Written by StockNews.com

American Tower Corp (NYSE: AMT) early Monday [Feb 27, 2017 | 7:51am] posted market-beating profits for the fourth quarter, as its recent acquisitions continued to bolster its revenues significantly.

The Boston-based telecom REIT reported Q4 EPS of $1.52, which was $0.18 better than the Wall Street consensus estimate of $1.34.

Revenues surged 20.3% from last year to $1.54 billion, roughly in-line with analysts’ view for $1.55 billion.

American Tower noted that property revenue gained 21.6% in the latest period to $1.521 billion, while adjusted EBITDA gained 16.7% to $936 million. Consolidated AFFO, which is a key metric used by REITs, increased 20.9% to $655 million.

Looking ahead, AMT forecast full-year 2017 property revenues of $6.21 to $6.39 billion, EBITDA up 8.6% to $1.175-$1.245 billion, and AFFO up 10% to $2.7-$2.8 billion.

The company commented via press release:

“In 2016, we once again generated double digit growth in our property revenue, Adjusted EBITDA and Consolidated AFFO per Share. At the same time, we continued to expand our asset base through our active tower construction program and accretive acquisitions like the Viom transaction in India and ended the year with nearly 145,000 towers and small cell systems. In all of these markets, consumers are driving increases in smartphone penetration and monthly data consumption, including in the U.S., where the average smartphone user now consumes over 4.4 gigabytes of data per month. We expect that these trends will in turn result in continued network investment and underpin our expectations for 2017, which include Organic Tenant Billings Growth of over 7% and Consolidated AFFO growth of over 10%. Further, we continue to target annual dividend per share growth of at least 20%, remain committed to our target net leverage range and expect to evaluate both accretive acquisition opportunities and a reinstatement of our share repurchase program during the course of the year.”

...Year-to-date, AMT has gained 6.82%, versus a 5.91% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.

AMT currently has a StockNews.com POWR Rating of A (Strong Buy), and is ranked #1 of 48 stocks in the REITs – Diversified category.