You could say that Mobilitie LLC moved up a weight class among Orange County’s private companies last year.
And life in the heavyweight division looks pretty good for the Newport Beach-based wireless infrastructure company.
The sports analogies are apt in Mobilitie’s case—one of its main business lines is providing upgraded cellphone connections to fans at sporting arenas across the country.
The 11-year-old company ranked No. 1 among large enterprises in terms of revenue growth on a percentage basis in this week’s Business Journal listing of fastest-growing private companies based in OC (see related story, page 1; stories and lists in Special Report, starting on page 21). The large-company category includes firms based here that had more than $100 million in revenue for the 12 months ended June 30.
Mobilitie (pronounced “mobility”) had revenue of about $500 million over the period, a nearly 1,120% increase from its estimated revenue two years ago (see About Our Annual Fastest-Growing Private Companies List, page 28).
It’s the first appearance for Mobilitie in our ranking of large private companies.
The company ranked No. 12 among midsized companies—business with annual revenue between $10 million and $99.9 million—last year.
New Offerings
The move from a midsized company to a large one in our rankings comes as Mobilitie has expanded its base of product offerings, including the ramp-up of a big network deployment launch that’s starting to bring it some national attention.
That wasn’t the case in the early years of the company, which was founded in 2005 by Chief Executive Gary Jabara, a longtime partner at Deloitte’s telecommunications infrastructure practice in Los Angeles.
Privately held Mobilitie began operations as an owner of cellphone towers, and quietly built one of the country’s largest portfolios of towers within a few years.
Multiple cellphone companies typically lease space on individual towers for several thousand dollars per month to improve their wireless service.
Mobilitie made its first big headlines in 2012, when it sold a portion of its cellphone tower portfolio to SBA Communication for about $1.1 billion.
The 2012 deal vaulted Jabara to the ranks of Orange County’s wealthiest residents. The Business Journal now estimates his wealth at $425 million.
He’s put some of that money into the local commercial real estate market, buying a number of area properties, and also has funded Newport Beach-based Villa Real Estate, a high-end residential brokerage that began operations in 2013.
Mobilitie retained assets beyond the cellphone towers it sold in the SBA deal, and has since expanded into providing a variety of wireless infrastructure systems and services. That has given Jabara an entrée of sorts into the professional sports world, albeit not the one he first envisioned: He was part of a group that fell short in a 2012 bid to buy the San Diego Padres baseball team.
Mobilitie, meanwhile, has become a leader in the installation of distributed antenna systems, or DAS, permanent antenna systems that can be placed in a variety of indoor and outdoor venues to provide better cellphone and wireless connections for patrons.
Venues that use the company’s DAS technology include Churchill Downs in Kentucky, the casinos of Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts International, and the Honda Center in Anaheim.
Additions to the company’s DAS portfolio announced in the past month include skyscrapers in Chicago and Seattle’s subway system.
Much of that work appears to have been merely a warmup for Mobilitie’s recent push.
“We have been growing significantly every year, but particularly last year, because of our outdoor small-cell (base station) business,” said President Christos Karmis.
Industry buzz that started late last year pointed to a deal between Mobilitie and Overland Park, Kan.-based Sprint Corp. to roll out a countrywide upgrade of the wireless giant’s network, primarily through the use of small-cell base station sites.
Upwards of 100,000 small-cell base station sites are expected to be installed by Sprint over the next few years, in the largest rollout of its type to date, according to trade publication reports.
Mobilitie is rumored to have landed the contract for a large portion of the small-cell sites.
Karmis declined to comment on who Mobilitie is working with for this new line of business, but noted that a number of major national carriers are now turning their attention to rolling out the technology, and that his company is poised to be one of the largest providers of small-cell sites in the industry.
Small-Cell Advantages
Small cells are designed to improve a wireless carrier’s network capacity in areas that have high mobile data usage, particularly in large cities where installation of traditional cell towers might not be practical.
Street lights, utility poles and other outdoor structures often are used to host the technology.
It is estimated that 1 million small-cell sites could be installed in the U.S. over the next few years.
Terms of the deal between Sprint and Mobilitie have yet to be disclosed, although Mobilitie has alluded to the project on its website, noting it is working on the “largest network deployment initiative in the U.S.”
Karmis said that Mobilitie has “several thousand” permits approved for the rollout.
Building and operating the small cells could cost about $190,000 over 10 years, while a traditional cellphone tower can cost $732,000 over that time due to real estate, power and other costs, Jabara told the Wall Street Journal in June.
The pace and breadth of the Sprint rollout has brought Mobilitie some additional press coverage, with a few local reports highlighting objections to some of the company’s installation plans in various cities.
“The reality is, in 95%-plus of the time, it goes great,” said Karmis, who believes some of the negative reports are being pushed by companies likely to lose business to the cheaper-to-operate small cell systems.
The rollout plans have resulted in a hiring push for the company in OC; its employee count here is 255, up from about 150 a year ago.
It’s also hiring a lot outside OC.
“We don’t just deploy, we operate (the small-cell base) system,” Karmis said.
The company now has more than a dozen offices across the U.S. besides its OC headquarters, plus locations in the U.K., Panama and Tokyo—home of SoftBank Corp., the majority owner of Sprint.
