Earnings Labs

Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (DLR)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 26, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Digital Realty Fourth Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Stewart, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

John J. Stewart - Senior Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Denise. The speakers on today's call will be CEO, Bill Stein; and CFO, Andy Power. Chief Operating Officer, Jarrett Appleby; and SVP of Sales and Marketing, Matt Miszewski are also on the call and will be available for Q&A. Management may make forward-looking statements related to future financial and other results, including 2016 guidance and the underlying assumptions. Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a further discussion of the risks and uncertainties related to our business, see our 2014 10-K and subsequent filings with the SEC. This call will contain non-GAAP financial information. Explanations and reconciliations to net income are included in the supplemental package furnished to the SEC and available on our website. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Bill Stein.

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Thanks, John. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us. I'd like to begin on page two of our presentation, by reminding you that delivering superior risk-adjusted returns is our guiding principle. That applies to the investment decisions under our control and it also holds for the investment opportunity, we expect to provide to shareholders. In terms of our capital allocation decisions, that means mitigating risk on development by requiring significant levels of pre-leasing and building only into markets, where we have high visibility on demand. It means emphasizing profitability over velocity and preserving the flexibility of our balance sheet. We are highly focused on the accretive deployment of capital, and we decline deals that do not provide us sufficiently positive spread above our cost of capital. We emphasize growth in our bottom-line on a per share basis. In terms of the investment profile that we offer to shareholders, it means delivering consistent, uninterrupted growth in earnings, cash flow, and dividends per share throughout the business cycle, firmly supported by the underlying value of owned real estate. Let's turn now to our platform on page three. We have made a very conscious decision not to directly pursue the enterprise vertical with few exceptions, such as our traditional bread-and-butter customers like financial services companies. We aim to enable our partners to serve as enterprise customers upon the real estate foundation that we provide. In early December, we announced the colocation resale alliance with AT&T, as well as a direct link colocation partnership with IBM Software. I'm pleased to report that our partners and alliances program continues to gain momentum. And that these partnerships have already begun to bear fruit, contributing meaningfully to our fourth quarter signing total. Through threes strategic initiatives, we have on-boarded some new target customers, such as…

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thank you, Bill. Let's begin with an update on Telx, here on page nine. As you know, we closed the transaction in early October. I'm pleased to report that we reached our commitment for $15 million of expense synergies during the fourth quarter and we expect to realize the full run rate benefit of these savings in 2016. We also reached retention agreements with key personnel and we are well on our way to integrating the two platforms. For the fourth quarter of 2015, Telx generated $89 million of revenue, an 11% increase compared to the prior year period. Revenues are split roughly 50-50 between colocation and interconnection. From its existing 20 locations and prior to expense synergies, Telx generated $33 million of cash EBITDA during the fourth quarter. Telx performed at or slightly better than our plan on all fronts. That momentum has carried on into 2016 and we remain on track to meet our underwriting targets. Bill has already alluded to more than 1,000 new customers with whom we are able to establish a relationship as a result of the Telx transaction. Separately, Telx brought an additional 27 new logos into the fold during the fourth quarter as well, including new subsea cable systems, mobile operators, and content suppliers. The total number of cross-connects for the combined organization is now more than 60,000 and we believe that connectivity represents a significant opportunities for cross-fertilization. We told you on our last earnings call that the next order of business for Telx would be to transfer our existing colocation business at 365 Main, along with turning over pockets of available inventory within our Internet gateways. I'm pleased to report that the transfer of 365 Main was completed earlier this month, and the build-out and transfer of approximately 10,000 square feet…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question will come from Jordan Sadler of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Jordan Sadler - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Thank you. Good afternoon. First question is regarding leasing and the overall environment. Maybe Bill or Matt, can you speak to what you're seeing in terms of the hyperscale cloud players and some of these larger requirements that Bill, you described in your commentary as lumpy and hard to predict. We see some of your competitors landing some very large transactions during the fourth quarter and post-quarter end and just curious what you're seeing in terms of that? Is it harder to compete? Do you expect to see more of it? That would be great.

Matt Miszewski - Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Thanks, Jordan. This is Matt. Yeah, I think Bill nailed it in his opening remarks and good focus on the hyperscale activity, because those requirements really sort of form the foundation of what the demand was in Q4 and is and will be as we move forward in 2016. We see that demand as well as our regular demand accelerating, but we do have to keep an eye on the hyperscale requirements and the lumpy nature of those requirements. We saw $36 million of revenue as a healthy pace for space and power in Q4. When you throw in connectivity that gets up to about $43 million in the quarter. And I think all of that is still a reflection of our desire to remain disciplined not just in challenging times, but to remain disciplined in good times as well. It's important to remember that we're seeing successfully signed deals at attractive cash returns. And as Andy mentioned in his remarks, we were happy to land one of those very large cloud deals at a 15-year term in Q4, and we expect to see that continue in the first quarter.

Jordan Sadler - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Okay. And then perhaps as a follow-up, you mentioned the total number of cross-connects in the portfolio. Did you mention or could you tell us how many were added in the quarter and maybe anything that might be embedded in guidance as it relates to interconnection?

Jarrett Appleby - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Hey, Jordan. It's Jarrett. We are tracking our cross-connect growth consistent with the colocation pull-through. As Matt indicated, that incremental interconnection business, the connectivity, we gave you some guidance on what that incremental $8 million was that contributed to the sales. And we're continuing to evaluate and roll out more details on the interconnection business. But, as Bill mentioned in his opening comments, we're very excited because it's very complementary, it's a great add-on and it's fundamental to the connected campus to drive those connectivity solutions.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Matthew Heinz of Stifel. Please go ahead. Matthew Heinz - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Hey, thanks. Good evening, guys. So, your 2016 revenue target for Telx, I guess, implies about 7.5% growth off of the 4Q run rate, but if I take the 4Q bookings you reported from Telx of about $13 million for interconnect and base rent, I guess that implies, alone, about a 4% increase off of that run rate, so it just seems pretty conservative there. I'm just kind of wondering what sort of incremental leasing assumptions you have embedded in there or should we just take that as – the $385 million-plus as sort of the low-end of the guide and you probably expect to come in above that?

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Hey, Matt. This is Andy. So, I mean that the signings number, obviously, as you know, don't all come in the first day and kind of roll into the next period. So, it's not a direct correlation. I think we feel good on the guidance or the numbers that we laid out for Telx from a revenue and an EBITDA perspective, and it's going to be a combination of leasing up some of the unutilized space and selling incremental cross-connects and getting flow through on the revenue contribution. Matthew Heinz - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. I mean, how quickly do – I'm assuming that interconnect bookings probably commence quite a bit faster than your typical four month or five-month lag on normal scale bookings. Can you just comment on book-to-bill?

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Yeah. So, colo, space and power could be a month to two months for deployment; interconnection would be overnight. Matthew Heinz - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Jonathan Atkin of RBC. Please go ahead. Mr. Atkin, your line is open for questions. Okay. We'll move on to the next question of Colby Synesael of Cowen and Company. Please go ahead. Colby Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: Great. Great job with the last name there. So, I have two questions. The first is with a bunch of your current customers, CenturyLink, AT&T, Rackspace, all being in, what we'll call interesting positions, CenturyLink and AT&T looking to potentially sell some of the facilities to which you are the underlying landlord, and then Rackspace, depending on one's opinion, is doing okay as a company. Obviously, going through change in their own business model; has a lot of space that's being not utilized. How comfortable are you right now with the exposure you have to these customers right now? And is there anything that you're doing to prevent or anything you can do to prevent any risk with these customers as you go forward? Then my second question, the $43 million of new leases including the interconnects, based on your guidance that you have now for 2016, are you expecting that number to remain relatively stable through the course of the year or would you expect that – or is that assumed – or do you assume that in your guidance that that ramps even further as we go into 2016? Thanks.

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Well, I'll take the second one first. I mean, I think we thought that the signings from a scale and a colo and interconnection point of view was pretty good performance, and we see that run rate kind of continuing throughout the year, maybe a little bit of increase, as it relates to the colo and the interconnection piece. And then going back to your first question and I'll let others on the team jump in. I mean, holistically, the best way is obviously to mitigate this are through diversification of your customers, your locations, your leases, maturities. We're always in constant dialog with our customers, making sure we understand their business and where it's going and trying to help them with their space needs. I don't think there is anything on the horizon right now, either with a Rackspace, AT&T or a CenturyLink, where they're actually looking to contract from our specific footprints. I think some of the noise you're seeing in the market or on the news rags is more about folks, who some of them, excluding probably Rackspace, focusing on their core businesses and selling non-core businesses.

Matt Miszewski - Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Analyst · RBC

Yeah. Hey, Colby. It's Matt. And just to pile on a little bit to that answer. It's really quite the opposite, in fact, in some of the names that you mentioned, we saw upticks not just in last year's leasing, but also in the pipeline moving forward to 2016. Important to remember that these customers, especially the customers that you mentioned that are on our top 20 list, these folks are flexing into new opportunities, moving from a capital-heavy to a capital-light perspective, and flexing towards focusing on their core objectives. And the great part for us is that, we've got long-term leases in place with these particular customers, but we also have incredible relationships, and we've developed strong partnerships over all of 2014 and 2015, so that we know exactly what direction they're moving in and how they can use our facilities to benefit from that.

Jarrett Appleby - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst · RBC

And Colby, one final point from a legal standpoint, many of these leases require our consent in order to be signed.

Operator

Operator

And our next question will come from Vincent Chao of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Vincent Chao - Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead

Hey, everyone. Just want to go back to some of the sources and uses. I just want to make sure I got this straight. So, on the $1.5 billion of debt, at the midpoint, I think that, Andy, you said that included the $550 million on the term loan, the upsize, but just curious, you also mentioned $500 million Euro bond potential. But given the disruption that we're seeing in the markets today, is that something that could be done today or do we have to see things calm down before that could actually even get off the ground? I mean, I know it's a mid-2016 guide, but just curious what the conditions are today?

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Sure, Vin. You were correct in your first statement, so, of the $1.5 billion, $550 million was done in the first week or second week of the year, when we closed our bank facility, and that was incremental five-year and seven-year term loan. The next leg of it, or just under $1 billion, could be a potential $500 million Euro bond. This would be – we've been to the Sterling bond market now twice and obviously, been to the U.S. dollar bond market many, many times. This will be our first entry to the Euro bond market, it really aligns well with our investments on the continent over there. We've done some pre-work in terms of meeting with different folks over there and fixed-income investors. It's really opportunistic, so as you can see from our debt maturity schedule, it's really would be capital that would term out a portion of our revolver balance, that's pretty far out there in general. So, we're kind of playing it day by day and we want to make sure there is a stable and receptive market to go to, so you'll probably see us re-engage and looking at that even harder in the coming months.

Vincent Chao - Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead

Okay. Thanks. And then my second question, sticking with sources on the disposition side. It sounds like the four-data center asset portfolio, you expect to be, I guess well – I thought I heard in the first half, but end of first half of this year, but we have seen a fair amount of disruption in some of the CMBS markets and that kind of thing. Not that, that's a big factor for data centers, but just curious if that's having an impact on sales expectations? I know there's no financing contingencies, but just in terms of buyer pools and that kind of thing?

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

So, we're quite fortunate that Scott and his team got going on this and worked diligently, really ahead of the game here. So, as you notice, we sold one property before the end of the year; we sold another one just beginning of the year. And in this portfolio, that you mentioned, is under contract without a financing contingency. So, I think, we got ahead of some of the supply coming to the market, in terms of data center assets. And I think we've got a good buyer for these assets and realistically, I think that, that would be roughly 75% of our – the $200 million or so in our guidance. So, we're pretty much through with the bulk of our DSBOs.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Manny Korchman of Citi. Please go ahead.

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Hey, guys. Just thinking about the commencements, I thought last call, you guys had talked about the commencement timing sort of turning back to more normal, I don't know what we'll call it, six-months sort of timeframe were actually lower now at 4.5 months. Is that just depending on the pool or the mix of the leases or is that where we should expect things to sort of remain going forward?

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Manny, you're saying the time from signing to commencement?

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Yeah.

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

I just want to make sure, we heard you correct.

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Yeah.

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Matt, do you want comment?

Matt Miszewski - Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Yeah. So, hey, Manny it's Matt. I would still expect that the normalization will come out at that six month level. Remember the impact that Telx hit inside the quarter and that certainly had an impact on the 4.5 months

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Sorry, just so I understand that wouldn't the impact get greater as sort of you do more with Telx, so why would that – why would Telx be sort of a factor now and not in the future?

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

So, Telx, Manny, has a shorter time to commencement, that goes back to, maybe I think it was Matt's question, as he asked about. I said one month to two months from when they signed to take the space.

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Yeah.

Matt Miszewski - Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

And keep in mind, Manny, that when you say, the question about whether Telx will normalize to 4.5 months across the entire year in 2016. There is also these hyperscale environments that may extend that period a little bit. So, we do still feel that six months is the accurate timeframe.

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Great. And then, just if we think about the returns you get on one of those large cloud deal versus sort of your overall return targets or guidance, where would those two lie? Is it 200 basis point gap? Is it 400 basis points? Just, if you could help us think about that?

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

On the large, hyperscale cloud deals that we've signed to-date, including the one, in the last quarter. They were, well, within our 10% to 12% range. Now, they're obviously closer to the lower end of that range, but they still kind of met our overall hurdles.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Jordan Sadler of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Jordan Sadler - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Thank you. Just a quick follow-up on New Jersey. You did say that, I think, most markets are tightening. You were blowing out of – or you've gotten out of one of your assets here in New Jersey. Just can you maybe talk about conditions there and sort of your appetite looking forward? And then as a follow-up, just maybe discussion a little bit about markets that are seeing a little bit too much supply right now or not much demand?

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Yeah. Jordan, thanks for jumping back into the queue. We like the position that we have in New Jersey. There is an interesting transition happening that continues to have the growth that we have in the financial services, which – what we established ourselves in the New Jersey. But with the addition of Telx, in particular, our focus on content and cloud in that particular market is starting to add to the pipeline in a way that we hadn't seen before. So, I'm hoping that the pipeline is developing right now, will allow us to get to that good balance between supply and demand in New Jersey.

Jordan Sadler - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead

And then just markets where you're not seeing the strengths right now that you're a little bit more concerning?

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Yeah. So, to go through strength of the markets. And as you know, Jordan, I look at that from a forward-looking pipeline perspective. We continue to see strength in Northern Virginia, incredible strength in Chicago, especially over the past few quarters. And in Dallas, continued support in Singapore, especially with Sing 11 (42:40), the new property coming online and maybe partially due to China demand moving over from the Mainland into the rest of Asia-Pacific. And then some continued strength coming out of London in the social, mobile, analytics, cloud and content markets. We do have a significant amount of those market ready, but more importantly, shell available inside New Jersey; and as I said, I'm looking that as an opportunity for us. And then we've identified a number of strategic assets where we've had opportunities to lease in the past and we've increased our marketing focus on those markets, so I'm hoping that our increased marketing focus will have a very positive effect, not just in those particularly strategic assets, but in our cash position as well.

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Hey, Jordan, just to add one thing. Going back to, I think your first question, I don't think we hit the nail on the head for what you were looking for. The cross-connects at Telx were over 55,000 just by itself, so Digital contributes about 5,000 to get over 60,000 combined. And on a year-over-year basis, that was about 7% growth in cross-connects on Telx standalone.

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Hey, Jordan, adding to the list of weak markets or weaker markets, you could probably put Houston on that list. And I think Phoenix is on the bubble.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Richard Choe of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Richard Y. Choe - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead

Great. Thank you. In terms of the interconnection revenue growth, should we see that ramping through the year? And is it going to be something that's more back-end loaded or the revenue is coming in right away? That's the first question.

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

So, I just quoted you growth on actual cross-connects about 7%, I believe, the year-over-year rate growth is kind of closer to 8%, so it's combined pretty strong growth. I'm not sure, it's going ramp above that combined rate growth volume kind of in the mid to the high-teens, so I'm not sure that I can – I have a good read on the quarterly guidance, but we do see strong growth in terms of volume growth in the 7% range and rate growth are in the 8% range.

Jarrett Appleby - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead

And just to add on that, couple of things. We're now in a position to leverage the Telx product capability, on the Digital side, to monetize that at a higher level than we've done in the past. And we're now mining the data to who's connected to whom really to leverage the interconnection business and start scaling that and that will take a little bit of time, but it's definitely the SMACC focus that we're taking and the networking and the cloud providers are definitely interconnection-rich, as you see in the industry.

Matt Miszewski - Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead

And just adding to that, Richard, I'd like to answer your question, so we're all going to jump in. In terms of timing, in particular, the revenue optimization procedure that Jarrett just described, we're expecting that to start to take effect at the end of 2016 into 2017.

Richard Y. Choe - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead

So, there's a decent amount of runway for growth on the interconnection side? It seems like it's just starting.

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Yes.

Richard Y. Choe - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from Matthew Heinz of Stifel. Please go ahead. Matthew Heinz - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Thanks for circling back to me. I just had a couple of follow-ups. The first is coming back to Telx. I was wondering if you could share the churn assumptions embedded in your 2016 revenue target, or at least just remind me what the historical range has been there? And then secondly, regarding the AT&T agreement with IBM to manage its cloud and hosting services, I'm curious if that has any bearing on your relationship with either customer and if that partnership includes the management of AT&T's NetBond offering?

Jarrett Appleby - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst · Stifel

Sure. We're not giving guidance on the churn, but I'd say we're pretty much assuming in our projections that it was in line with historical averages. I don't want to give you all percentage, (47:11) but I thought it was like 0.6%, so relatively low. And then on your second question, I don't know if Matt, you would...

Matt Miszewski - Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Analyst · Stifel

Yeah. I'll be happy to answer that, Matthew. So, in the two agreements that you mentioned, the AT&T agreement, the IBM agreement. The AT&T agreement contains two main components and one of them is fairly far along; that's the reseller portion of that agreement. That has been significant and we've actually done joint trainings with our sales forces at our sales kickoffs and through – on multiple continents. And so, the progress being made on the AT&T side is fantastic. And the progress on the IBM side is incredibly promising. We have a unique situation with IBM where we happen to have the core compute nodes located on our campuses. We happen to have colocation space and colocation experts in Telx right next to those core compute nodes. And we have the magic of Telx's interconnection as well as a number of products that are in the funnel to bring to market in the future to provide our customers with the ability to securely and privately connect at lower than 1.5 milliseconds, which is incredibly important for them, and we think that we are one if not the only folks who can provide that environment for our customers. One small thing to clear up, NetBond is the second part of the AT&T agreement that we have; we don't manage NetBond as part of that process, but we do have a partnership with them, so that they can land NetBond assets on our connected campuses. Matthew Heinz - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. Thanks for the color.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from Jonathan Atkin of RBC. Please go ahead.

Jonathan Atkin - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst · RBC. Please go ahead

Yeah. So, I was wondering of the non-SMACC verticals, if you had to choose maybe two or three that are showing promise for potentially outsized growth, what would they be? And then on the JV front, there's a couple of assets where you have a partial stake and I wondered if you had any thoughts of securing full economic and operating control of any of them? Thank you.

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Hey, Jonathan, thanks for getting back on the call. We certainly don't like to pick amongst the non-SMACC verticals, because we're very big fans of the SMACC verticals. But in particular, financial services for us, and to go one click deeper, financial technology, we think is one of the places that holds a lot of promise, not just for large scale deployments on our scale team, but colocation requirements on our colocation team and then multiple points of connectivity. It's actually probably one of the best cases you can think about, where these fintech companies have to connect to other providers, have to connect to other institutions and have to connect to consumers, so fintech within finserv is one of the exciting places that we found. The Internet enterprises is another one of the verticals that we really like to have a focus on, not just because of our historical performance in those particular verticals, but because of the necessary growth that's coming out of some of the activities. So, some of the both – the M&A activity that we see happening here as well as some of the divestitures creates for us an incredible opportunity. When one of our great customers decides to split into two large companies, sometimes we get double the opportunity. And I know I wasn't supposed to talk about anything inside SMACC, but we think the mobile vertical for us is one that's incredibly ready for us to continue to exploit, and with the expertise of Telx now on-board, we're well situated to be able to do that.

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Hey, Jonathan, on the JV front, really not much for me to report there; we have several great partners from different types of capital sources. There is no real activity underway there.

Jonathan Atkin - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst · RBC. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from Manny Korchman of Citi. Please go ahead.

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Hey, Andy, just a quick follow-up for you. The $0.03 of G&A outperformance, I guess you would call it, that you show on slide 13 of the presentation, what specifically drove that much G&A savings versus where you expect it to be?

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

I mean really the outperformance was just based on our internal estimates that kind of drove our underlying guidance. I'm not sure there's a one decisive thing that kind of calls out over any of the others, and I'm not sure all (51:42) that can be normalized into the go-forward projections either. It was a handful of things that kind of – going into a quarter where we acquired a company, went through integration, we definitely didn't think we'd come up light on the G&A front with overlapping teams in the midst of reorganizations, but we did it a little bit better than expected.

Emmanuel Korchman - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Okay. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from John Hodulik of UBS. Please go ahead.

Ross T. Nussbaum - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead

Hey, it's actually Ross Nussbaum here with John Hodulik. A couple questions, guys. Obviously, the tone here, I think, has been pretty positive, but I guess my question is occupancy was down almost 200 bps year-over-year in 2015; it slid a little in Q4. You're guiding to kind of flattish for 2016 for the same capital portfolio. So I guess my question is, why isn't the occupancy rate of the core business trending higher given all the positive commentary I'm hearing here?

Andrew Power - Chief Financial Officer

Management

I think, basically we're looking at the occupancy going into the year, Ross, and seeing we have some renewals, we have some space that we've been seeing from coming back to us in the form of some PBB space, that was either dark space as a consequence of a former telco merger, there are some silver linings in that, because we're seeing some of our cloud service providers really engaging around taking that space. And we are just being conservative on our occupancy forecast throughout the year.

Ross T. Nussbaum - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead

Okay. And then as a follow-up, if I could, your stock has obviously done quite well over the last four months or so. How does your, I guess, positive shift in your equity cost to capital here influence, how you think about additional acquisitions, and in particular, looking at, say, things like the Verizon or the CenturyLink portfolios? How do you think about cost to capital versus acquisitions and has that changed from the commentary, I guess, you had last fall, when you did the Telx deal and said you were just focused on integration?

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Okay. Just let me go back to your first question. Because I think, I might have missed a piece of it. Just to make sure, we're all on the same page, the decrease in the total portfolio's occupancy by a 140 bps or so, as of this quarter, that was due to look through on Telx. So, 11 or 12 locations were 100% occupied at 3Q 2015, and when then, we bought their business and they were not 100% utilized within their four-walls, that was a step down there. So, I just want to make sure, we didn't miss-communicate on that front. Going back to cost of capital, the base plan, which we put out on our guidance, roughly seven weeks ago had sourcing usage plan that was funded through retained cash flow, a little bit from DSBO proceeds and CapEx below our 5.5 times debt-to-EBITDA; while at the same time, funding a pretty large investment in our development pipeline, that's the base case plan, it doesn't require equity. I think you could expect us to follow our past track record, if an opportunistic investment came about, whether it's some large scale increase in our development from landing a hyperscale deal or some M&A or other acquisition, we look to go the capital markets to keep our levered stats in line and equity is – time again been a part of that.

Operator

Operator

And our next question will be a follow-up from Colby Synesael of Cowen. Please go ahead. Colby Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: That response to that last question just begged me to ask one more. Obviously, there's a lot of speculation on whether or not you'll be interested in doing M&A this year or whether – wait to do something perhaps later on. As it relates to the Telx acquisition and now that integration, is there a point where you will feel more comfortable doing a deal or is that time now? Just help us give some perspective on the timing on when you think you'd be ready to handle a fairly large transaction, considering everything else that's going on inside the company?

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Hey, Colby. It's Bill. So, I think – and Andy said this in his remarks, but we think we've made really good progress there, on the Telx integration, we've obviously retained the talent that we thought was critical to retain. We have over $15 million of synergies there, coming into this year, which is great and we've established a joint go-to-market plan, and we've moved inventory from various Digital locations to Telx, both 365 Main, we're going to do that at 111 8th. And we've approved in our investment committee, the Telx side of Ashburn campus. So, all that's great. We're laying revenue synergies groundwork here for 2016, and we expect to realize that in 2017 and beyond. I mean, I think what should be clear to you is, this is really a continuum. There is no clear point in time when you can say, hey, green light, we're ready. We make progress every day. We actually has a leadership team, we review that progress once a week on Monday, and there is work to be done. But at the same time, we're open to look at other investment opportunities, other M&A opportunities and the criteria is what we've said from the very beginning, getting back to Ross's question, we wanted to be strategic and we wanted to be accretive. And of course, we'll finance it in a prudent manner, keeping the leverage neutral. Colby Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you for the color.

Operator

Operator

And ladies and gentlemen, this will conclude our question-and-answer session. I would like to hand the conference back over to Bill Stein for his closing comments.

William Stein - Chief Executive Officer

Management

Thank you, Denise. I'd like to wrap up our call today by recapping our fourth quarter highlights as outlined here on page 18 of the deck. First and foremost, we closed on the acquisition of Telx and what was truly a transformational transaction for our company. Telx checked all the boxes for us. It was highly strategic and extremely complementary to our existing platform. It was accretive to FFO and AFFO per share in year one and it was prudently financed. We reported fourth quarter results that were well ahead of the high end of our guidance range. The quality of our earnings is improving with the burn-off of straight-line rent and the contribution from Telx. Growth and cash flow is accelerating and we are poised to deliver double-digit growth and AFFO per share. We also took deliberate steps to secure our supply chain with the acquisition of a highly desirable land parcel in Ashburn. We also entered the Frankfurt market, a longstanding target. Last, but not least, we also raised the dividend for the 11th consecutive year. We've grown the dividend each and every year since our IPO in 2004 and we remained committed to delivering superior risk adjusted total returns to our shareholders. Finally, I'd like to say thank you to the entire Digital Realty team, whose hard work and dedication is directly responsible for this consistent execution. That concludes our fourth quarter call. Thank you for joining us. And we look forward to seeing many of you in Florida over the next several weeks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.