Was suggested to have a look at DXN and decided to stump a bit of coin on, getting final fill today.
A good write up popped in my inbox the other day on DXN which painted a picture of their ambitions plans although I suspect a couple of errors in article which no doubt long term holders will have their thoughts.
http://www.*********.com.au/tim_boreham.asp?a=AV&ai=48660
Data Exchange Network (DXN) 29c
The data centre entrant has a clear and bold aspiration to rival the size of its listed counterpart NextDC (NXT, $7.66) which bears an eye-watering $2.5 billion market capitalisation.
Actually, scrap that: its real ambition is to take on the $US32bn, Nasdaq listed Equinix, the world’s biggest data centre operator with more than 700 outlets.
While Data Exchange shares have surged more than 50 percent since listing on April 11, the Perth-based entity is still worth a modest $26m.
But CEO Peter Christie notes NextDC – which recently raised $280m in an aggressive expansionary push -- was valued at $20m when it listed in 2010 with a single leased building in Brisbane.
“The difference is we have an operating business with $5m of revenue.”
There’s no doubting data centres are a sexy sector – insomuch as rows and rows of whirring servers can be.
Locally the data storage sector turns over $5bn-plus a year, with growth is all but reassured because of the rise of cloud computing, ecommerce and data hogging ‘internet of things’ applications.
Despite common perception data centres are not high-tech themselves, but temperature controlled and secure repositories for computers rented and controlled by third parties.
In a sense, they’re high falutin’ self-storage facilities.
A crucial requirement is access to reliable power, because the servers collectively sap more electricity that a decent sized aluminium smelter.
Data Exchange’s approach is different to that of NextDC or Equinix, as it has no plans to acquire its own property.
By leasing rather than buying, the company can build smaller ‘modular’ facilities that can adapt to customer needs more quickly.
Still, Data Exchange’s core facilities will be its substantive outlets be in Sydney and Melbourne, with the company signing 20-year leases on two warehouses in Sydney’s Homebush and Port Melbourne.
These will be converted to collocated data centres at a cost of about $4.5m each (most of the company’s $16m IPO raising is earmarked for this purpose).
Christie says the company initially has targeted 200 ‘racks’ per facility, rising to 1000.
For the uninitiated, a rack is a cupboard of a standard size of 2.3 metres by one metre, housing about 40 servers.
Each rack attracts rent of about $2000 a month, which implies Data Exchange should chalk up $50m of annual revenue when the two sites are at full capacity.
Despite the cost of power – by far the biggest outgoing – Christie expects ebitda margins of 65 per cent.
(In comparison, NextDC cites an 85 per cent margin, although this excludes head office costs).
To date, Data Exchange has generated $4-5m of revenue a year from its ‘manufacturing’ business that builds data centres for third parties.
This business is already profitable and Christie expects the colocation business to break even after about eleven months.
In the longer term, Data Exchange is casting further afield, with its Singapore-based chairman Richard Carden scouring for partnerships in Asia.
Christie reckons countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam are ripe for the modular data centre approach because property trusts have overinvested in huge centres that are too big to fill.
