TAWAL in talks to buy more than 10,000 Mobily towers

The telecom infrastructure map of Saudi Arabia looks set for one final piece of consolidation, and if it lands, the Kingdom will effectively have a single company owning almost every mast that carries a mobile signal. TAWAL, the tower operator controlled by the Public Investment Fund, is reportedly in talks to buy more than 10,000 sites from Mobily, the country's second largest mobile operator. Semafor first reported the discussions in late July, citing people familiar with the matter, describing a multibillion dollar transaction that could be announced later this year if negotiations progress. None of the three parties involved, Mobily, PIF or TAWAL, responded to requests for comment, so this remains a reported deal rather than a confirmed one, and that distinction is worth holding onto. The scale of what would result is the most interesting part. TAWAL currently owns and operates more than 30,000 towers spread across Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Pakistan. That portfolio itself is the product of an aggressive buying run. In 2023 the company paid 1.22 billion euros, roughly 1.34 billion dollars, for United Group's tower business across Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia, picking up more than 4,800 sites in what was its first move into European telecoms, accompanied by a twenty year master services agreement committing it to deploy over 2,000 additional shareable sites. Domestically, PIF completed its 2.3 billion dollar acquisition of a 51 percent stake in TAWAL in February 2025, then merged those assets with Golden Lattice Investment Company, the vehicle holding roughly 8,069 sites of which about 60 percent were macro towers. Analysts at TowerXchange had already flagged that Mobily was bringing its towers to market and predicted PIF would be the only serious bidder, noting that adding roughly 11,000 Mobily masts would push the combined entity from around fifteenth in the global towerco league table to something close to ninth, overtaking IHS Towers. That concentration is exactly what makes the deal worth watching rather than simply cheering. People close to the talks describe the outcome as giving TAWAL monopoly power over the Kingdom's mobile tower infrastructure. In most markets that phrasing would attract immediate competition scrutiny. In Saudi Arabia the logic runs differently, because tower consolidation has been framed as a Vision 2030 objective, allowing operators to shed capital intensive passive infrastructure and focus spending on 5G rollout, spectrum and services rather than steel and concrete. The counterargument is that when one landlord owns every rooftop, the operators leasing space on them lose negotiating leverage permanently. TAWAL is expected to begin preparing for an initial public offering that could arrive in 2027 or 2028, and a portfolio covering essentially the entire national market makes for a considerably more attractive prospectus. The regional dimension here is unusually layered because this is not a purely Saudi story. Mobily is partly owned by e&, the Abu Dhabi based group formerly known as Etisalat, which is itself 60 percent owned by the Emirates Investment Authority with the balance trading on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange. The timing aligns closely with a strategic reset at e& under new group chief executive Masood M. Sharif Mahmood, who took over on 1 April 2026 from Hatem Dowidar. Dowidar had spent six years pushing the group toward being a global technology company, using cash from a dominant home market to fund international and venture bets, and shareholders were not convinced, with the Abu Dhabi listed shares down 8.6 percent over three years against a market capitalization of roughly 176.9 billion dirhams. The new direction is a retreat to core telecoms. e& sold its entire 16.21 percent Vodafone stake to Vega, the Niel family vehicle behind Iliad, for about 5.95 billion dollars, exited Careem, and is reviewing its venture arm e& capital and the Beehive lending platform. HSBC and Citi both expect the Vodafone proceeds to cut net debt to EBITDA from around 1.1 times to roughly 0.5 times by the end of 2026. Selling Mobily tower assets fits that pattern cleanly, releasing capital from infrastructure that produces steady but unspectacular returns. For MENA investors this is the second Gulf sovereign backed group in a year deciding that owning towers, minority stakes and side bets is less valuable than owning customers. What happens next depends on whether the negotiation actually closes. Saudi Arabia's telecom sector posted combined listed profits of 4.78 billion riyals in the first quarter of 2026 on revenue of about 27.64 billion, with Mobily reporting 880 million riyals in profit, up 15 percent. An operator in that position is not selling towers out of distress. It is selling them because the tower business and the network business have become genuinely separate industries, and the Gulf has decided to run them that way.