Towerco comparability · note 01

The tenancy ratio problem

Twelve tower companies put a tenancy ratio in front of investors. They range from 1.03x to 3.7x — and almost none of them counts the same thing. Two of the largest publish no ratio at all.

What they publish

Every figure below was read from the company's own filing and appears, character for character, on the page cited. Nothing here is estimated.

tenants per site, as published published, but counts something else not published — we computed it

The same word, four different meanings

Each row quotes the company's own sentence. The differences are not rounding; they are definitions.

Company	Ratio	What they call it	In their words	Page
TDF	3.70x	colocation rate	“Overall colocation rate on TDF sites in 2025: 3.7x” — across broadcast and telecom sites together, a different asset base from a pure tower portfolio.	p22
IHS Towers	1.46x	colocation rate	“the average number of Tenants per tower that we own or operate across our tower portfolio at a given point in time, excluding Managed Services.”	p1
Vantage Towers	1.55x	average tenancy ratio	“our average tenancy ratio in the Consolidated Markets was 1.55x (31 March 2025: 1.53x)” — consolidated markets only, excluding its joint ventures.	p21
Helios Towers	2.26x	tenancy ratio	Built on colocations, which it defines as “standard colocations plus amendment colocations as of a given date” — amendments count as tenants.	p78
INWIT	2.40x	tenancy ratio	“Tenancy ratio (period end)”. Its own two documents for the prior year give 1.96x and 2.38x — a 21% gap depending on which one you open.	p2
China Tower	1.81x	not published	No ratio in the filing. We divided 3,844,000 tenants by 2,119,000 sites, both read from the same page, and marked it as ours.	p17
Array	1.03x	not published	No ratio in the filing. Computed from 4,572 tenancies over 4,450 sites, both cited, and marked as ours.	p1

Three traps a league table walks into

The word is not the measure

TDF's 3.7x counts colocations across broadcast masts and telecom sites. IHS's 1.46x counts tenants per tower and excludes managed services. Ranking one against the other measures the portfolio mix, not the operating performance.

The perimeter moves

Vantage reports 1.55x for its consolidated markets. Its joint ventures — including the UK — sit outside that number. A reader who compares it with a group-wide ratio is comparing two different companies.

One company, two numbers

For the same financial year, INWIT's results deck and its annual report give 1.96x and 2.38x. Neither is wrong; they count different things. A spreadsheet that takes whichever it found first is wrong.

And the ones who publish nothing

American Tower — four filings swept, not one of the forty names for this metric appears. It reports tenant billings growth instead.
SBA Communications — same result across its 10-K and three quarterly filings.
Crown Castle — mentions tenancy twice, never with a number attached.

This is worth saying plainly, because most data products leave those cells blank and let the reader assume someone failed to look. Absence is a finding: two of the three largest listed tower companies in the world do not give you this ratio, and no amount of scraping will produce one.

What we do about it

We read the filings of 43 tower companies — listed, private bond issuers, and joint ventures — and record four different things where others record one: the figure, the company's own definition, what could not be compared, and what the company never published. Every figure carries its page and the sentence it came from, so a credit committee can check it in thirty seconds.

The quarterly dossier covers 29 metrics on that basis: portfolio, tenancy, revenue, profitability, capex, leverage. Where two documents disagree, the cell says so and names both figures.

Ask for the dossier

The current edition is a 43-page PDF and an Excel workbook covering 43 companies. 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. The last pass found 405 of 406 on the page cited; the one that could not be found was taken out rather than footnoted.
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.

Write and say which companies you cover.
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