Thursday, November 6, 2008

Digital Realty Trust c.c.

Some highlights from DLR conference call (see Seeking Alpha transcripts):

>>Despite the challenging market conditions, overall we continue to see very attractive pricing and strong demand throughout our top markets, particularly for our Turn-Key Datacenter product. Demand for Datacenter space continues to be very healthy in our primary markets.

We continue to see significant lack of supply necessary to meet this demand and DLR remains one of the full Datacenter providers with the financial capacity and expertise to proactively build turnkey facilities.

In addition, we were able to capture previously unutilized space of 120,000 square feet from Qwest in our 350 East Cermak facility in Chicago in exchange for a substantial payment to DLR. We are redeploying this space as Turn-Key Datacenter to meet the demands from our tenants, including securities and commodity trading customers at the property. No other space is available at the building.

(Equinix has two data centers in the building)

Michael Foust

So this is related to Qwest, as I mentioned in my remarks, and at 350 Cermak in Chicago, it's maybe our most highest demand building, highest demand market, and we're out of space there.

William Marks - JMP Securities

On sectors of the economy, are there any areas where you're seeing a real slowdown in demand?

Michael Foust

Not really. It's interesting. Financial services continues to be a strong demand area - and that's very broadly, everything from commodities, security trading platforms to major Wall Street firms. We're seeing continued demand from the Internet sector, companies that are operating, companies like the Yahoo!s and Amazons and Facebooks of the world still need space.

And the system integrators and IT outsourcing companies are seeing a lot of demand, and I think, if you look at a lot of the analysis that's coming out of kind of the co-location, hosting, managed services sectors who are a lot of our customers, their businesses are doing quite well and they continue to see expansion for 2009.

David Aubuchon - Robert W. Baird & Co.

And then just one last question relative to an earlier question about just demand and whether or not it's falling off, are you seeing anything differentiating the international side of your business right now?

Michael Foust

I'd say no. Now, with that said, we've been very focused on London, Paris, Amsterdam, and we're seeing good demand in all those markets. I would say in London there was probably a little bit of a slowdown in interest from financial services, but growing interest from kind of corporate, major corporates and system integrators easily taking place. And now we've got financial services coming back and showing interest again.

A lot of interest from network providers, content delivery, corporates, system integrators, folks like IBM. We recently did a lease with them in Paris for their corporate customers. It seems more broadly based in terms of different industry verticals than maybe it was even a year ago.


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