revenues single-quarter (US$M)
• CNNO Profitability, annualized (%)
• Capex & M&A spending, single-quarter (US$M)
• Net PP&E by CNNO type (US$M)
• Number of data centers &NRSF per data center (K)
• Bandwidth fiber route miles, Global
• CNNO towers & average tenancy ratio
• Average size of data center, owned vs. leased: Equinix (000s of sq ft)
• Average number of cabinets installed, owned vs. leased: 21ViaNet
• # of Datacenters: Global
• Net Rentable Square Feet (NRSF) (MN): Global
• NRSF Per Data Center (K): Global
• # of Towers: By Region
• Number of Tenants: By Region
• AVG Tenancy per Occupied Tower: By Region
• Route Miles of Fiber: Global

Below charts by total CNNO market and by companies:

• Revenues: annual, single-quarter, and annualized (US$M)
• Profitability (Net Profit; Cash from operations; Free cash flow): annual, single-quarter, and annualized (US$M)
• Spending (M&A; Capex): annual, single-quarter, and annualized (US$M)
• Cash & Short-term Investments: annual and single-quarter (US$M)
• Debt (Total debt; Net debt): annual and single-quarter (US$M)
• Property, Plant & Equipment: annual and single-quarter (US$M)
• Key Ratios: Net margin; Capex/revenues; M&A/revenues; Free cash flow/revenues
• Total employees
• Energy Intensity in CNNO sector
• Energy Intensity by Company, 2023 (MWh/$M)
• Revenue per employee, annualized (US$K)
• FCF per employee, annualized (US$K)
• Net PP&E per employee, annualized (US$K)

Company benchmarking charts:

• 2018 vs. 2024: company benchmark by KPI (Revenues, Net profit, Cash from operations, Capex, Free cash flow, Cash & short-term investments, Net PP&E, Total debt)
• 2018 vs. 2024: company benchmark by key ratio (Capex/revenues; Net margin; FCF margin)
• KPI Benchmarking (Revenues, Net profit, Cash from operations, Capex, Free cash flow, Cash & short-term investments, Net PP&E, Total debt)
• Benchmarking by Key ratios: Capex/revenues; Net margin; FCF margin
• Top CNNOs by infrastructure type (2023)

Companies Featured

• 21Vianet
• American Tower
• Arqiva
• Balitower
• Bharti Infratel
• ByteDance
• Cellnex
• China Tower
• ChinData
• Chorus Limited
• Cogent
• CoreSite Realty
• Crown Castle
• CyrusOne
• Cyxtera
• Databank
• Digital Realty
• DigitalBridge
• DuPont Fabros
• EI Towers
• Equinix
• GDS Data Centers
• GTL Infrastructure
• GTT Communications
• Helios Towers
• IBS Towers
• IHS Towers
• Internap
• Interxion
• Inwit
• Keppel DC REIT
• Level 3
• Lumos
• NBN Australia
• NEXTDC
• QTS Realty
• SBA Communications
• SMN (Protelindo)
• STP Towers
• Summit Digitel
• Sunevision
• Superloop
• Switch
• TDF Infrastructure
• Telesites
• Telxius/Telefonica
• Tower Bersama
• Uniti Group
• Zayo

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Attachments

• Data centers and rentable space
• Bandwidth route fiber

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