OREANDA-NEWS. Fitch Ratings says in a new report that the impact from the potential sale of tower infrastructure by Russian mobile companies on key leverage metrics would be neutral to positive under the agency's assumptions on sale price and rent expense.

The impact on LLC T2 RTK Holding's (B+/Stable) metrics will be more pronounced due to a smaller absolute size of its debt relative to the Big three mobile operators - PJSC Mobile TeleSystems (BB+/Stable), PJSC MegaFon (BB+/Stable) and Vimpelcom Ltd (BB+/Stable).

Recent media reports in Russia and comments from the companies suggest that some Russian mobile operators may sell their tower infrastructure. Vimpelcom is officially considering the opportunity to sell its mobile towers and is negotiating the terms of a potential deal with several bidders. MegaFon and T2 RTK Holding (T2 RTK) are also considering the spin-off of their tower businesses while only Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) has publicly stated that it does not have any plans to sell its towers.

In this report Fitch analyses the impact of potential sale of tower infrastructure by Russian mobile operators on their leverage metrics and credit profiles. Fitch does not incorporate a sale of infrastructure in the rating cases for these companies and this exercise is performed as a hypothetical scenario analysis.