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A consortium including New Zealand's Morrison & Co has entered a binding agreement to buy ASX-listed telecommunications infrastructure player Uniti Group for $5.00 per share or $A3.62 billion ($3.88b).
The deal is subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.
The consortium also included Canada's Brookfield Australia (a subsidiary of Canada's Brookfield Asset Management) and Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, which invests on behalf of four Australian super funds.
The Morrison et al consortium reportedly headed off a bid from Macquarie Group - which, along with Aware Super, now owns Vocus Group (owner of Orcon Group in NZ, which is in the process of merging with 2degrees).
The Morrison group initially bid A$4.01 per share or A$3.1b, with trading temporarily suspended (at A$3.96 per share) after the bid leaked to media.
After trading resumed, Uniti confirmed a A$4.50 (A$3.4b) bid from an un-named party - thought to be Macquarie - before Morrison, Brookfield and Commonwealth trumped it with their A$5.00 bid disclosed today - by which time, shares were trading at a record A$4.97.
The deal is Morrison & Co's third Australian telco infrastructure play.
In 2016, the Morrison & Co-managed Infratil acquired a 48 per cent stake in Canberra Data Centres. And last year, Morrison & Co teamed with Australian super funds and the Future Fund to buy 49 per cent of Telstra's mobile towers business.
Industry eyes are now on whether Morrison & Co will enter the bidding for Vodafone NZ's celltower network, or Spark's, as both telco's weigh possible spin-offs. Morrison & Co is already involved in the sector through Infratil's half-share in Vodafone NZ. Former Morrison & Co Marko Bogoievski publically mulled a shared mobile telco infrastructure company in 2019 - an idea that now looks ahead of its time amid a flurry of telco infrastructure carve-outs.
From a standing start in 2019, Uniti has become the largest private fibre network operator in Australia via a series of acquisitions.
Its directors include two of Australia's highest-profile telco sector deal-makers - former M2 and Vocus director Mick Simmons and M2 founder Vaughan Bowen.
M2 bought NZ's CallPlus (now part of Orcon Group) for $200m in 2016, among a string of other deals. M2 went on to merge with Vocus Group, with Bowen becoming chairman of the combined operation in 2017. Bowen departed Vocus in 2017, but in 2021 was charged with insider trading related to an (ultimately unsuccessful) bid by private equity fund EQT to buy Vocus. In September, Uniti said it stood by Bowen, who would keep his position.
Bowen is fighting the charges and, by coincidence, had a preliminary hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates Court last month. His full trial is not expected until later this year.
Uniti owns fibre and wireless networks that offer the only major private alternative to Australia's Government-owned and run National Broadband Network (NBN) - albeit with less coverage. Its operations are centred on cherry-picked areas of the east coast. Greenfield housing developments are a point of focus.
Last year, Uniti made a net profit of A$29.2m (from the year-ago A$15.9m) as revenue rose from A$58.2m to A$160.5m - with the jump driven by its acquisitions of fibre network builder OptiComm for A$694m and its A$140m purchase of Telstra's "Velocity" fibre-to-the-premise business.
Wellington-based Morrison & Co is best known as the manager of the ASX and NZX-listed Infratil (market cap $5.7b), which holds a half-share in Vodafone NZ. All up, it manages around $21.5b in infrastructure investments.
The firm announced last November it had secured US$3b for a new global infrastructure fund, with Australian super funds understood to be among the anchor backers.