Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Michael Rollins with Citi Investment.
Michael Rollins - Citigroup
Hi good morning. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the size of maybe the acquisition opportunities that could be left in the U.S. As you think about inevitably the capital structure and the options for which you can deploy cash, if you could size that part of the market for us, that would be great. And can you also give us a sense of what kind of opportunities for incremental investment lie in Latin America in a little bit more detail? That would be great. Thanks.
James Taiclet - Chief Executive Officer
Sure Mike. Good morning, it's Jim. First, of all let's talk about the U.S. The alternatives that I'll list may or may not be available now or in the near future but we can definitely talk about the universe for a few minutes. First and foremost is our peer company and one we have a lot of respect for, it's Crown Castle, very similar size to American Tower in many respects. It's our peer and probably the only peer of such size in the industry today, obviously a merger candidate if you will, theoretically. SBA is the second public company in the peer group versus American Tower and Crown Castle, 23,000, 24,000 size, we are talking about a smaller number. SBA has been doing some acquisitions lately and bulking up a bit, so maybe they are at 7,000, 8,000 tower range by the time it's all rolled in and that again another very well managed high-quality company in the public market. And then you get down to a couple of somewhat sizeable privately owned tower companies that are out there like Global Tower Partners. But now you're down into sort of the 2,000 to 3,000 tower range and then it goes down from there Mike.
So, and even some of those candidates in the say 500 tower range lately have been acquired. So, there is a fairly limited number of third-party tower companies of any kind of scale that's available. But, of course, there are also the carrier on tower portfolios that are still owned by those companies, the biggest one we believe is AT&T probably about 8000 towers, most of those legacy AT&T wireless sites. T-Mobile, which publicly announced an auction that was then discontinued for about 6,000 tower size and of course recently Sprint sites were sold. So, 3,500 but they are off the market now. So again, a fairly limited universe of U.S. tower acquisition opportunities, but they could range from a couple of hundred million dollars to... Crown Castle is valued at upwards of 15, 16 billion. So wide range, not a lot of candidates and nothing that I can say today is eminent or available to our knowledge among the group. In Latin America, there is a very broad range of opportunities for us, Mike. First of all in the existing markets we have, you may recall that this year we acquired about 250 towers, 200 or so in Mexico and about 50 in Brazil from Nextel International that already occurred in the first quarter. So, periodically if we do get those types of opportunities to acquire tranches of existing career towers in Mexico and Brazil. We are also building in Brazil specifically this year at a higher rate than we ever had before, there's a lot of opportunity down there with companies like Oi and Claro and Unicel that are either expanding their territories or new to the market.
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