Towerco comparability · note 02

Your leverage screen is not comparing leverage

10 tower companies publish a net debt to EBITDA multiple. They run from 2.67x to 6.40x. The spread is real, but a large part of it is the definition, not the balance sheet.

What they publish

Each multiple below is the company's own, read from its own document, with the page. None of them is adjusted here.

Company	Leverage, as they define it	Period	Page
Telesites	2.67x	Q2-2026	p21
IHS Towers	3.10x	FY2025	p1
Helios Towers	3.40x	FY2025	p1
American Tower	4.90x	FY2025	p1
Tower Bersama	5.00x	FY2025	p369
INWIT	5.20x	FY2025	p5
EuroTeleSites	5.50x	FY2025	p4
Crown Castle	5.90x	FY2025	p1
Cellnex	6.28x	FY2025	p19
SBA Communications	6.40x	FY2025	p16

A credit screen sorts that column and stops. The next two sections are why it should not.

The denominator moves by up to a third

Ground leases are the tower industry's largest operating cost. Under IFRS they sit below EBITDA, so a company can report EBITDA, or EBITDA after lease costs, and both are true. Where a company publishes both, here is the gap between them.

Company	Period	EBITDA	After lease costs	Difference	Pages
EuroTeleSites	FY2025	227.3m EUR	151.3m EUR	−33%	p63, p63
Vantage Towers	FY2026 (to Mar)	984.5m EUR	734.1m EUR	−25%	p118, p25
Cellnex	FY2025	3,317.0m EUR	2,484.0m EUR	−25%	p23, p23
INWIT	FY2025	984.4m EUR	785.9m EUR	−20%	p24, p24

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Divide the same net debt by the second column instead of the first and a 20% gap lifts a 5.0x multiple to 6.3x, and a 33% gap lifts it to 7.5x. Nothing about the company has changed.

And the numerator hides a second balance sheet

Lease liabilities are debt to some definitions and not to others. US reporters keep operating leases off the debt line entirely. Where both figures are published, this is the size of what moves in or out.

Company	Period	Net debt	Lease liabilities	Leases as % of net debt	Pages
EuroTeleSites	FY2025	1,248.5m EUR	379.8m EUR	30%	p62, p48
Crown Castle	FY2025	24,192.0m USD	4,961.0m USD	21%	p1, p1
Helios Towers	FY2025	1,723.3m USD	235.1m USD	14%	p14, p14
Cellnex	FY2025	20,765.0m EUR	2,497.0m EUR	12%	p24, p24

So we recompute on one basis — and mostly cannot

Our house rule is the one a rating analyst would recognise: leases out of the debt, EBITDA after lease costs. Like with like. Applying it to the 24 companies whose filings carry any of these figures gives this.

5 companies in all publish EBITDA after lease costs. American Tower, Crown Castle and SBA report under US GAAP; every name for that measure was searched through their filings and none appears.
19 could not be recomputed: no EBITDA after lease costs is published.
2 could not be recomputed: its net debt definition does not say whether leases are inside.
2 could not be recomputed: another part is missing.
Cellnex could be, and it moves: net debt 20,765.0m EUR (p24) less lease liabilities 2,497.0m EUR (p24), over EBITDA after lease costs 2,484.0m EUR (p23) → 7.35x, against the 6.28x it prints itself.

That is the finding, and it is not a complaint about the companies. On published information, a like-for-like leverage table across this sector cannot be built. What can be built is an honest one: each company's own multiple, its own definition beside it, and a recomputed figure only where the filing actually supports one. We never fill the gap with an estimate, because a credit committee cannot act on a number nobody published.

Ask for the dossier

The current edition is a 43-page PDF and an Excel workbook covering 43 tower companies and 29 metrics. Every figure carries its page and the sentence it was read from.

Before each edition ships, every figure is looked for again in the source file itself, page by page, independently of our database.
What a company never published is marked as the company's gap. What we have not read yet is marked as ours. The two are never mixed.
Where a company defines a metric in its own words, that wording is quoted, with its page.

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