Equinix Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
October 25, 2023

There are 10 speakers on the call.

Operator

Afternoon, and welcome to the Equinix Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines will be able to listen only until we open for questions. Also, today's conference is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, please disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Chip Newcomb, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Operator

Sir, you may begin.

Speaker 1

Good afternoon and welcome to today's conference call. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that some of the statements we will be making today Are forward looking in nature and involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary significantly from those statements and may be affected by the risks we've identified today's press release and those identified in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10 ks filed February 17, 2023 and 10 Q filed August 4, 2023. Equinix assumes no obligation and does not intend We provide a reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a list of the reasons why the company uses these measures in today's press release on the Equinix Investor Relations page at www.equinix.com.

Speaker 2

We've made available on the IR page

Speaker 1

of our website a presentation designed to important information about Equinix on the IR page from time to time and encourage you to check our website regularly for the most current available information. With us today are Charles Myers, Equinix's CEO and President and Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, We'll be taking questions from sell side analysts. In the interest of wrapping this call up in 1 hour, we'd like to ask these analysts to limit any follow on questions to 1. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Charles.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Chip. Good afternoon, and welcome to our Q3 earnings call. Despite an increasingly complex macro environment, we delivered another solid quarter of results and continue to drive strong value creation, raising both our dividend and our AFFO per share outlook for the full year. While we continue to operate in an environment characterized by customer caution, this caution is balanced by a clear commitment to digital transformation and accelerating interest in AI And a growing reliance on Equinix as a critical partner in designing and implementing hybrid, multi cloud and data centric architectures. Customers continue to see digital as a critical priority and they remain focused on optimizing existing infrastructure spend and capabilities across cloud, network and other Demand remains strong.

Speaker 2

New logo growth is accelerating and we see a highly favorable pricing environment allowing us to deliver higher MRR per cabinet yields Driven by price, power density and strong interconnection demand. The net result is solid revenue growth, a strong forward pipeline And continued optimism about our differentiated ability to deliver compelling value to our customers and in turn to our shareholders. In Q3, our go to market engine continued to execute well with more than 4,200 deals in the quarter across more than 3,100 customers, Including record new logos from high value targeted customers. We saw solid performance across all aspects of our platform strategy With data center services, digital services and our x scale offerings all coming together to address the evolving demands of our customers And strong cross regional bookings highlighting the power of our unmatched global reach. On the AI front, we continue to found 55% of organizations are in pilot or production mode with generative AI.

Speaker 2

We are seeing this manifest in accelerated interest from both enterprise customers And from emerging service providers looking to service this demand. We see strong similarities between the evolving AI demand and the multi tiered architectures that have characterized build out for the past 8 years and believe that our broad portfolio of offerings in tandem with our key technology partners Will allow us to capture high value opportunities across the AI value chain along 3 key vectors. First, in our retail business, we pursue magnetic AI service provider deployments to support on ramps, inference nodes and smaller scale training needs. We are well positioned here with nearly 40% market share of Yaron ramps to the major cloud service providers, key players in the AI ecosystem. And in Q3, we're proud to have been recognized as a 2023 Google Cloud Customer Awards winner for our work supporting Google AI technology.

Speaker 2

Key wins in this area for Q3 included CoreWeave, a specialized GPU cloud provider, deploying networking nodes at Equinix, Leveraging our unique multi cloud on ramps and network connectivity across multiple metros. And Lambda, selecting platform Equinix to offer customers expanded regional connectivity, higher networking performance, security and scale for an enterprise grade GPU cloud Dedicated to large language models and generative AI workloads. 2nd, we intend to meaningfully augment our XScale portfolio, including in North America To pursue strategic large scale AI training deployments with the top hyperscalers and other key AI ecosystem players, Including the potential to serve highly targeted enterprise demand. We expect some builds will be tightly coupled with our retail campuses Like our newly announced Silicon Valley 12X asset, while other builds will be larger scale campuses in locations with access to significant power capacity. And finally, in response to burgeoning enterprise AI demand, we will leverage our unique advantages to position platform Equinix As the place where private AI happens, allowing customers to place compute resources in proximity to data and seamlessly leverage public cloud capabilities, All while maintaining control of high value proprietary data.

Speaker 2

We also anticipate a dramatic acceleration in inference workloads And see Equinix has well positioned to deliver performance and economic benefits derived from our reach, network density and cloud adjacency. While still early, we're seeing broad based demand for private AI from digital leaders with specific wins in the transportation, education, public sector And healthcare verticals, including Harrison dotai, a clinician led healthcare artificial intelligence company That is dedicated to addressing the inequality and capacity limitations in our healthcare system by developing AI powered tools in radiology and pathology, an exciting opportunity that not only drives our business, but clearly aligns with Equinix values. As AI demand accelerates, We are adapting our product portfolio and our physical platform in response to evolving customer requirements. In terms of data center design, we're using our innovation facility in Ashburn to evaluate technologies to support escalating power requirements and have already commercialized our early work in this area with liquid cooling solutions That are supportable in all markets, including support for direct to chip liquid cooling in 45 markets across all three regions. We are already supporting significant liquid cooled deployments across our range of deployment sizes and densities, and we look forward to sharing more with you on our progress in this space.

Speaker 2

Turning to our results as depicted on Slide 3, revenues for Q3 were $2,060,000,000 up 14% year over year driven by due to strong operating performance and timing of recurring CapEx spend. Interconnection revenues grew 9% year over year with continued strength from Equinix Fabric. These growth rates are all on a normalized and constant currency basis. Our data center services portfolio continues to perform well, Given the strong underlying demand for digital infrastructure and the long duration in delivering new capacity, a factor that continues to drive positive pricing trends, We're investing broadly across our global footprint. We currently have 56 major projects underway in 39 markets across 23 countries, Including 14 ex scale builds that will deliver more than 100 megawatts of capacity once opened.

Speaker 2

More than 50% of our expansion capital Is supporting capacity in our major metros where we have strong visibility to fill rates. Recurring revenues from customers deployed In more than one region, stepped up 1% quarter over quarter to 77% as customers continue to move to more distributed architectures. On interconnection, we now have over 460,000 total interconnections with 4,200 net interconnections added in Q3, Thanks to healthy gross adds offset somewhat by continued grooming activity and consolidations into higher bandwidth connections. Equinix Fabric saw continued momentum with record port orders and significant growth in provision bandwidth, up 8% quarter over quarter to more than 200 terabits per second. Internet Exchange had another strong quarter in APAC with peak traffic in the region surpassing the Americas for the first time.

Speaker 2

Globally, peak traffic was up 9% quarter over quarter and 27% year over year to nearly 35 terabits per second. Recent interconnection and ecosystem wins include Southern Cross expanding their relationship with Equinix by deploying their SX NEXT Subsea Cable into our LA4 IBX to boost aggregate capacity on their U. S. To Australia and New Zealand network by 500%. And the Warsaw Stock Exchange migrating their primary matching engine and trading system to Equinix's Warsaw III IBX To offer more capabilities and enhance trading performance.

Speaker 2

We continue to invest behind our platform strategy with revenue growth from our digital services portfolio Significantly over indexing relative to the broader business, including strong adoption of our network edge offering by enterprise customers. We're also seeing momentum in expanding our partnerships with leading technology companies, including the recent announcement of NetApp storage on Equinix Metal, Which is an integrated full stack solution that provides enterprise customers low latency access to all clouds while keeping control of their data, A critical consideration for AI workloads. Key digital services wins this quarter included McGraw Hill, a leading educational publishing company Deploying virtual hubs using Network Edge across multiple markets to connect to key cloud providers via Equinix Fabric And a significant win with a global gaming company using Equinix Metal to support a major new product launch. Our channel program delivered another strong quarter, Amplifying the reach of our sales team and accounting for over 65% of new logos with wins across a wide range of industry segments focusing on digital transformation initiatives. We continue to see growth from partners like AT and T, Cisco, Dell and HPE.

Speaker 2

Key wins included a top 5 U. S. Public school district Seeking to modernize aging IT infrastructure while improving systems uptime and enhancing cybersecurity. This executed with partners Dell Technology Managed Services, Carahsoft and Impax Technologies will deliver low latency multi cloud connectivity And secure network access to key ecosystem resources while lowering operational expenses. Now, let me turn the call over to Keith and cover the results from the quarter.

Speaker 3

Great. Thanks, Charles, and good afternoon to everyone. Let me start by saying I hope you and your families are doing well. Now notwithstanding these complex and difficult times, we continue to remain bullish about our business and the opportunities ahead as we work hard to expand Our strategic and preferential position in the marketplace. As you all know, one of the core tenants of our strategy revolves around long term shareholder value creation.

Speaker 3

With that in mind, we continue to build capacity in markets that will enhance our platform positioning and differentiate our offerings into the future. Also, we continue to work diligently to maintain rigor with our pricing strategies while closely overseeing our spending decisions. As it relates to our capital structure, we've been able to maintain a highly advantaged balance sheet with ample liquidity and lower leverage. This gives us the flexibility to opportunistically access the capital markets under terms and conditions that are beneficial to us. In addition, We're actively working to support other strategic operating goals, including how and where we source our supply chain, including energy costs, While increasing our investments in and around our Future First sustainability initiatives, both highly important matters for our customers.

Speaker 3

Lastly, we remain pleased with our efforts to manage our derivative risks, including our exposure to foreign currencies and interest rates. Moving on to business, we continue to perform well. In Q3, we had solid gross and net bookings with strong customer demand. Our pricing dynamics are very positive. MRR churn is well within our targeted range.

Speaker 3

Also given the tight supply environment across many of our metros, we and our customers continue to look for ways to optimize deployment, including increasing The power density of the cabinet sold. This drives improved bottom line profitability and high return on invested capital. Global MRR per cabinet was up $57 quarter over quarter to $2,214 per cabinet, A 12% increase on our yield year on year on a constant currency basis. With respect to our net cabinets billing metric, it remains flat compared to Q2 largely due to the meaningful increase in density of cabinet and the timing of bookings and churn at the end of the quarter. We have a solid backlog of booked but not yet installed cabinets and the depth of our pipeline and the related coverage ratios Support and expected strong bookings performance to close out our year.

Speaker 3

Now let me cover the highlights from the quarter. Note that all comments in this section are on a normalized and constant currency basis. As depicted on Slide 4, global Q3 revenues were $2,061,000,000,000 up 14% over the same Quarter last year due to strong recurring revenue growth and prior price increases. Non recurring revenues remained flat compared to the prior quarter. Although as noted before, non recurring revenues, particularly those attributable to our ex scale business are inherently lumpy.

Speaker 3

For Q4, our guide implies a meaningful step up in non recurring revenues attributed to a number of deals expected to close across different markets this quarter. Q3 revenues net of our FX hedges included a $1,000,000 headwind when compared to our prior guidance rates. Global Q3 adjusted EBITDA was $936,000,000 or 45 percent of revenues, up 9% over the same quarter last year due to strong operating performance. Looking forward, our Q4 adjusted EBITDA is expected to remain roughly flat due to the timing of our spend And specific one time costs attributed to corporate real estate activities. Q3 adjusted EBITDA net our FX hedges includes a $1,000,000 FX headwind when compared to our prior guidance rates and $2,000,000 of integration costs.

Speaker 3

Global Q3 AFFO was $772,000,000 above our expectations due to strong business performance and timing of recurring CapEx spend. Q3 AFFO included minimal FX impact when compared to our prior guidance rates. Global Q3 MR churn stepped down to 2.2% and we expect Q4 Our churn to remain consistent with our Q3 levels in the lower half of our 2% to 2.5% quarterly guidance range. Turning to our regional highlights, whose full results are covered on Slides 5 through 7. On a year over year normalized and constant currency basis, EMEA and APAC were our growing regions at 26% 10%, respectively, followed by our Americas region at 7% year over year growth.

Speaker 3

The Americas region had a solid quarter across many of our key metros and we experienced strong public sector activity. As it relates to AI sales To be discussed in Charles' remarks, the vast majority of the demand is destined for America's footprint. And as highlighted by Charles, this quarter we won a mix of AI training, Inference and networking deployments with a pipeline of anticipated deals to follow. Our EMEA business had a strong quarter led by our U. K.

Speaker 3

And Dutch market and record digital services bookings. In EMEA, as highlighted previously, we continue to lean into our future first sustainability strategy, Including implementing heat export initiatives into Frankfurt, Helsinki and Paris communities, while supporting other innovative Environmental initiatives to support many other communities in where we operate. And finally, the Asia Pacific region saw performance led by our Hong Kong, India and Singapore markets. Capacity constraints exist across a number of our markets, particularly Singapore. These supply constraints will help drive strong deal discipline and pricing power in these markets.

Speaker 3

During 2024, we'll be opening new markets in India, Indonesia and Malaysia, expanding our APAC platform and ecosystems in pursuit of larger opportunities given the demand for digital infrastructure. And now looking at our capital structure, please refer to Slide 8. Our net leverage remains low relative to our peers at 3.5 Times are annualized adjusted EBITDA. Our balance sheet increased slightly to approximately $31,700,000,000 Including an unrestricted cash balance of over $2,300,000,000 Our cash balance remained flat quarter over quarter as our strong cash flow and financing activity was offset by our investment in growth CapEx and the quarterly cash dividend. As I've previously noted, we've been opportunistically looking to raise additional debt capital and reduce rate environments.

Speaker 3

To that end, in September, we raised $337,000,000 of Swiss franc denominated 5 year paper at an attractive 2.875 percent rate. Additionally, during the quarter, we executed an incremental $230,000,000 of ATM forward equity sales, which we expect to settle alongside our Q2 ATM forward contracts In late 2023. These financing transactions will help fund our 2024 growth initiatives alongside other sources of capital, Allowing us to maintain our strategic flexibility. Also in September, we published our 2023 Green Bond Allocation Report. As highlighted in the report, we've now fully allocated the net proceeds from our green bonds, aligning our financing efforts with Our commitment to create a more environmentally friendly data center footprint.

Speaker 3

Turning to Slide 9 for the quarter, capital expenditures were $618,000,000 including recurring CapEx of $52,000,000 Since our last earnings call, we opened 6 new retail projects, including 2 new data centers in Dubai and Montreal. We also purchased our Dublin 1 and Montreal 1 IBX assets and land for development in Manchester and Washington DC. Revenue from owned assets were 64% of recurring revenues for the quarter. Our capital investments delivered Returns as shown on Slide 10. Our 174 stabilized assets increased revenues by 9% year over year on a constant currency basis.

Speaker 3

Our stabilized assets are collectively 85% utilized and generate a 27% cash on cash return on the gross PP and E invested. And finally, please refer to Slides 11 through 15 for our updated summary of 2023 guidance and bridges. Do note all growth rates are on a normalized and constant currency basis. For the full year 2023, we're maintaining our underlying revenue outlook with expected top line growth of 14% to 15% Approximately 9% growth excluding the impact of power costs passed through to our customers, a reflection of our continued strong execution. We're raising our underlying 2023 adjusted EBITDA guidance by $17,000,000 due to favorable operating costs and lower integration spend.

Speaker 3

And we're raising our underlying AFFO guidance by $27,000,000 to now grow between 12% 14% compared to the previous year. AFFO per share is now expected to grow between 10% and 11%. CapEx is expected to remain in the $2,700,000,000 to $2,900,000,000 range, Including approximately $215,000,000 of on balance sheet ex scale spend, which we expect to be reimbursed When these assets are transferred to the JVs early next year and about $225,000,000 of recurring CapEx spend, an increase over the prior quarter As we accelerate costs into Q4. Lastly, given our strong operating performance And our historically low AFFO payout ratio, we've accelerated the timing of our cash dividend increase into Q4 of this year from Q1 of next year. As a result, the quarterly cash dividend will increase by 25% to $4.26 per share this quarter.

Speaker 3

Looking forward, we expect our annual cash dividend growth rate will track at or above our AFFO per share growth rate for a number of years. So let me stop here and turn the call back to Charles.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Keith. In closing, we continue to see strong demand as customers embrace AI And advance their digital transformation agendas with infrastructure that is more distributed, more cloud connected and more ecosystem enabled than ever before. Despite a variety of crosscurrents in the business, we are translating healthy bookings growth, a favorable pricing environment and increasing power densities into strong increases in cabinet yield. These dynamics combined with a continued focus on driving operating leverage and expense discipline through the business are allowing us to deliver compelling value on a per share basis. As we close out 'twenty three and look towards 2024, our forward looking strategy and vision for our platform will enable us to amplify our unique strengths, Leveraging them to expand our market opportunity and drive sustainable growth in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Speaker 2

We remain optimistic about ahead and steadfast in our commitment to show up every day in service too, starting with the resolve to align, inspire and empower our teams Around our strategy and our mission, enabling them to deliver durable value and meaningful impact to our customers, our shareholders and the communities in which we operate. Let me stop there and open it up for questions.

Operator

Thank you. Our first question comes from Matt Niknam with Deutsche Bank. You may go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the questions. Just 2 if I could. First On the cabs billing metric, I appreciate you Charles given some of that color around the increased power density. I'm just wondering if there's any additional color you can share With some of the softness in the cabs billing ads, some of the actions you may be taking to release some of that available capacity at Higher mark to market rates and any sort of color you can share in terms of expectations for 4Q.

Speaker 4

Then second question, again, we appreciate all the color on AI. Just wondering if you can give us any more color on the conversations you're having with customers on their AI strategy, What role Equinix can play in helping them meet their goals and any sort of timing in terms of when this can become a little bit more material? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes, you bet, Matt. Yes, we absolutely figured that we would have a question there on the cabs, as you might imagine, A key topic in the discussion. I want to start by just reinforcing that with the flat cabinet growth is really not driven by a lack of demand as you heard in the script. We had another really solid bookings quarter with overall deal counts in line with what we've been seeing. And so I think it's not a demand problem per se.

Speaker 2

As I said Q1, look, we recognize billing cab ads have to be part of the growth story over time. But the pressure on the metric is really linked to Some other positive dynamics in the business as you sort of alluded to there. So let me unpack that a little bit for you and give you a little more detail. I think the force that I think maybe we didn't fully appreciate the past couple of quarters or didn't highlight as much is the extent and the pace of the evolution on the power density. And so we really dug into that this quarter and looked at that for the last several quarters.

Speaker 2

And what we find is really an expanding delta between the power density of our churn cabinets And that of our newly sold cabinets. So we look back over these 1st 3 quarters of 2023 where we've had a flatter profile on the build cabs Billing cabs. And we've turned cabinets at over that period at an average density of 4 kilowatts per cab. But we've added new billable cabs at an average of 5.7. So that's really a major factor that our cab equivalents is not density adjusted.

Speaker 2

So the reality is we've been paddling hard against that increase in density when it comes to cabinet growth. Additionally, and we talked about this in prior calls as well, we do have some capacity constraints, somewhat Q1s in certain markets, And those are driving some proactive churn on our part. And we see a level of customer optimization At the cabinet level, it's similar to what we've been talking about on interconnection, but we're seeing very little customer churn or full customer churn. And so I'm not I'm definitely not saying that all of our churn activity is necessarily desirable or wanted. But As you can see in our churn metric, we're managing the overall churn really well within our guided range.

Speaker 2

So, as I said, I talked about last quarter these 37 deployments with really positive mark to markets when you look at both price and power density. And when we look at Q3, we actually saw that general range of 60% to 70% uplift as broadly So in other words, our average of our churn cabinets, our new cabinets were about 60% percent above what we had churned. And so obviously, that dynamic is super attractive in terms of and really explaining why we're driving Revenue growth even with the limited growth in billable cabs. So I mean, we've always said we're I want to chase volume as a business objective, because I think that often results in a loss of discipline in the process. We're very much playing the long game when it comes to our commercial decision making.

Speaker 2

And although cabinet growth is going to have to be a part of the story over time, We're really seeing that the current dynamics are allowing us to drive, as we said, strong MRR per cab, solid stabilized asset growth and really, I think the return on capital is going to continue to be very favorable. So I think all of that is it translates into what we see as the really most critical bottom line and that's AFFO per share and dividend growth and I think sort of the results are really strong in that area. So that's context on the first question and on billable cabs. 2nd one on AI, Definitely seeing it show up. We talked about in the script about a number of deals that we won in the quarter.

Speaker 2

AI and ML are not new things for us. We kind of talked about that. We've been working I think through AI opportunities with digital leaders for several years now. There's a lot happening across the platform. In fact, people don't maybe remember it, but we announced our NVIDIA Launchpad offering with them over 2 years ago and really that's been a unique opportunity for us to get in early with customers as they're piloting AI initiatives in their business, and really monitor AI demand in the marketplace.

Speaker 2

And so, we've a number of deals with service providers this quarter. There's definitely an emergent set of service providers, CoreWeave and Lambda, we talked about, that I think are Really sources of incremental demand for us. We closed those deals really in the retail footprint focused on networking and inference type nodes. And I think that what we're seeing most of with customers is working with them on 3 big questions when they're thinking about AI. Where do I put my data?

Speaker 2

And I think we're seeing a lot of people looking at sort of cloud adjacent data as the answer. And I think that plays right to our advantages. Secondly, how they bring compute and other data sources, in other words, data that's not their own to their own data. And then finally, how do they deliver AI generated business insights to the users of those insights economically and with high performance. And so those really are the areas that we've been deeply engaged with our customers.

Speaker 2

I think that it's a contributing factor to our Probably our best forward looking pipeline, multi quarter pipeline that we've seen in a long time. And so I do think AI is A very positive force in the business overall.

Speaker 4

That's great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Frank Wilden with Raymond James.

Speaker 5

Great. Thank you. Quick question on so on

Speaker 6

the channel, you mentioned 65% of new logos coming from the channel. What percentage of Overall sales are there. And then how do the logos in the channel tend to perform longer term versus those from the existing sales force? They produce the Same amount of repeat business?

Speaker 2

Yes, I would I think our bookings percentage is Probably in the 40 ish percent range from our channel. You do have to recognize, Frank, and we've been very transparent about this, our channel is not really a Sell through channel as much. It's really more of a sell with sort of meet in the market. But what we're using is the extensive relationship that our channel partners have, particularly in the broad enterprise, to identify opportunities and then bring our unique value to the table. And so that often Results in essentially a joint selling proposition between ourselves and our partners.

Speaker 2

And over time, I would say that I think we need to be moving Towards a bit more of a sell through model that would provide even more economic leverage to the model. But we do see our channel wins As very on par in terms of quality of business and our ability to sell into them, sometimes even more readily, we can Capture incremental wallet share even more readily because of the strength of our channel partners from a relationship perspective inside of those accounts. And so, I'd say very much a positive force for us. And as we look at now sort of deepening our channel relationship with key technology partners, we talked about the NetApp offering With the NetApp storage on metal, those are great examples. We do have a similar sort of offering with Pure.

Speaker 2

And so those things are really relevant as customers are saying, hey, we're really deeply thinking about where to place our data. We have Technology opinion about the storage providers we'd like to use and we really would like to place that at Equinix to get proximity and adjacency to the cloud. And so I think those that's a great example for the kind of deals that we're winning in the channel and that continues to be an important part of the business.

Speaker 5

Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Jon Atkin with RBC Capital Markets. You may go ahead.

Speaker 7

Thanks. So I was interested in if there's anything notable to call out that drove the growth in EMEA where Things seem to have accelerated a bit versus APAC, which saw slightly slower growth. And then on pricing, which I think you mentioned in the earlier part of your Prepared remarks, what do you see the main levers? Would it be renewal spreads on cabinets or harmonizing cross connects or Anything to kind of call out around pricing to think about in 2024? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Sure. Yes, I mean, I think when When you adjust for the PPI, I mean, because the EMEA numbers are obviously going down on an as reported basis are driven significantly by PPI. And so there is that. We certainly are seeing, I think, good performance across our regions. APAC, I think, is over a multi quarter period here, a little has more constraints To deal with, and so from a capacity perspective and as we've talked about Singapore being sort of a prominent example there.

Speaker 2

But I would also say that in EMEA, I think a more prominent feature for us to continue to be looking at internally and I realize that there's not as deeper Transparency or granularity in the information about you, but the deal mix in EMEA continues to be extremely favorable. And the team has done a really great job Going from what I think was a little more dependency on some of the large footprint business over time and now in a post ex scale world, Really shunting the really large stuff off to Excale, and I think weaning away from a dependency on large footprint demand even in the enterprise, Which I think always has the sort of the prospect of greater churn probability over time. And so the deal mix in EMEA has really shaped nicely, I think, over the last couple of years and I think really kudos to the team on the ground there to make that happen. Then on pricing, I would just say that I think pricing broadly speaking is very favorable. Part of that is just simply driven by I think an understanding from customers that Increases in underlying costs are driving a rising price environment across a whole range of things.

Speaker 2

And so that's one factor. But then I think perhaps the more important one for us is I think being able to deliver really compelling value for them and being able to And so in terms of where it's coming from, yes, I do think there's continued pricing activity On all across our portfolio, interconnection, space and power and on our digital services. And then I think that the and that includes both uplifts on list pricing, and as well as on renewals. And so I think you're really seeing that show up in terms of as I just I tell you, when you look at a dynamic that says, okay, if you're churning cabinets at X And you're selling new cabinets at 1.6x or 1.65x, that's a very attractive dynamic. It's not driven entirely by price Power density is a meaningful part of that.

Speaker 2

And then actually new cabs mature even further as interconnection That goes into those over time. And so I think those are some of the dynamics on the pricing front. And I think it has been a little hard for people to hold all that in their head And figure out exactly why that you have some of these dynamics in there. But I think you're seeing it show up in terms of The MRR per cab as well as the overall revenue growth rates and then particularly dropping it to the AFFO per share results.

Speaker 7

And then lastly, the new logos you mentioned, are there any particular verticals where you're seeing Penetration that's driving the new verticals? And then on the churn side, anything to kind of think about for the coming quarter or year Around where you might fall within your typical range for MRR churn? Thanks.

Speaker 2

You always get full value for your questions, John. So on new logos, I would say, I think we're seeing A pretty varied set of across verticals in terms of we're not really seeing a heavy concentration. I think that More day I would say that more what I would consider data centric or data intensive industries are where we're seeing That focus on digital transformation and on AI. And so we talked about some of those in terms of transportation, Healthcare, etcetera, we've identified a few wins there. But interestingly, things like manufacturing have been tremendously strong for us.

Speaker 2

Retail has been tremendously strong for us. Financial Services, very strong, a very forward leaning posture on AI, A very forward leaning posture on cloud, but one that is moderated by sort of compliance, security, Distributed infrastructure requirements, etcetera. And so they continue to be that sort of ideal customer for us that really Is using a broad range of infrastructure options, but wants to place their data and some of their private infrastructure in proximity to all that. And so, we have seen, I think, very strong performance across verticals on new logos. It seems like every earnings report has a different highlight In terms of what we're talking about on new logos.

Speaker 2

And then on churn, I think we kind of gave the key highlights there. We are, again, well within our range, a little bit of churn that we are being proactive about or that we're being Sort of receptive to customers looking to optimize footprints because we believe there is meaningful upside there. And again, I think in an environment that in Transparency does have some level of optimization from customers who maybe were buying a little more than they needed I think in the 2021, 2022 timeframe, but I think are really tightening that up to ensure that they're buying just what they need and then to the multi the hybrid and multi cloud architectures. And so, it turns something that I think we have to continue to really keep a close eye on. And But right now, I think performing where we would expect it in terms of our MRR our churn as a percentage of MRR.

Speaker 8

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next caller is David Barden with Bank of America. You may go ahead.

Speaker 8

Hi, guys. Thanks so much. Two questions if I could please. Just Keith, apologies for my voice. Keith, I'm trying to kind of Understand my takeaways for the 2024 trajectory.

Speaker 8

We've had a stronger than expected year to date through 3Q. You're guiding to kind of a weaker than expected jumping off point in 4Q into 2024, but then you're talking about the strong bookings. And so I'm wondering if it's too easy to read into the Q4 and maybe we should be looking at the second half as a jumping off point for the first half 24 rather than the 4th quarter specifically. And then the second question, if I could, maybe Charles, When you mentioned that your churn is 4 ks Dubs and new clients are coming in 5.7, what does that look like? Is that like 110 For every 3 new 4s or is that literally just the directional movement of the new client is 50% more tower dense?

Speaker 8

Thank you.

Speaker 3

So David, let me so I'll take the first question and then pass to Charles. Thank you for the questions. I think it's important for us to highlight and share with everybody how the business is performing. Very much like Charles has said, the company is performing well and notwithstanding the comments around the billing cabinets because You can't you don't grow revenues like you grow revenues as we did over $40,000,000 quarter over quarter when you don't when you're not creating value is coming through price and volume and all the things that we do. So as you sort of cash forward to the Q4, again, a nice step up in recurring and non recurring revenue.

Speaker 3

I think at midpoint of guide, we're up $73,000,000 over the prior quarter on a neutral basis, on a currency neutral basis. And so that's an impressive increase. And so let me give you a little bit of Size on the non recurring piece. You've seen non recurring being relatively flat quarter over quarter. It's ebbs and flows generally with large a large deal done in the Exhale business, but this will the Exhale business, we see an order Roughly $30,000,000 So that gives you a sense of the size of the uplift in non recurring.

Speaker 3

That leaves you with plenty of Room on the recurring revenue. Again, dollars 73,000,000 in midpoint of guide. So what's going on on the cost side of the equation? Well, There's almost some seasonality as we all know. But as we sort of said in our prepared remarks, there's 2 things that I want to bring to the top.

Speaker 3

Number 1, no surprise the company is working hard to be as judicious as we need to be with our spend, including our corporate real estate assets. And so we've embedded a fairly large charge inside the quarter relating to corporate real estate. And so order of magnitude of think of that in the $20,000,000 to $30,000,000 range, just to size it for you. The second piece is, yes, the business, as you know, we've been able to deliver a good year and We're setting ourselves up now for 2024 and that's where our focus is because we know we had strong bookings in the 3rd quarter. We feel we're really well positioned for booking activity in the Q4 and that sort of sets the stage or sets the table for 2024.

Speaker 3

So, we did accelerate some costs into the year into the last quarter, both on an OpEx basis and you can certainly see it on a recurring CapEx basis. And so we made that decision, 1, because we could deliver better than the market was anticipating and simultaneously make sure that we get Some of the investments behind us, so we could focus 24 on things that were important for 2024. So it's a combination of those two things that really have made a difference if you look at Flow throughs. But as you then enter into the New Year, you've really set the stage for a good start to 2024. If we deliver against those that booking expectation, I think it just it sets the table really nicely for our 2024 start.

Speaker 3

So Let me leave that. I hope I answered your question there.

Speaker 8

No, thanks, Keith.

Speaker 2

So I'll take the second one, David. It's pretty simple really in It's really what I was talking about there in terms of the 4% to 5.7% is really a macro average, an overall aggregate average Again, that's for the 1st three quarters. We basically said, look, this is the number of cabinets that were churned out over that period of time And this is the total contracted power that was turned out over that time. Divide those 2 and you get 4. And then here's all the new cabinets we build booked During the year, and here's the new contracted power on those and divide those and you get 5.7.

Speaker 2

And the reason I think it's important to I actually think it will be harder for us to deal with it if it was all exactly 4 kilowatt cabinets being turned and all exactly 5 point The reality is that the workloads have quite a range. We still see meaningful Demand well below that 5.7 and that's obvious since that's an average. And Then you see some meaningfully above that, right? And you might see we might see deals that are 10, 15, 20 or more Kilowatts per cap. And as we said, we may even be looking at liquid cooling to Support some of those very high density requirements.

Speaker 2

And so and I think that's important in that I think it's an opportunity for us as we have this dynamic Space being freed up, to the extent that we can match that up with power and cool it appropriately using liquid cooling or other means Or traditional air cooling means, then I think that's an opportunity to unlock more value from the platform. And so that's a dynamic that we're very focused on. But What I gave you in terms of the 4 to 5.7 is really an overall average.

Speaker 8

Helpful color, guys. Thank you so much.

Operator

Our next question comes from Michael Rollins with Citi. You may go ahead.

Speaker 5

Thanks and good afternoon. 1st, curious if you could discuss the factors that led to the decision to adjust capital allocation and boost the dividend per share In this Q4 and then it just kind of the go forward metric of how to think about dividend growth. And then I have a follow-up if that's okay.

Speaker 3

Sure, Michael. Just broadly speaking, clearly we think of ourselves It's very advantaged by the cash that we keep on our balance sheet, the liquidity position we have available to us and how we're setting up our debt structure, particularly in low rate environment. And I think that will continue to hold true as we look into 2024 and certainly into 2025. And no surprise, I know this wasn't directly in your question, but I'll come to the dividend in a moment. The cost of debt is going up.

Speaker 3

And so we're trying to be very judicious how we raise our capital, Continue to find balance, but we know we've set the stage, if you will, coming off of the Analyst Day for a 5 year view on what we think we can accomplish as a business. And we know how much capital incrementally we need to raise, all else being equal inside that business plan. And so You're seeing us execute against and strike where we can when it's opportunistically favorable to the business. And that's why you saw us raise Swiss francs put on the balance sheet right away. We've got the positive carry and so we move on and that's good liquid capital for us.

Speaker 3

So as you then look about how do we distribute some of the cash flow back to our investors, no surprise, we are REIT. We've made a commitment to pay out 100 percent of the taxable income inside the qualified structure. And the way that that It's through a distribution of the dividend and basically you limit your taxable income and avoid excise taxes If you pay out, you pay out that dividend. Now, with us, the business, we've been seeing this for the last few quarters and I'm sure it's not lost in everybody. The operating performance of our business and that's what the primary that is not the primary, that is the sole makeup of our dividend.

Speaker 3

We're returning capital through strong operational performance and that the taxable operational performance of the business, which of course mimics The book operational performance has been accelerating. And over the years and certainly, at lastly, we've been doing all we can to, if you will, To mitigate the point of time where we've under distributed, we're at a point now where We can't hold back that momentum any longer. And as a result, we want to give our tax teams the flexibility to manage the tax, Tax provisions and tax positions this year instead of having to worry about what we file In September of next year for 2023. So we accelerated the decision. So that's sort of why we did it in Q4 then just the sheer The size of the investment or the distribution is to give you a sense of the momentum in the business and how much the tax is growing relative to the business.

Speaker 3

And so we needed to release that and create capacity for ourselves, Not just for this quarter and closing out the 2023 year, but certainly for 2024 as well. As we look forward, We have pretty darn good visibility in what we think that taxable income is going to look like. And so we wanted to mitigate And under disputed issue in 2024 and we just we solved the problem by making this decision.

Speaker 5

Thanks. And then just one other thing that you mentioned earlier. You mentioned the opportunity to try to improve the power Density in the existing footprint. And just curious if you could share with us how the power utilization of your portfolio Compares to the cabinet utilization of your portfolio and the opportunity Based on access to the utility load and thinking about the cost, like how much further can you take the power in the portfolio. Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. Great question, Mike. It's unfortunately not a particularly simple matter. But I will give you an answer to your question, which is our power utilization is actually meaningfully lower Then our cabinet utilization, right? And so that does represent, I think, some opportunity for us To the extent that we can match space and power and have the appropriate cooling requirements to Productive value creation capacity from the platform.

Speaker 2

Again, it's not super straightforward because you have to ensure that you can You have the because draw can be very different facility to facility, and your ability to augment available power is It varies substantially either due to availability of power from the utility or from our own ability to Do that in terms of the equipment available, the power distribution in the facility, etcetera. And so I do think that there is opportunity there To be had, and I think it is something that is working to our advantage in terms of the kind of overall dynamics of the business now, but one where we always have Continue to ensure that we're delivering superior reliability to our customers, understand exactly what their requirements are, can cool that can cool it Properly deliver the reliability and resiliency they need, and sort of manage all those factors simultaneously. So I do think though that you are I think you're properly interpreting an opportunity there that says, okay, well then if you're turning cabinets out at lower, Selling them at higher and you have some sort of headroom from a power perspective and you're freeing up space or cabinet capacity, Can you take action to sort of augment power over time in ways that would allow you to create value?

Speaker 2

I think the answer is yes. And we'll be hard at work figuring out how to do that best.

Speaker 3

Mike, maybe I can just add on one other thing to what Charles has said. One of the main objectives coming from Ralph's organization is to drive efficiency into the IBXs. So we're perpetually looking for ways to drive more efficiency and create the capacity, incremental capacity that Charles refers to. We're also looking at new design and construction techniques to run them more efficiently. And that drives down our PUE.

Speaker 3

And PUE, It's good for the customer. In some cases, we're held to certain PUE with our customers. And so, it drives the efficiency into the business and creates that capacity Hopefully, we can resell. But these investments, particularly with some of the older data centers, to the extent of new technology Where certain components of our MCE become available and we choose to make an investment, You're not expanding necessarily the footprint, but you're making an investment that frees up stranded capacity or energy That works really well for the business and as I said for the customer.

Speaker 2

Yes. And one last comment I'd make Mike is that, I think I do think this highlights what a very different business we Because when you're talking about a very large number of customers in a facility, that's extremely different. So we wouldn't have that same View relative to an ExCale facility, for example, right? I mean, that is, hey, you design it at a certain power capacity, you sell that to a customer, sometimes an entire building to a customer At that and sort of that, that is what it is. And 1 or 2 customers, it sort of doesn't matter.

Speaker 2

But when you're By very large numbers of customers with very widely ranging power requirements, it represents both a challenge and an opportunity, And one that I think over time we've developed a set of processes and capabilities to manage quite effectively.

Speaker 3

Thanks.

Operator

Our next caller is Eric Liptko with Wells Fargo. You may go ahead.

Speaker 9

I appreciate it. Thanks for the question. So maybe you could touch a little bit, Charles, on the kind of the enterprise sales in the quarter and the pipeline. I With rates moving higher recently and some concerns around potential recession in the U. S, are you seeing any of them Pulling back on IT spend or being more cautious in their outlook as they look kind of at their IT stack and hybrid cloud migration and Any signs that they're kind of optimizing costs that are evidence in any of your churn numbers?

Speaker 2

Yes, great question, Eric. As we said in the script, you heard me say that it was an environment that we I thought it was characterized by customer caution. And I think that's true. And so I and I've been out, as I would very much like to be out In the field with our teams, both in the data centers, in the sales offices with customers, with partners, etcetera. And I think I would say that there is a sentiment that says, hey, customers are very forward leaning from the standpoint of recognizing they need to invest in They need to invest in digital and digital transformation and AI, although I think they're very early in those endeavors in many cases.

Speaker 2

But they also are facing the natural constraints that are created in a more challenging macro environment from a budgetary standpoint. So oftentimes, they're trying 1, they're trying to move dollars around to ensure that they can fund their digital transformation initiatives. And 2, they're saying, And what can we do to get more out of our more bang for the buck out of our digital dollars we spend or the IT dollars that we spend broadly. And so I think you're seeing that in terms of one thing that you're seeing a lot of is people saying, hey, we really have to look at our cloud spend And understand that and determine what the right mix of clouds is and whether or not there are certain workloads that we've attempted to lift and shift to cloud That we may want to think differently about or you're seeing people saying, hey, are there things that eventually we need to get into a cloud native Sort of work as cloud native workloads and move them. And so it certainly is working in all those directions.

Speaker 2

But I would say, I think people are Customers are really working hard to optimize their digital infrastructure. And I think we can be a real resource to them. Network is another area, right? And we talked about Network Edge and customers being very responsive to that product offering, I think that is most commonly in the context of WAN re architecture And trying to save money on networking and still deliver higher levels of performance. And so I would say, I think there is some level of Not there, but I think that it is one where people are really trying to make room to make the investments in digital And thinking about what is the right long term architecture, hybrid, multi cloud, distributed and data centric.

Speaker 2

And I think that positions us well to be trusted partner to them on that journey.

Speaker 9

Great. Thanks. And just one quick follow-up. I was curious in the Xscale Kind of update, a development in Silicon Valley I saw. So you made it clear that your desire to expand more into the United States.

Speaker 9

Maybe as you look at the set of opportunities in the U. S, is development the best option you see today to attack that opportunity or is M and A another lever that You continue to evaluate in the U. S. For Excale?

Speaker 2

Yes, it's a great question. I certainly don't think we would be opposed to that. I think if we believe there were assets that were available under reasonable terms from an M and A perspective and that we could do that, That would likely be a transaction that would be executed through some sort of ex scale venture joint venture vehicle. And so I wouldn't we're not opposed to that, but I do think that probably our immediate focus is on development. And we'll keep you updated on both of those fronts as appropriate.

Speaker 9

Great. Thank you.

Operator

And our last question comes from Nick Del Deo with MoffettNathanson. You may go ahead.

Speaker 1

Hey, thanks for fitting me in.

Speaker 2

Yes, I guess to follow-up on

Speaker 5

the Scale question in the U. S. What do you view is different about AI training that makes you want to support those deployments Via Excale in the U. S, relative to cloud, where you if I understand it correctly, you didn't see the opportunity as worth pursuing given how competitive the supply environment

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, I think there's a couple of things. One, I do think that the at the time that we made And we're communicating that judgment to the market. I would say that the supply demand characteristics and therefore the return profile Of ex scale in the U. S.

Speaker 2

Market was less than stellar. I think that dynamic is changing. I think the supply demand sort of Landscape in the U. S, both because of sort of traditional AZ demand or hyperscale demand for the form of in the form of hyperscale for AZs and those kind of things combined with now a meaningful acceleration in demand for training, I think changes the supply demand profile. And then I would and so I do think there is a more attractive market in which to sell.

Speaker 2

The other thing that I think is something maybe that we appreciate even more powerfully now is and we talked about this when we did to begin with, we said, look, we need to continue to have really well developed and constructive relationships With the major players in the digital ecosystem and obviously the hyperscalers are at the top of that list. And so we continue to work hard to make sure that we can be a partner in meeting their Capacity needs, and not only on the retail basis, but at least as one of probably a number of providers That they're going to lead to leverage in the ex scale arena. And then the last thing that I think is maybe underappreciated is, I think it's also important that we continue to maintain our scale and relevance in the supply chain. And so we I think we are Very well positioned there. And I think our procurement and supply chain teams have done an extraordinary job there.

Speaker 2

And I think part of the reason that they can do that job so well, 1 is the strength of our balance sheet and 2 is the scale of our operation. And so I think, Excale is also a way for us to continue to maintain our position in that regard. Okay. Are you able to

Speaker 5

share anything regarding how you're thinking about returns here? Or is that premature? And I guess any progress in terms of line Partner for domestic ex scale.

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, I think the last part is probably premature, but I think the first one, I don't think the I don't think we see a dramatic shift in the overall return profile. I mean, we have seen it already, I think, improve from where it was, where I think it was Single digits there for a while. If you were lucky, it was high single digits, where I think you're now seeing Sort of full return yields and levered returns even above that. And for us, given that we get sort of some advantages in the structure associated with fee streams, etcetera, I think and it's still attractive equity to return profile for us.

Speaker 2

And so I think that but I think those returns have gone up where you're seeing cash on cash yields that are meaningfully higher, meaningfully up into the double digits and much more Active now. So I do think that that return profile has improved. It's going to continue to be a very competitive business though. It's Ann, but one that will have a very return a different return profile than retail, which is again why we want to preserve our balance sheet firepower to the We can to continue to cultivate our retail business while at the same time recognizing the strategic importance of continuing to be active in the ex scale market.

Speaker 5

Okay. Thanks Charles.

Speaker 1

You bet, Nick. This concludes our Q3 conference call. Thank you for joining us.

Operator

Goodbye. And this concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may disconnect at this time and have a great rest of your day.

Powered by Quartr
Earnings Conference Call
Equinix Q3 2023
00:00 / 00:00