Share Price Catalyst?, page-4

The share price weakness could be due to a couple of things:
i) Institutional selling - possibly Acorn - last notice lodged in March would still see them selling c. 10m shares if they were selling to zero. Morgans have had the largest volume in the name since April
ii) recent debt raise - equity holders may be happy with 9% return on NXT debt rather than the volatility of the equity, so they may have funded their purchase of debt by selling their shares
iii) short-interest - big debate is whether data centres are commoditised products

The first two points are short-term in nature anyway. On the third point I argue that Next DC data centres are not commoditised products. Anyone can create a standard data centre - just go an rent some office or warehouse space, buy a few air conditioners and off you go... BUT I don't think that large corporations are going to risk loss of data, reputational damage or the negative financial impacts of IT downtime because they chose a sub-standard data centre. I think any decent CIO wouldn't risk their own reputation by housing IT infrastructure within an uncertified data centre and housing data internally is becoming more expensive due to retail power charges and high rental costs in capital cities.

The differentiating attributes of Next DC are: Purpose built buildings (fireproofing, cooling etc), designated power supply, backup power supplies, low latency data transfer between telcos and software vendors, national network (big plus here as clients can have redundancy in other states, also WA centre provides lower latency into Asia), vendor neutrality (clients aren't locked into one telco or software provider), cheaper power costs than retail rates.

IMO further capacity capex could be revenue and debt funded from here in. What would be good to see at the result announcement is Next's capex estimates and timing to take them to full 35.5MW of capacity. Also obviously an update on their current contracted capacity and take-up/utilisation capacity. Also, as per their last result announcement, it's good to get a view on what rates they are selling capacity at and what the whitespace/retail split is. And of course how close they are to EBITDA break-even and what the BV is.

I guess now that the NXT's national network has been completed, from here in the focus would be on getting the right mix of whitespace and retail clients in order to maximise the ecosystem (by creating a balance between rack space revenue, power revenue and cross connects). These type of assets are appealing to me due to the low client churn and high recurring revenue and payout ratio once at capacity, hence my long position.