American TowerAMT
$81.9B market capOwns cell towers worldwide and leases space on them to wireless carriers.
American Tower in 36 checks
American Tower at a glance: how it scores on value, growth, quality, health, shareholder returns and trend. The fuller the shape, the stronger the company. Behind each axis are six pass-or-fail checks from its filings, spelled out in the chapters below. Point at an axis to see them.
A mixed picture - strengths and real weaknesses - 17 of 36 checks passed.
Value
What you pay today for what the business produces, measured against AMT's own history and its peers, never a universal rule.
Expensive against its own history and its sector - you're paying up for what you get.
Is the price high or low right now, compared to what the market usually pays?
→At 27.4x earnings, the market is paying 31% less than AMT's own 11-year median of 39.5x. Pessimism is priced in - the question is whether it is deserved. Today's multiple is the lowest in the charted history.
What has the market paid for AMT over the years?
◌ 2026 = at the latest close (2026-09-04), over the trailing twelve months; earlier years are annual averages
→At 27.4x earnings, the market is paying 31% less than AMT's own 11-year median of 39.5x. Pessimism is priced in - the question is whether it is deserved. Today's multiple is the lowest in the charted history.
What does “Value” actually mean?
Value asks what you pay for each dollar of earnings, sales or cash the business produces. A high multiple isn't automatically bad - fast growers earn theirs - but a price far above the company's own history means the market expects a lot to go right. We compare each multiple to the company's own past and to its sector, never to a universal rule.
How we scored it · 1 of 6 checks passed
| – | Cheaper than its own history (earnings) | no multiple history |
| ✕ | Earnings yield beats a long bond (4%) | 3.6% vs 4.0% |
| – | Better cash yield than its own history | under 3 years of cash-flow history |
| ✓ | FFO yield above 5% | 5.4% vs 5.0% |
| ✕ | Cheap on FFO | 18.58 vs 16.00 (peer median) |
| ✕ | Price isn't outrunning growth | PEG 1.80 |
Growth
What the company has actually reported - is it selling more, and is more of it becoming profit?
Growing, but with caveats - revenue +6.3% over the last year.
Revenue: is the business selling more than it used to?
◌ 2026 = trailing twelve months to the latest filed quarter, not a full fiscal year
→Revenue reached $936M in 2025, compounding +4% a year since 2022 though the pace has cooled. The trailing twelve months are already running at $10.8B, ahead of the last full year.
Net income: how much of that revenue becomes profit?
◌ 2026 = trailing twelve months to the latest filed quarter, not a full fiscal year
→Net income was $2.6B in 2025, compounding +16% a year over three years. Earnings per share moved +62% over the last twelve months. Trailing twelve-month profit stands at $3.0B.
How fast is it growing, year by year?
+21%revenue growth, FY 2025
→In 2025 revenue grew +21% while earnings moved +15% - when the earnings line runs above revenue, each new dollar of sales is arriving more profitably.
What does “Growth” actually mean?
Growth here is what the company has actually reported to the SEC - not a forecast. We look at the last year, the three-year pace, whether growth is speeding up or slowing down, and whether it's been consistent rather than one lucky year. Hatched bars are fourth quarters we derived from annual filings (companies file a full-year 10-K rather than a Q4 report).
How we scored it · 3 of 6 checks passed
| ✕ | Outgrew its sector last year | 6.3% vs 7.7% (sector 70th pct, n=179) |
| ✕ | Sustained growth beats its sector (3 years) | 3.3% vs 16.1% (sector 70th pct, n=170) |
| ✓ | Profits grew last year | 62.1% vs 0.0% |
| ✕ | Profit growth beats its peers | 15.2% vs 16.5% (sector 70th pct, n=118) |
| ✓ | Growth is speeding up, not slowing | 1y 6.3% vs 3y 3.3% |
| ✓ | Grew per share, not just in total (FFO per share) | 15.1% vs 0.0% |
Quality
Whether the growth makes real money - margins, returns on capital, and whether profits turn into cash.
Rare profitability: margins and returns on capital are well above its peers.
Margins: of every $1 of sales, how much survives each cost layer?
◌ 2026 = trailing twelve months to the latest filed quarter (2026-03-31), not a full fiscal year
→Operating margin widened 192 points to 518% since 2022. After everything, 281 cents of each sales dollar reaches net profit. AMT doesn't tag a gross-profit line in its filings, so the chart starts at operating margin.
Earnings quality: do the reported profits turn into real cash?
◌ 2026 = trailing twelve months to the latest filed quarter (2026-03-31), not a full fiscal year
→Operating cash flow runs at 185% of reported profit, so the earnings are more than backed by cash - depreciation and other non-cash charges are understating what the business actually collects.
What does it earn on the money it uses?
◌ 2026 = trailing twelve months to the latest filed quarter (2026-03-31), not a full fiscal year
→ROE of 72% but ROCE of only 9% - a chunk of those shareholder returns is manufactured with leverage, not operations.
What does AMT really earn on its properties?
◌ 2026 = trailing twelve months to the latest filed quarter, not a full fiscal year
Net income plus property depreciation, less gains on property sales - the measure REITs are actually valued on, because a building does not lose value on the schedule the accounts assume.
→AMT generated $3.7B of funds from operations in 2025, growing +5% a year over three years. FFO adds back depreciation because a REIT's buildings do not really wear out the way the accounts assume. Per share that is $7.95, +324% since 2011 - the number REIT investors actually compare. Property-sale gains are not separately tagged in these filings, so this reads slightly high against the strict NAREIT definition.
Does AMT earn more on its capital than that capital costs?
→AMT earns 72.0% on the capital it employs, well above the 10% most investors treat as the cost of capital. It was 30.4% in 2022, so the trend is up, and the pace is picking up. That is the highest in AMT's filed history.
What does “Quality” actually mean?
Quality asks whether the growth makes real money. Margins show how much of each sale survives costs; return on equity shows what shareholders earn on their capital; and the profit-to-cash comparison catches companies whose accounting profits never turn into actual cash.
How we scored it · 5 of 6 checks passed
| ✕ | Turns more rent into FFO than peers | 40.7% vs 47.1% (sector 70th pct, n=172) |
| ✓ | Keeps more of its rent as profit than peers | 27.8% vs 18.5% (sector 70th pct, n=187) |
| ✓ | Actually profitable | TTM net income $3.0B |
| ✓ | Earns well on shareholders' money | 85.4% vs 6.2% (sector 70th pct, n=197) |
| ✓ | FFO is a real return on its property | 7.0% vs 4.5% |
| ✓ | Profits are cash, not accounting | 1.85 vs 0.80 |
Health
The balance sheet stress test: could AMT survive a bad year?
The balance sheet carries real risk - read the checks before anything else.
Could it handle its debt if things went wrong?
→Debt of $37.3B sits against $1.6B of cash, or 10.6x shareholders' equity. Earnings cover interest 3.5 times - adequate, with less room than it looks in a downturn.
Is the company's own capital growing or shrinking?
→The company's own capital shrank from $4.2B in 2023 to $3.5B (-16%). Buybacks or losses are drawing the buffer down - the distinction matters.
What does “Health” actually mean?
Health asks one question: can the business survive a bad year? We check whether near-term bills are covered, whether debt is modest and shrinking, whether earnings comfortably pay the interest, and - for loss-makers - how many years of cash are left at the current burn rate.
How we scored it · 2 of 6 checks passed
| ✕ | Leverage is under control | 83.9% vs 60.0% |
| ✕ | Less levered than its peers | 0.84 vs 0.48 (sector 30th pct, n=221) |
| ✕ | Debt trending the right way | debt/equity 10.59 now vs 9.46 five years ago |
| ✓ | FFO covers the interest | 3.19 vs 2.00 |
| ✓ | Converts sales to cash better than its sector | 51.5% vs 50.1% (sector 70th pct, n=186) |
| ✕ | FFO covers interest and the distribution | FFO covers 0.97x interest plus distributions |
Shareholder returns
How much cash actually flows back to owners - dividends, buybacks, whether the share count truly falls, and whether what is handed back is affordable.
Owners are paid reliably and affordably, and the share count is not eroding their stake.
How much goes back to shareholders - and how much leaks out as stock compensation?
→$3.5B returned last year against $174M of stock issued to employees - the returns outweigh the dilution 20.4-to-1.
How fast is your ownership being diluted - or concentrated?
→0.1% more shares last year - your stake was diluted by that much.
Is the dividend cheque itself growing?
→Up from $4.32 to $6.79 per share over 5 years - the cheque keeps growing.
What does the payout earn you at each year's prices?
◌ 2026 = at the latest close (2026-09-04), over the trailing twelve months; earlier years are annual averages
→At today's price the yield is 3.9%.
Can it actually afford the dividend?
◌ 2026 = trailing twelve months to the latest filed quarter (2026-03-31), not a full fiscal year
→Stretched: 121% of profits and 84% of free cash flow go out as dividends - most of what the business generates, so a cut gets likelier in a bad year.
AMT has issued or retired shares - did shareholders end up better off?
Both lines start at 100 in 2011, so the gap between them is what each share gained or lost. Share counts are split-adjusted.
→AMT issued +17% more shares from 2011 to 2025, but FFO per share still rose +324%. The dilution bought more growth than it cost existing holders.
Why compare buybacks with stock compensation?
A company can trumpet billions in buybacks while quietly issuing nearly as much stock to employees. What matters to you is the net effect: is the share count actually falling? If not, the 'return' is mostly recycling.
How we scored it · 5 of 6 checks passed
| ✕ | Share count isn't climbing | shares up 1.3% over 3 years |
| ✓ | Buybacks outpace the stock issued to staff | $541M bought back vs $179M of stock compensation |
| ✓ | What it hands back fits inside its FFO | 85.2% vs 100.0% |
| ✓ | Meaningful yield to owners (dividends and buybacks) | $3.8B returned, 4.6% of market value |
| ✓ | Reliable payer, never cut | paid 10/10 years, worst year-on-year change 0.7% |
| ✓ | Dividend growing ahead of inflation | 17.1% vs 9.0% |
Trend analysis
What the market is doing about all of the above. This is price behaviour, not a fact about the business - read it as the market's current opinion, scored on six checks like every other chapter. The market is the S&P 500, measured by the SPY ETF with dividends included, over 3 months (63 trading sessions) and 12 months (252).
The market is voting against it right now - a falling trend on most measures.
How is AMT's trend actually behaving right now?
Chart by TradingView
→AMT has no trend to speak of right now. The price is inside the band where recent trading settled, which is where prices drift rather than travel, though the band itself is tilting up. It crossed only one session ago, so treat it as unsettled. The last two weeks are running ahead of the last month and the price is above where it stood a month ago, so what pressure there is leans upward. The band drawn for the coming weeks turns upward partway through, so the support beneath the price should firm up from there.
How the trend above is worked out
The trend read comes from the daily Ichimoku picture, a standard trend indicator, translated out of its jargon. It builds a band from the midpoints of the last 9, 26 and 52 sessions' highs and lows - in effect, the range where recent trading has settled - and draws that band 26 sessions into the future. Price above the band is an uptrend, below it a downtrend, inside it no trend. Because the band is drawn forward, the support for the next few weeks is already fixed and a change of its direction can be seen coming. We also compare the last two weeks against the last month, and today's price against where it stood a month ago. None of this says anything about the business; it describes the price only, and it is not advice. Where a check says 'the S&P 500', the comparison is with the SPY ETF including dividends, on the same adjusted basis as the stock's own price: short means 3 months, 63 trading sessions; long means 12 months, 252.
How we scored it · 1 of 6 checks passed
| ✕ | Trading above its cloud | 0.00 vs 0.50 |
| ✕ | Long-term trend structure is healthy | 171.12 vs 175.35 |
| ✕ | Rising over 3 months | -8.5% vs 0.0% |
| ✕ | Beating the S&P 500 over 3 months | -8.5% vs 4.7% |
| ✕ | Beating the S&P 500 over 12 months | -6.4% vs 20.0% |
| ✓ | Not in a deep hole | -8.5% from its 52-week high |
Insider activity
What the people running the company do with their own shares - reported to the SEC within two days, classified so pay-plumbing doesn't masquerade as conviction.
Are the people running it buying or selling with their own money?
→$23M sold against $995,669 bought. Watch whether the buyers are executives (conviction) or the sales cluster outside scheduled plans.
Who did what, exactly?
| Date | Insider | Role | Type | Shares | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-21 | Rajesh Kalathur | Director | BUY | 2,829 | $500,733 |
| 2026-07-29 | Robert Joseph Meyer | SVP & Advisor to the CFO | SELL | 5,000 | $894,450 |
| 2026-07-29 | Ruth T Dowling | EVP, Chief Admin Ofr, GC & Sec | SELL | 1,106 | $193,506 |
| 2026-07-28 | Ruth T Dowling | EVP, Chief Admin Ofr, GC & Sec | SELL | 685 | $116,135 |
| 2026-06-01 | Robert Joseph Meyer | SVP & Advisor to the CFO | tax | 153 | $28,692 |
| 2026-04-29 | Ruth T Dowling | EVP, Chief Admin Ofr, GC & Sec | SELL | 416 | $73,857 |
| 2026-04-28 | Ruth T Dowling | EVP, Chief Admin Ofr, GC & Sec | SELL | 556 | $99,235 |
| 2026-03-11 | Richard C Rossi | EVP & President, U.S. Tower | tax | 684 | $125,069 |
| 2026-03-11 | Juan Font | SVP, Pres. & CEO, CoreSite | tax | 928 | $169,685 |
| 2026-03-11 | Rodney M Smith | EVP, CFO & Treasurer | tax | 1,295 | $236,791 |
Why do the transaction types matter so much?
Most insider filings are not trades: stock grants, option exercises and tax withholding are how executives get paid, and gifts are estate planning. The signal lives in open-market transactions - a buy means an insider chose to spend their own cash on the stock. Sells are murkier: many are pre-scheduled 10b5-1 plans set months in advance. That's why the chart counts only open-market activity, and the table labels every row.