DigitalBridge's 16.2x tower deal prices a single credit

Liberty Global has agreed to sell the towers behind its Dutch carrier VodafoneZiggo to a consortium led by DigitalBridge for €669 million, about $778 million, at a multiple the seller puts at 16.2x the assets' 2025 EBITDA. That is a full price for European tower steel, and it is being paid for a package whose only tenant will be the operator Liberty Global has just finished buying outright.

The deal was confirmed on Tuesday, Sept. 8, shortly after the Financial Times reported that a sale was planned, and ownership of the assets moves to an entity jointly held by funds managed by DigitalBridge, TD Greystone Infrastructure and L&G. The coverage does not disclose how the three split the equity, what debt sits on the vehicle, or what rent VodafoneZiggo will pay and for how long, and that last gap is the one that decides whether the buyers got a bargain. A tower company with a single tenant is a credit with steel attached; the lease is the asset underneath the lattice.

Liberty Global's motives are easier to read: it is preparing to list Ziggo Group, which also owns Belgian mobile and broadband operator Telenet, in the second half of next year, and wants to raise between €1.2 billion ($1.4 billion) and €1.4 billion ($1.63 billion) from non-core disposals along the way. The VodafoneZiggo buyout closed in August, when Liberty Global took over Vodafone's 50 percent stake and turned the joint venture into an asset it controls outright; selling the passive layer soon after is the standard sequence for a company that has decided what it wants to be valued as.

Vodafone and Liberty Global created VodafoneZiggo in 2016 by merging Vodafone Netherlands with Ziggo, and the carrier serves around six million mobile subscribers. A decade of Dutch mobile competition later, the masts behind those subscribers have become a saleable financial asset and the subscribers themselves have become the part of the business being prepared for a public listing. Mike Fries, Liberty Global's chairman and chief executive, said the disposal and others under way strengthen the company's position ahead of that listing.

Selling is the right call for Liberty Global, and the price says so: a converged telecom's equity story is written in subscribers, bundles and price rises, while passive infrastructure generates bond-like cash flow and consumes capital a pre-listing balance sheet would rather show as growth. Next year shareholders will be asked to value a service business, not a landlord. Getting €669 million for the towers, on a multiple computed from the company's own 2025 EBITDA figure, while keeping the subscribers to sell, is clean housekeeping: this one package covers between 48 and 56 percent of the €1.2 billion to €1.4 billion disposal target on its own.

The buyers are underwriting something narrower than a tower portfolio: DigitalBridge, TD Greystone and L&G are agreeing to a transaction in which a carrier sells the masts it uses, which is a leaseback in substance even though the coverage does not lay out its terms, and the cash flow therefore rests on one operator in one country. That operator is about to hand its parent a listing, and the listing cuts both ways: a public Ziggo Group has a reason to keep its network commitments intact, and it also has public shareholders to answer to if Dutch mobile margins compress. Reading the buyer's side as a property play misses where the risk sits.

The sorting mechanism is the one this desk keeps running into across digital infrastructure: hyperscaler anchors set the infrastructure price, and everything without contracted cash flow is a merchant shell until proven otherwise. This deal extends the principle rather than complicating it; the anchor can be any credit that can sign a long lease, and VodafoneZiggo, with six million mobile subscribers and a parent that wants it listed, qualifies. That is why a Dutch tower package clears 16.2x while merchant fiber and edge projects struggle to clear their cost of capital.

On the buy side, Infrastructure Investor's 2026 II 100 found a $200 billion rebound in five-year fundraising, with BlackRock's GIP back at the top of the infrastructure fundraising table, and the sponsors competing for those institutional checks are chasing exactly the kind of contracted revenue this deal manufactures. Capital is abundant for assets with a tenant and selective everywhere else, which is the environment in which a seller with a listing to fund gets to name a price.

The lease supporting the single-tenant, single-country package has not been disclosed, and neither has the leverage the buyers will put on the vehicle. When those details surface, in the tower entity's own reporting or alongside the Ziggo Group listing if it proceeds in the second half of next year, the market will find out whether DigitalBridge bought a utility or a bet on a Dutch operator's willingness to keep renting its own masts.