GTT to Get $175 Million Investment Post-Interoute Acquisition

GTT Communications is set to receive a $175 million investment in its common stock at the closing of its acquisition of Interoute, expected by late summer.

The investment group is lead by Aleph Capital Partners and Crestview Partners, two of Interoute’s significant shareholders. They will invest a portion of their proceeds from the sale of that company into the combined company. According to the the terms of GTT’s debt financing commitment for the Interoute acquisition, this equity commitment will reduce the amount of debt to be issued by GTT to fund the acquisition on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

GTT’s Rick Calder

GTT been on quite an acquisition spree the past few years and Rick Calder, GTT’s president and CEO, said M&A will continue to be part of his company’s growth strategy. Its latest acquisition is Accelerated Connections (ACI), a Toronto-based provider of managed networking, VoIP and colocation services to large, distributed Canadian enterprises.

GTT said the Interoute acquisition will bolster its fiber, data-center and SD-WAN capabilities.

“Aleph and Crestview’s investment is a strong vote of confidence in our vision to create a disruptive market leader with substantial scale, unique network assets and award-winning product capabilities to fulfill our clients’ growing demand for cloud networking services in Europe, the United States and across the globe,” Calder said.

In December, the company announced it was upgrading its channel partner program to make its agent partners more successful, from initial engagement with GTT to direct support of partners’ end-user clients.

“We are excited to become shareholders of GTT in this new phase of its growth and development,” said Hugues Lepic, Aleph’s CEO. “The strength of GTT and Interoute’s combined assets and capabilities creates a compelling opportunity to build a player with significant scale and international presence and drive further industry consolidation.”