Second Largest Privately Owned Tower Company Continues Growing

Harmoni Towers, a portfolio company of Palistar Capital LP, acquired Parallel Infrastructure from Apollo in late 2022, setting itself up as the second largest privately held tower company in the United States. With well over 2,000 towers built and in development, the combined enterprise has since been focused on adding tenants to its existing infrastructure, building more towers and developing a collaborative, transparent culture that puts customers first.

In Harmoni with Parallel

Both Harmoni and Parallel started with a focus on organic portfolio growth, electing to build from the ground up rather than acquire existing infrastructure. Fortunately, the portfolios each company developed did not overlap, a major point of synergy that made their merger more compelling to stakeholders and customers alike. Their coverage areas, which span across 40 states, with saturation in the Southeast, Midwest and West Coast, are predominantly suburban, over-engineered monopoles, self-support and guyed towers with a peppering of creative, “stealth” structures, according to the company. The average age of their asset pool is less than 3.5 years, giving them confidence the portfolio has the space and capacity to benefit from the ongoing 5G development cycle.

“With the Parallel Infrastructure merger, we doubled in size and expanded our relative footprint in terms of scale, making ourselves more relevant to our customers and certainly a more coast-to-coast participant in the development of new communication infrastructure,” said Yannis Macheras, Harmoni’s CEO. “When you have more relevance to your customer, you also adopt more responsibility to them, which is why our cultural focus has been on delivering solutions and showing some empathy towards their objectives, challenges, and periodic limitations. Harmoni is about being in balance with the customers we are here to serve.”

Connecting Scale and Simplicity

Harmoni hasn’t stopped with just growing its tower portfolio. It’s also doubled its commitment to customer service by investing in a robust Business Development organization, says Macheras.  Many of Harmoni’s customer facing team members have over 20 years in the carrier or tower business and have deep connections with major customers at the regional and national level.

“We’re in the business of connecting customers to our assets, and by doing so, connecting people and communities across the country. To do that, we believe it is our duty to make life easier for the carriers,” said Chas Peterson, Chief Commercial Officer at Harmoni. “Our approach is to understand our customers’ challenges, and then to find creative ways to solve them.  We are positioned to create flexible solutions that save our customers OPEX and minimize their CAPEX burdens. For instance, if it helps them, we can fully fund their colocation build on one of our sites, inclusive of all gear and installation costs.”

Transparent pricing is also an integral part of the partnerships that Harmoni enjoys with carriers, according to Peterson. “Because we develop a level of trust with our customers, we can work together collaboratively through any problem in a focused way,” he said.  “Being honest and unambiguous and removing any drama is typically appreciated by customers who are already running very complicated and dynamic businesses.  We want to be the easy part of their ecosystem, so they can continue to connect people and improve their end-users’ experiences on their state-of-the-art networks.”

Harmoni’s Towers Positioned for 5G Growth

A substantial portion of Harmoni’s portfolio was built in suburban locations or for FirstNet, so the portfolio is in population centers that are now areas targeted for 5G investment. “Our assets are in locations that are very attractive for subsequent carriers looking to connect underserved customer communities or to resolve capacity issues, especially when you consider the adoption of new 5G services like FWA,” Macheras said.

Harmoni is disciplined, electing to focus on macro towers. It has build-to-suit and colocation agreements with all the major national and regional wireless carriers as well as agreements with scores of WISPs and non-traditional providers.

“We don’t do small cells. We don’t do fiber,” Macheras said. “We build and lease macro towers in the United States — full stop. Our focus is to work with carriers and find ways to connect their networks with their customers. So, tenant growth on our existing inventory and building new towers are our primary areas of focus.”

To build new towers at a nationwide scale, Harmoni is complemented by a supply chain that includes partnerships through MSAs and PSAs with well over 500 bespoke businesses around the country. This provides redundancy in every corner of the country to ensure the towers they elect to build are delivered on time. “We have very reliable and experienced people in the field that we contract with,” Macheras said. “Our preferred providers are located where the tower will be built. Local knowledge is paramount when developing new critical infrastructure. The companies we engage with are the best of the best and we consider them an extension of Harmoni.”

Looking Up in 2025

The carriers went through a re-tooling period over the past two years as they reconciled their buildout plans with their revenue growth, according to Macheras, and “we expect to see a more steady, sustained growth profile beginning around the middle of 2024.”

Harmoni believes it will see greater interest in its portfolio given the location of its assets as carriers expand their 5G connections beyond core urban areas and add capacity in suburban areas. “We expect to see carrier spending on new sites accelerate, with measured and steady growth returning solidly in the near term and ticking upward over the upcoming years,” said Peterson.

As it enters the second quarter of 2024, Harmoni is bigger than ever, with the business focused on driving new opportunities and Macheras confident in Harmoni’s ability to add new tenants and build new portfolio. “As one of the largest privately owned tower companies in the United States, we are now positioned to be a thought leader and to help establish standards for building towers and providing white-glove customer service. We’re hopeful that collectively our culture of transparency, our commitment to deliver when we say we will and our steadfast desire to leverage our financial strength to be as creative as a customer needs us to be, are the ingredients needed to leave a modest impact on this amazing industry that we are humbled to be a part of and that connects us all.”

Harmoni will be hosting meetings at the “Peace I” meeting room during the upcoming Connectivity Expo at the Georgia World Congress Center, May 14-16. To set up a meeting, contact Chas Peterson (chas.peterson@harmonitowers.com) or Alisha Sherman (alisha.sherman@harmonitowers.com)

By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor