Brendan T. Cavanagh
President and Chief Executive Officer at SBA Communications
Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon.
The fourth-quarter was a solid finish to the year. Results for the quarter were in-line to slightly ahead of our estimates, even with worse than assumed foreign-exchange rates. Domestic new carrier activity or bookings continued to increase sequentially from the third-quarter. The shift in the makeup of our new business also continued. The higher percentage coming from new lease colocations versus amendments to existing leases.
Our carrier customers continue to expand their 5G mid-band coverage, including adding capacity for fixed wireless access, as well as extend network coverage into areas of the country that have little-to-no cell coverage today. Even with increased bookings in the quarter, our leasing application backlogs grew throughout the quarter and finished at the highest-level of the year. And our U.S.-based services business had its best quarter of the year as well. The beginning of 2025 is also off to a strong start, suggesting another quarter-over-quarter increase in new leasing business to begin this year. And our 2025 services outlook contemplates a year-over-year increase in that business.
Our US customers are busy and we expect to be a key partner to them this year in support of their network goals. Internationally, our fourth-quarter results were in-line with expectations as our customers continued to invest in their networks. In almost all of our international markets, the mobile network operators are well behind the US in terms of 5G coverage. So we anticipate continued network investment to close that gap and to broadly expand coverage to underserved areas.
In many ways, wireless is an even more critical service in our international markets than in the US. International churn unfortunately continues to be elevated, largely due to customer consolidations and we are working closely with our customers to help them achieve necessary network efficiencies. We believe the surviving customers will be stronger and better-positioned for ongoing investments and ultimately will support greater stabilization in our international cash flows. Overall, 2024 was a successful year. While our stock performance was hindered by the headwinds of the macro interest-rate environment and a strong dollar, we had several accomplishments that set us up well for the future.
Operationally, we expanded and strengthened our relationships with our largest customers. We grew our leasing and services backlogs, refreshed our mission, vision and values and streamlined a number of our operations and processes. With regard to capital allocation, we invested over $550 million in asset acquisitions, stock repurchases and new tower builds, all while growing our dividend at an industry-leading 15%. We also improved our balance sheet and liquidity position.
In the beginning of the year, we refinanced our $2.3 billion term-loan, pushing out the maturity to 2031, extended the maturity of our revolving credit facility and increased it from $1.5 billion to $2 billion and subsequently entered into a forward-starting interest-rate hedge, reducing our future floating-rate interest exposure and locking in a much lower rate than can be achieved today. In addition, in October, we refinanced $2.1 billion of tower securities at rates well below where those same securities were priced today. We ended the year at 6.1 times net-debt to adjusted EBITDA, the lowest level in our history.
In February of last year, I laid out my strategic priorities, focusing mostly on ways to enhance the portfolio with the goals to stabilize results, grow the core business and improve the overall quality of our assets, be it through inorganic growth or new agreements with our customers. While we still have work to do, we made major strides toward these goals. As announced last quarter, we entered into an agreement to purchase approximately 7,000 towers from in Central America. This immediately accretive transaction positions SBA as the leading power operator in the region with over 10,500 pro-forma sites. Beyond just the absolute size and scale, this deal aligns us with one of the leading M&Os in the market under long-term US dollar-nominated lease agreements.
We also entered into a significant build-to-suit agreement with that we expect will drive growth and further improve our position in the region for years to come. In fact, our 2025 outlook incorporates a planned level of up to 800 new tower builds this year, the largest number for SBA in over 20 years with the majority of those in Central America. Needless to say, we're excited about this transaction and its contributions to our future growth and stability. Alternatively, when we are in a subscale position and don't see a path to scale or other potential limitations on a market's future performance, we'll look to exit those markets.
Like we did in Argentina back-in the fourth-quarter of 2023, we officially exited the Philippines in January. And today, we've also announced we are under agreement to sell our operations in Colombia. Colombia market represents less than 200 sites and the impact to the financials are immaterial. It is not our desire to exit markets. In fact, it's much more our preference to find ways to scale, aligning with leading carriers and driving returns. We will continue to look for ways to do just that across our remaining markets. Each of the steps taken over the past year will help our teams be better focused and better-positioned to maximize new business opportunities.
Looking at 2025 and beyond, the key growth drivers remain intact. Mobile network consumption continues to grow and limited new spectrum availability means more equipment at the cell site. Fixed wireless access, the incorporation of next-gen AI applications and handsets, regulatory build-out requirements and remaining 5G coverage expansion are expected to contribute to ongoing network investments. The strength of our balance sheet and the significant free-cash flow that we generate every year will allow us to continue investing in high-quality new assets as well as shareholder remuneration through industry-leading dividend growth and share repurchases. We are optimistic about our future opportunities.
Before turning it over to Marc, I'd like to thank our team members, the company's ability to achieve our vision to be our customers' first choice provider and the industry-leader in quality infrastructure solutions is only possible because of the incredibly hard-working team members we have here at SBA. I'd also like to thank our customers for their trust in us and we look-forward to collaborating with them to achieve their network goals.
And with that, I'll now turn things over to Marc who will provide additional details.
