Vantage Towers Brand Guidelines: Vodafone’s Düsseldorf Tower Company & Oak Holdings

Towers and masts gathered into one company.

Vantage Towers is a young company. In July 2019 Vodafone Group announced that it would gather its mobile towers and masts into a new business unit, German Wikipedia says, part of a wider move in the industry to separate a network’s passive infrastructure — the towers, masts and rooftop sites — from its active equipment. In the United States, renting space on the masts of neutral, specialist tower companies had long been common. The new company was based in Germany, in Düsseldorf, and began operating under the name Vantage Towers in May 2020.

Later in 2020 Vodafone said it would list its new subsidiary, and the shares were first traded in March 2021, with about a fifth of the company sold at the outset. German Wikipedia calls it the largest stock-market debut in Germany that year by volume. The proceeds helped Vodafone reduce its debt and gave Vantage Towers funds to expand in markets such as Greece, according to both the English and German Wikipedia articles.

The company also took on Vodafone’s holdings in two partner tower companies. In the United Kingdom, Vantage Towers bought half of Cornerstone on 14 January 2021; Cornerstone began in 2012 as a joint venture of Vodafone and Telefónica UK. In Italy, Vodafone had combined its towers with INWIT, the tower company spun out of Telecom Italia in 2015, in a 2020 merger, and that co-controlling stake passed to Vantage Towers. English Wikipedia gives the holdings as 50% of Cornerstone and 37.61% of INWIT in March 2025.

Oak Holdings and a delisting.

The listing lasted about two years. Early in 2022, German Wikipedia says, reports emerged of interest from institutional investors. On 9 November 2022, Capacity reported, Vodafone agreed a partnership with a consortium of infrastructure investors led by Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) and KKR covering Vodafone’s 81.7% stake: a joint venture would hold the shares, and Vodafone would keep co-control. In December 2022 the Vantage Towers management and supervisory boards recommended that shareholders accept the offer from that joint venture, Oak Holdings.

The deal closed on 23 March 2023. TelecomLead reported that day that Oak Holdings would own 89.3% of Vantage Towers, that Vodafone held 64% of Oak Holdings, and that the consortium aimed to raise its share of Oak Holdings to as much as half by the end of June 2023. Oak Holdings and Vantage Towers also agreed to take the shares off the stock market, and a domination and profit-and-loss transfer agreement was put to an extraordinary general meeting on 5 May 2023. German Wikipedia says trading in the shares ended on 9 May 2023.

Since then Vantage Towers has been privately held. English Wikipedia gives Oak Holdings’ stake as about 89.32% in March 2025. The leadership has changed in the meantime: Vantage Towers announced on 4 November 2025 that Martin Bouchard would become chief executive, and says he took up the role on 4 May 2026.

How tower companies present themselves.

Tower companies sell something most people never notice: space on a mast. A mobile operator rents a slot on a tower, a rooftop or a small cell, and several rivals can share the same steel. That makes the business hard to picture, so the companies that run it tend to lean on a small set of images to explain what they do.

The most common is the structure itself. A steel lattice mast against a wide sky, a slim monopole beside a motorway, a cluster of antennas over a city skyline at dusk, or a lone rural tower at sunset all stand in for coverage that cannot be seen. People appear too, usually climbers in harnesses and helmets working high on a tower, a reminder that the sites are built and maintained by hand.

The second register is the map. Annual reports and investor pages often show a country or a continent dotted with sites, because the number and spread of locations is the product. Site counts, country lists and phrases such as “neutral host” or “shared infrastructure” do much of the talking.

The industry also meets in public. Trade shows such as Connect (X) in the United States and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona put tower companies beside the operators they serve, with stands, renderings of towers and maps of networks. For a design guide, the interest lies in how a business made of steel, leases and coordinates turns that into a calm, legible identity.

Steel, rooftops and two timber masts.

Vantage Towers builds, operates and leases passive infrastructure for mobile networks. English Wikipedia counts 87,824 sites in ten European countries in March 2025, with Germany, Spain and Greece as the largest markets; the company’s own website gives about 90,000 towers in ten countries. It has its own offices and staff in eight markets — Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, the Czech Republic and Hungary — while the United Kingdom and Italy come through Cornerstone and INWIT, according to German Wikipedia.

The core of the business is ground-based towers and masts and rooftop sites, supported by distributed antenna systems and small cells for tunnels, large buildings and patches of weak reception. The company says it offers colocation, built-to-suit sites, indoor coverage, small cells and connectivity services. It rents space to mobile operators, energy suppliers and Internet of Things providers, with competing operators often sharing a site, and describes itself as a neutral host; in Germany, German Wikipedia says, all the large mobile network operators are among its customers. The same article says the company also works on 5G corridors along railway lines and motorways. Recent company announcements include a cross-border 5G motorway corridor between France and Germany in January 2025 and, in October 2026, what it called Ireland’s first 5G digital highway and its first federally funded tower in Schleswig-Holstein.

German Wikipedia lists several structures of unusual construction among its sites. Two are timber mobile masts, at Bechtolsheim and at Rottenbuch near Peiting; the Rottenbuch mast was dismantled in 2026 after damage by ants and replaced with a steel tower. Two others are three-legged towers of precast concrete, in Stuttgart-Vaihingen and Mannheim-Rheinau.

For a design guide, Vantage Towers shows how a carved-out network of steel masts and rooftop antennas can take on a name of its own, separate from the operator that built it. Compare Vodafone, its founder and co-owner, and INWIT, the Italian tower company in which it holds a stake. For this guide we use a graphite, a slate blue and a sky grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vantage Towers’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.