Bell sells 49.9% of new tower company to La Caisse

Bell has agreed to sell 49.9 per cent of a newly formed wireless tower company to La Caisse, the Quebec pension investor, for $2.45 billion, parent company BCE Inc. announced Tuesday.

The deal values the new company, called TowerCo, at about $4.91 billion. TowerCo will hold more than 5,000 of Bell’s wireless tower sites and be headquartered in Montreal. Bell will keep the remaining 50.1 per cent and continue to consolidate the company’s results in its own financial statements.

Bell will lease space on the towers back from TowerCo under long-term agreements. The company said it keeps its spectrum licences, its active network equipment and the land it owns. TowerCo is expected to carry no financial debt when the deal closes, and it plans to grow by adding equipment to existing sites and renting space to other carriers.

Closing is targeted for the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions.

The sale is meant to free up cash as BCE works to bring its net debt leverage ratio down to 3.5 times by the end of 2027, according to coverage of the announcement by iPhone in Canada. Some outlets reported the price in U.S. dollars at roughly US$1.75 billion.

The transaction follows a similar arrangement by Telus, which sold a 49.9 per cent interest in its tower subsidiary Terrion to La Caisse for about $1.26 billion. Telus said that deal closed on Sept. 11, 2025, and that it kept control of Terrion. Bell’s structure is the same: the carrier remains the majority owner while an outside investor buys into the long-term rental income from the towers.

Canada’s big carriers are under pressure to fund network spending while managing heavy debt. Rogers reported this month that its free cash flow rose sharply in the third quarter, as we reported, and has also been talking up a future role for satellite connections, as covered here. Towers are one of the few assets the companies can part-sell without giving up control of their networks.

La Caisse, formally the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, managed about $552 billion in net assets as of June 30, 2026, according to the iPhone in Canada report.

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