Investing.com -- Crown Castle International (NYSE:CCI), a leading provider of mobile telephone towers and wireless broadband distribution systems, increased its forward guidance on Thursday afternoon, despite missing revenue and earnings' forecasts in the first quarter.
Crown Castle, which purchases cell phone tower portfolios before renting or leasing them to top carriers such as VZ Holding AG (SIX:VZN), AT&T Inc (NYSE:T) and T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS) among others, finished with revenues of $934.4 million during the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2016. It represented a spike of 3.8% on an annual basis, just short of estimates of $935 million.
As a result, the Houston-based company reported earnings of $47.8 million before dividends, down sharply from net profits of $122.8 million over the same period a year earlier. On a per-share basis, Crown Castle reported earnings of 0.11, far below profits of 0.30 in the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2015. Crown Castle projected per share earnings of 0.19.
In terms of site rental revenues, Crown Castle's sales increased by 9.3% to $799.3 million, slightly above the company's midpoint of $791 million.
"As a shared wireless infrastructure provider, Crown Castle is uniquely positioned with our portfolio of towers and small cells to help our customers deploy their wireless networks efficiently and cost-effectively as they seek to meet the increasing demand for wireless connectivity," said Ben Moreland, Crown Castle's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Our track record of consistently delivering results that meet or exceed our guidance, including the strong results we generated in the first quarter, further demonstrates the long-term demand for our wireless infrastructure."
In spite of the earnings miss, Crown Castle increased the midpoint for annual site rental revenue to $3.22 billion from previous guidance of $3.18 billion.
"The innovation and adoption of wireless connectivity is expected to drive new applications, such as machine-to-machine connections, mobile video and fixed wireless broadband, all of which give us confidence in our ability to deliver on our stated goal of generating compound annual growth in AFFO and dividends per share of 6% to 7% organically over the next several years," Moreland added. "We believe this growth, combined with our current dividend yield of approximately 4%, represents an attractive long-term total return profile for shareholders."