DigitalBridge Group, Inc. (DBRG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. I'm Severin White, the Head of Investor Relations for DigitalBridge. Welcome to our inaugural Investor Day as a public company and under our new ticker, DBRG. We've unveiled our new name to reflect the significant business transformation we've undertaken over the past couple of years. It's a name that draws from our heritage as early innovators in digital infrastructure that also looks forward as we shape and build a fully digital, interconnected future. We're thrilled that you've joined us to learn more about our company, its unique business strategy and the powerful thematics and large market opportunities we're leveraged to across the digital infrastructure landscape. And most importantly, here from some of the amazing people across our organization. In fact, if there's one takeaway, one thing we want you to understand about DigitalBridge is that this is the broadest, deepest team in the world focused singularly on investing in, building and operating digital infrastructure assets and businesses. You'll meet many of these leaders today as we advance through the agenda, and in the future, as we're able to get back to connecting in-person. Let's start off by running through our agenda quickly, and then I'll hand it off to Marc Ganzi, our President and CEO. We're going to break today down into 5 sections: an introduction to our business led by Marc; a case study section that will give you some insight into our background investing successfully across 3 major thematics, meeting some of our key executives and CEOs; a business and financial overview led by Jacky Wu, our CFO, updating our medium-term guidance; a buy versus build analysis that will give you a sense for where and how we're investing in opportunities today; and finally, some perspective from our digital board members, accomplished executives who are helping us shape and advance our customer-led investment focus. So we've got a lot to cover, and we're going to be efficient with your time today. So sit back. Enjoy. And without further ado, I'll turn the mic over to Marc Ganzi, our President and CEO. Marc?

Thanks, Sev. Hi. I'm Marc Ganzi, President and CEO of DigitalBridge. Thank you for joining us today. This is a great day for DigitalBridge. That's because we get to unveil not just a new name, but to introduce you to what we think is the most exciting, fastest-growing digital infrastructure REIT globally. It's the latest phase of a vision that dates back to 2013, when we established a new platform built on 2 decades of operating experience and a deep network of industry relationships. This was a vision shaped by an early perspective around the emergence and the belief that digital infrastructure would emerge as its own asset class, taking our experience of scaling businesses in the tower sector and extending it to data centers, fiber and small cells. We did that committing our own capital and in partnership with investors that shared our vision. The next stage, DigitalBridge 2.0, formerly known as Digital Colony, was about taking that operating platform in those relationships and building an institutional capital formation capability, alongside of it, a capacity that would allow capital to flow efficiently, financing a new era in connectivity on a global basis. This created an enterprise-grade business by aligning human capital, our creativity with our back-office systems, workflows, processes and the structure necessary for the company to fulfill its true potential. That brings us to today, DigitalBridge 3.0, a unique digital REIT with the operating DNA and access to institutional capital that positions us to execute globally on converging the digital infrastructure ecosystem. We'll show you how we've accomplished that and how we'll continue to execute against that vision. First, let's take a step back and understand this window of opportunity and why now? [Presentation]

As you can see, we are exposed to some of the most powerful secular trends driving innovation on a global basis today. These are not multiyear cycles, these are multi-decade cycles. The transition to a mobile society to ubiquitous connectivity as part of our daily lives, whether it's at work or at home. It's not just the powerful digital infrastructure thematic. There are other secular trends underpinning our strong growth into the future. In particularly, persistently low global interest rates are driving investor interest and the types of assets that we have owned and operated for decades; assets with long duration, investment-grade customers, long-term contracted cash flows that generate stabilized and predictable yields. We'll talk more about these tailwinds and some of the growth inherent in them as we get into the detail of some of our case studies today. These are big markets. You'll also get some perspective on the breadth and depth of our management team. I've been investing in digital infrastructure for over 27 years. One of the things that I've been most conscientious about my entire career is not just building businesses, but building great management teams. People talk about the digital ecosystem. But for me, it's really about our management team and that management team's ability to see the ecosystem that sets us apart. These are the leaders that help us invest, build and operate our businesses on a global basis. What's so special about that? Well, it's very simple. It's being reliable, and it's being in trusted set of hands, 99.99% uptime, the 5 9s, as we call it in the industry. These are reliability standards that our management teams are expected to meet every day. When Texas was hit by an ice storm, they took down electricity grids across the state earlier this year. DataBank's data centers delivered. You'll get to meet Raul Martynek, the CEO there today. This is active infrastructure. It's on 24/7, and our customers rely on us to serve their mission-critical needs. At the end of the day, it's our people that make this happen. It's more important than ever. Why? Changing network architectures like new technologies enabling AI, IoT and edge computing require more converged digital infrastructure today. This is changing the supply demand characteristics across our entire sector. I'm not talking about data center pricing last quarter or tower lease-up probably in the next year, I'm talking about the investment necessary over the next decade plus to create networks that are capable of handling exponential growth of increasingly valuable data. A flexible, agile approach to deploying capital is truly a differentiated strategy. This allows us to build a portfolio anchored by stable assets like towers in developed markets, but with exposure to new and emerging opportunities like small cells and edge data centers on a global basis. This is a constellation of businesses levered to the future of a data-driven economy. That's extremely unique. That's what sets DigitalBridge apart. We are a digital REIT levered to large growing markets, benefiting from these secular tailwinds. We have a best-in-class management team and a differentiated strategy built around next-generation networks. It's a business with real assets, steady and predictable cash flows and attractive returns on capital, centered around a business model with 2 strategic pillars: first, digital operating; second, our digital investment management platform, 2 building blocks served by central, efficiently run core singularly-focused on compounding value for you, our investors. This is what we're building. This is DigitalBridge 3.0. We're an established player, but we're challenging the status quo inside the traditional digital REIT ecosystem. We're a trusted financial partner, but with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. We are a business that's focused on compounding value for investors, but we're committed to making an impact in the markets and communities we serve. We're exposed to some of the best growing markets around the globe today, but what's critical to this is these markets have also proven to be extremely resilient through good times and bad. We're thought leaders, and we're business builders. I want to thank you for joining us today and your interest in learning more about our company. With that, I'll hand it over to Severin to introduce our thematic presentations.

Thanks, Marc. Now we're going to turn to a case study section covering 3 powerful thematics that we're leveraged to: 5G, digital transformation and next-gen edge networks. These are all benefiting from strong secular tailwinds centered around connectivity and mobility. Some of our executives and partners will join us to talk about the large growing markets, each of those represent how we've executed on those opportunities in the past, and finally, cover some of the new investments that we're making today to continue to successfully capitalize on these trends. You'll see the DigitalBridge value-add playbook in action and hear firsthand how our operating DNA is helping to build the digital infrastructure businesses of the future. We'll start with 5G, and I'll turn it over to Ben Jenkins, our CIO; and Steven Sonnenstein, one of our senior managing directors. Ben? Steven?

Hi. I'm Ben Jenkins, Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer at DigitalBridge. I oversee our fund investments. Marc and I have been partners for over 15 years, since we started working together when we invested in Marc's company, Global Tower Partners when I was at Blackstone. After GTP was sold to American Tower in 2013, Marc and I founded Digital Bridge. It's been amazing to witness the growth of the digital infrastructure sector over that period, not just as a segment of the broader infrastructure landscape, but into its own proper asset class. I'm here today with Steven Sonnenstein, one of my partners, who leads our Global Tower investment practice.

Hi. I'm Steven Sonnenstein. I'm the Senior Managing Director here at DigitalBridge. Today, Ben and I are going to cover the first of 3 thematic presentations. This one is about 5G. We'll start by giving you some context for the opportunity, show you how we've invested successfully in prior tower investment cycles and we'll finish with a couple of examples of how we're applying the tower playbook we've developed today in some of our newer investments.

So let's start with a quick primer on 5G. What is it some of the opportunities it creates and the investment cycle associated with it? [Presentation]

Okay. So you can see why we're so excited about the prospects for 5G. Some really interesting use cases and a lot of associated investment opportunities. I hope one of the takeaways here, as we discuss 5G and walk you through these case studies, is that this is just the latest generation, the most recent cycle for us. We've been investing successfully in the tower sector since the first G. We participated in the progression from analog to digital, 2G to 3G to 4G. And so we're now on our fifth G. What's important about that is it's allowed us to develop an approach we know works, that's been battle tested and refined over all those prior tower investment cycles. Before we get into the case studies, I thought we'd share a couple of observations about how the tower sector has evolved over time. As you can see here, this slide tracks the evolution from 2 to 3 to 4G. And what you've seen at each stage is growth in the number of towers from 60,000 in 1999 to 120,000 10 years later as the 4G rollout kicked off. And today, we're over 200,000 traditional towers here in the United States. And on a global basis, ex-China, that number is over 3 million sites. At the same time, you're also seeing increased tenancy ratios, the number of carriers or customers per tower, which creates the attractive unit economics that underpin the tower business model. And based on the terrestrial ecosystem it supports, that's why you see U.S. carriers investing over $80 billion in new spectrum to unlock the capacity they know consumers and enterprises will demand over time. That's just a down payment on the investment necessary to realize the full potential of 5G.

The next slide gives you some perspective for the progression of the corporate ecosystem that has evolved alongside the growth in towers. Each market has unique characteristics, but there are some strong underlying trends that have led to the emergence of the tower consolidators. The most powerful of those drivers is the neutral host model where it's ultimately most efficient for one tower owner to provide access to multiple carriers. The economic rationale for that is even more powerful after the substantial investment in spectrum the carriers have made. As you can see, with some of the high-profile media asset divestitures, they are actively freeing-up capital, shedding noncore assets to fund the 5G rollout. We'll also be part of that solution. Originally, these consolidators maintain primarily domestic footprints, but almost all of them are increasingly investing on a global basis. This expanding market with consolidating ownership has been the environment in which we've successfully invested and built tower companies over a very long period of time. It's a story like the others you'll hear today of growth, driven both organically and through strategic M&A. Let's talk about how we've successfully executed on these cycles in the past. Specifically, we'll cover 2 investments, Global Tower Partners, or GTP, which Marc founded in 2003; and the second is Vertical Bridge, which was founded in 2014 by the former GTP team.

Now I'm going to ask Marc to rejoin us and talk about the founding of GTP, the opportunity he perceived, the tower landscape at the time and how he and the team successfully created what became the largest private tower company in the United States before its sale to American Tower. Marc, take it away.

Thanks, Ben. GTP started in 2003, was formed by a view that the tower sector could perhaps have a different approach so you could build a better company. So I made that decision back then alongside of my partners to build at that point what we believe was going to be the next generation of digital infrastructure in the tower sector. There were a lot of busted balance sheets. There were a lot of companies reorganizing themselves. A lot of people didn't believe in the tower business model. We did. We saw an approach, and we saw an opportunity. We took a company that had a couple of hundred mobile towers and built it to over 14,000 cell towers, ultimately accumulating in a sale to American Tower for $4.8 billion in 2013. But how we got there was the real critical learning. This was the fun part for us. We got to rewrite the playbook on how you build a tower company. And along that road, there were 5 core ingredients to how you build great companies, not just in the tower sector, but across any sector in digital infrastructure. First, what we learned is it took talent. It took great people. Coming from the days of the early '90s when key executives like Alex Gellman and Jeff Ginsberg and myself, built a great company. We brought a lot of that talent back because human capital is the most important thing you can have in these businesses. The second thing we did is we built a great M&A engine. We saw an opportunity to acquire small tower portfolios, roll them up together and put them into a larger scalable platform. We did over 350 M&A transactions in 10 years. It was an epic amount of M&A, but we had a great team and most importantly, we had a framework for how you acquired and build towers. I'll come back to that in a second. The second great thing about GTP was that we also were very capable of building towers. So not only did we have the ability to buy assets, but we also had the opportunity to build assets. And this was really important. The ability to buy and build is a key strategy that is resident today at DigitalBridge. Third, organic growth, working with customers. Finding ways to put incremental customers onto that existing infrastructure is the fastest way to create sustainable and long-term returns for investors. Our ability to lease and outperform our peer group was essential to our success. The fourth ingredient, understanding how to manage information. We built best-in-class systems from the ground up, creating an information database that allowed us to see the entire organization when a customer knocked on the door of a tower to ultimately them getting installed on that tower and most importantly turning that into billing and cash flow and taking that information along each step in understanding how to ultimately break down that experience and make it better for customers. The weaponization of information at GTP was second to none. It helped us inform our decisions in buying towers, building towers and ultimately, how to serve customers better. The last ingredient was, most importantly, thinking differently on how to finance this asset class. In 2005, we did the first cell tower securitization. We want to hit that marketplace 4 more times. Today, here at DigitalBridge, most of our businesses on a global basis have had access to that capital. But the key learnings at that point in time, working with the rating agencies, explaining to them the importance of these long-lived cash flows, the exposure to investment-grade counterparties. These were the key pillars and the foundation for how you finance this asset class. And we've taken that today to finance not only towers but small cells, data centers and fiber infrastructure. So at the end of the day, GTP was not only a story of success in returning capital back to investors, but it was about building that playbook. It was about building a framework for how you invest in what we think today is the best asset class. These learnings have been taken forward, and we've taken them in other verticals. And we've grown our team on a global and scalable basis, but I'll never forget the formation of that company. It was a special time for us here at the firm and a special time for all of partners here at DigitalBridge.

Thanks, Marc. GTP was an incredible experience, where many of us began working together for the first time. In fact, when it was sold in 2013, Marc and I felt like our work wasn't quite done. The digital infrastructure sector was just starting to emerge as an important segment of the infra asset class. We felt like many of the relationships and capabilities we developed were applicable across a broader opportunity set, and that was the genesis of DigitalBridge. One of our first investments was founding Vertical Bridge in 2014 in partnership with Alex Gellman, who's been the COO of GTP. Alex is going to walk us through some of the highlights from that experience, what he's built, how some of the core strategies from the tower playbook have contributed to that growth. Alex?

Hi, everyone. I'm Alex Gellman, and I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders of Vertical Bridge. Since its founding in 2014 by members of the Global Tower Partners leadership team as well as others, Vertical Bridge has grown into the largest private owner and operator of communications infrastructure in the United States. We are private, at scale and permanent, giving us a unique position in the market. In addition, our assets are 100% in the U.S. and macro self-focused. Our executive team has centuries of experience, and we consistently beat our public peers in all growth measures. Our continued focus on growth through lease-up, accretive M&A, build-to-suit coupled with our back office has allowed us to achieve a 68% TCF CAGR since our initial scale acquisition in August of 2014. Our portfolio has been assembled and really curated through more than 440 individually underwritten asset acquisitions. Major transactions include Alaska Wireless Network, giving us the most towers in the state of Alaska; Exelon Corporation, where we acquired assets and partnered with them at 3 subsidiaries; Acquiring Towers from T-Mobile, from AT&T and from iHeartRadio, among others. I've been in this industry for a long time, and I've had many sponsors and investors in my career. DigitalBridge is truly unique, and there are 3 aspects that stand out for me for DigitalBridge versus other sponsors. First of all, in the early days, they were extremely helpful on the M&A side, not just in sourcing deals, not just in their relationships, but also helping us assess what to acquire and how to finance it. Their support, involvement and commitment very early on was critical and helped us stand out in a hypercompetitive market. A second major advantage working with DB is balance sheet management. Their active approach has allowed us to tap into the securitization debt market as well as other aspects of the debt market and in a way with the speed and at a level we could not have done on our own. For example, our first securitization was really viewed as GTP 7, more than Vertical Bridge 1, and that helped us tremendously. So all told now, we have over $2 billion of equity commitments and nearly $3 billion of debt facilities, including $1.7 billion raised through 6 ABS financings. Lastly, but not least, a major benefit of being a DB company is the perspective it gives us across the U.S. and the world in communications infrastructure. In the U.S., we're allied with leaders across all other areas of communications infrastructure, including Zayo, DataBank and ExteNet. Think about it. The largest private fiber, data center, small cell and tower company under the same umbrella, gives us tremendous advantage for what we can do for potential customers. We also get a broad view across towers and communications infrastructure worldwide. And in that capacity, I'm happy to be involved with several of the tower companies in the DB portfolio outside of the U.S. DB's relationships also give us access to the C-suite of our biggest customers at a level we would never be able to reach on our own. With all this help from DB, we have successfully replicated the GTP formula at Vertical Bridge. And now we are in a unique position to succeed in the emerging 5G market and continue to outperform all of our competitors. And with that, I'd like to say thank you, DigitalBridge, and I'd like to hand it back to Ben and Steven.

Thanks, Alex. What's really compelling about the tower playbook that both Marc and Alex discussed is how portable it is across geographies. As we've expanded our geographic scope, we're able to leverage those key learnings in new markets. That's a list of to dos and not to dos, which are actually often more important. We have now built 8 tower companies globally in North America, Latin America, Europe and most recently in Asia. And while each of those markets has unique characteristics, we found the core tenets of the playbook hold true. Whether it's the 4 corners of underwriting that we'll talk about later today or the benefits of our reputation as we enter new markets and finance growth at the portfolio company level. The transferability is a true differentiator that gives us a fundamental edge.

Steven, another interesting corollary to what you're describing is the fact that these technology generations don't all roll out at the same time globally. As we get set to accelerate 5G investment here in the U.S. and across the globe, many markets are still in the early stages of their 4G deployments. That asynchronous rollout allows us to transfer knowledge we develop in early adopter markets as we expand into new markets with advanced knowledge that allows us to be more efficient and to more rapidly deploy new infrastructure in some of the fast-growing markets we're invested in, like Brazil and most recently, Southeast Asia. Ultimately, these advantages add up and manifest themselves in higher growth, lower costs and better execution that drives improved investor returns.

Ben, now that we've talked about some prior investments, we're going to look forward and discuss a couple of new opportunities that will benefit from our extensive TowerCo experience. We'll start by introducing you to Justin Chang, who leads DigitalBridge's Asia strategy to talk about Edgepoint. Justin, take it away.

Thanks, Steven. What's really interesting about Edgepoint, the Southeast Asian tower platform that we launched a little bit less than a year ago, is how well it speaks to the commentary that Steven just made around the transferability of the tower digital playbook, not just across geographies but across technology cycles. And what I mean by that is Southeast Asia is a really interesting set of regional growth economies, but the 4G penetration levels are pretty low, right? So the experience and the expertise that we have, watching and participating in the 4G cycle in the U.S. and Europe, which is now behind us, that experience and expertise we can bring right to Asia, right? And it's new for Asia, but it's something we've done before. And so something we can really provide to Edgepoint and the team as it grows and scales. The Southeast Asian economy is fundamentally very attractive. As people know, high population growth, demand growth, consumer spending, mobile data growth, particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia. If you step back for a second and just take those 2 countries, the population of those 2 countries is over 300 million people, right, GDP growth of 6% on average. Mobile data consumption growth, 25% a year. These are really significant numbers off a large base and high growth, and that's the opportunity in front of Edgepoint as we participate in the digitization and the 5G in the years to come. If you look at these markets, in addition, they're highly fragmented, right? There isn't really a lot of scale players. There's the opportunity to be a consolidator to really grow the business and to do it at very attractive valuation [ loans ]. These are opportunities that we just don't see in other parts of the world right now. In many respects, Southeast Asia is one of the remaining frontier opportunities, and we really see an opportunity to create a lot of value in these markets, employing the same playbook that we've done in the United States, that we've done in Europe and that we've done in Latin America. These are really attractive macro tailwinds. And as I step back for a second, you have to remind yourself that the digital infrastructure in this part of the world is really under invested in, right? So whether you look at the number of subscribers per site, it's really, really high, higher than other parts of the world. You look at the spectrum availability, it's really, really low, right? So those 2 things combined really underscore the need for more tower sites, which is an obvious benefit to tower companies and plays right into Edgepoint's thematics. In a little less than a year, we've already completed 2 acquisitions in Indonesia. We've done 3 acquisitions in Malaysia. We've scaled the company very quickly, and we're at almost 10,000 towers. We formed this company in partnership with Suresh Sidhu, a really amazing, well regarded, impressive tower company executive from the region. Prior to joining us, he spent the last 10 years building and leading really the only other pan-Asian tower platform as the founder and the CEO. He joined us not just because we're a financial sponsor with shared vision, although that matters, but he really saw us as a strategic partner, a value-added partner who can really help him and the team and Edgepoint grow and scale from a strategic and an operational standpoint, and we're already doing that. Strategic M&A and finance are 2 areas where we're already leveraging the global playbook, bring our global platform and resources to bear. Whether it's looking at acquisitions in these markets or looking at consolidation opportunities in adjacent markets, those are things we're already doing, working hand-in-hand with Suresh and the team, and we expect to do that in the months and years ahead. Look, stepping back for a second, we couldn't be more excited about this opportunity. We're in the markets at the right time. We've already built scale, and we're building really an innovative market leader that's beginning to be recognized as a leader in the region. And while it's innovative in the region, it's really something we've done many, many times, right? This is a classic DigitalBridge tower consolidation play. We've done it in the U.S. We've done it in Europe. We've done it in Latin America. And now we're bringing that playbook to Southeast Asia. We're excited about the opportunities ahead, and I think the years to come will be extremely exciting for Edgepoint.

Thanks, Justin. To round out the 5G thematic, I'd like to introduce you to Kevin Smithen, our Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy, who helped secure our investment in Vantage Towers.

Hi. I'm Kevin Smithen, the Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer at DigitalBridge. I'm happy to walk you through our recent EUR 500 million strategic cornerstone investment in Vantage Towers, Vodafone's recent TowerCo spinoff, which IPO-ed in April of this year. This partnership is a culmination of several years of discussions with the C-suite of Vodafone on the topic of mobile infrastructure. When you think about the drivers of the Vantage Towers investment, the map you see here really tells a lot of the story. Vantage Towers is at the heart of the European 5G infrastructure opportunity. It operates in 4 of the largest markets: Germany, Spain, Italy and the U.K. and has #1 or #2 position in 9 out of the 10 markets it serves. Nearly all of the European MNOs recently guided to a sharp increase in mobile CapEx for the next couple of years as they build out 5G. With tenancy ratios across the portfolio at 1.6x tenants per tower and just 1.2x in its core German market, there is an incredible amount of capacity to expand, especially when you compare that to a market like the U.S., Vantage benefits from a long-term MSA with an investment-grade global anchor tenant in Vodafone, one of the world's largest carriers. In our view, Vodafone will invest heavily in its mobile networks as evidenced by 7,000 build-to-suit commitments over the next 5 years with Vantage. In the medium term, the key to growth will be led by non-Vodafone tenancies and built-to-suit, and this is where DigitalBridge can be very impactful. We will help mold Vantage into an independent TowerCo by assisting its management team in new organic value creation opportunities such as small cells, indoor DAS and ground lease buyouts. We are a proven global leader in each of these segments. We believe the European tower sector is at an inflection point as 5G densification drives lease-up on existing towers, especially in Germany, where the challenger brand, Drillisch, is going to be building out a 5G network, and there are also mandatory 5G coverage requirements for the 3 incumbent operators. We are very bullish on the German tower market as a result of these factors. Specifically, Vantage is building a number of white spots or build-to-suit towers with 3 investment-grade anchor tenants. These are some of the highest IRR build-to-suit towers we have encountered anywhere in the world. Supporting the development of Vantage's lease-up strategy by working to drive those tenancy ratios higher is actually one of the key areas we can help the company realize its strategic plans. As you've heard, we have a long history of successful growth in partnership with leading carriers, and we hope to share many of these key learnings with Vivek and his team as they execute on their growth initiatives. At the same time, DigitalBridge is well positioned to be a key financial partner to Vantage Towers as it takes advantage of M&A opportunities across Europe. DigitalBridge, together with our LPs, can provide Vantage with access to significant firepower to create a credible strategic alternative for carriers that still own their towers. Fundamentally, this investment is built around supporting a strong and highly strategic relationship we built over the last several years with Vodafone, a key customer and partner. We look forward to helping the Vantage Towers team realize their goals at the heart of the European TowerCo opportunity and explore additional areas of collaboration with Vodafone across its portfolio. With that, I'll turn it back over to Ben.

Terrific. Thanks, Kevin. Well, we've just completed a world win tour of the last 20-plus years in the tower business. Starting originally with GTP, leveraging those experiences to build out companies like Vertical Bridge, ATP, MTP, Digita, Highline and now Edgepoint and supporting our partners at Vantage Towers. This is going to continue to be a robust area of investment. As you saw earlier, towers are crucial to the fabric of 5G, and we expect to continue to be active across all of these platforms. I'll finish with an observation that always strikes us at the beginning of each of these cycles, where there's enthusiasm about some of the clear use cases that faster speeds are going to enable, better YouTube viewing, for example. What we've always found is that while many of these advances manifest themselves, the most significant use cases are the ones we don't anticipate. When we started deploying 4G, no one foresaw Uber, TikTok, Zoom, Airbnb, just to name a few. 5G will change the way we live and work in new ways that we can't even anticipate. We are thrilled to be part of that evolution, applying our experience and expertise to advance connectivity to its next stage. With that, I'd like to ask Jon Mauck, who leads our global data center practice, to join us and talk about our next thematic digital transformation.

Hi. I'm Jon Mauck, a Senior Managing Director at DigitalBridge. I lead our global data center practice, and I'm a member of the investment committee. And today, I'd like to talk to you about digital transformation, how it's impacting enterprises and consumers, how those powerful trends are driving exponential growth and data creation and the related need for data center infrastructure on a global basis. In a few minutes, I'll hand it off to Mike Foust, one of the firm's senior advisers who will join us remotely. Mike, I referred to as the godfather of data centers, was the founder of Digital Realty and its CEO and serves as the Chairman of 2 of our important data center businesses, DataBank and Vantage. I'll [indiscernible] those 2 businesses as well as some of our newer platforms. As you will hear, we are continuing to leverage our experience from prior investments to identify new opportunities. We leverage DigitalBridge's best practices across all of our businesses. And most importantly, we focus on our customers first and we support them as they continue to scale. Let's start with a quick video to give you some perspective on what digital transformation means for businesses globally. [Presentation]

Wow, a $1.3 trillion market opportunity. As you saw in the video, the volume of digital content or data is growing exponentially. Imagine that 90% of the world's data was created in the last 2 years alone. That growth is from consumers, enterprises, content and cloud platforms and the universal migration of economic activity into a digital format. How that data is managed, delivered, stored and processed are the fundamental questions we ask when we think about digital transformation. While energy fueled the last industrial economic boom, data is powering the new economy. However, unlike energy, data is not uniform. It has domain and is unique for every user. It may be confidential or personal. It may be limited by data sovereignty or strict rules that require data only to be stored in a specific country. This makes data much more difficult to manage and process. And unlike energy, it can be originated by anyone, anywhere, at any time. New social apps, new business models, the Internet of Things, when your refrigerator talks to the grocery store, all of these things create data. This growth further accelerates as more and more people, businesses and devices are connected to the digital economy. Where and how data is being used is also rapidly evolving. Data has to be mobile and able to move between core and hyperscale locations, regional colocation facilities designed for enterprises and the edge, the location of each application and how it's used will be driven by performance considerations, latency and cost. For example, artificial intelligence, which requires massive amounts of data to be processed to drive better results, tends to be centered around large consolidated data center locations. As another example, the cloud is expanding globally. We're seeing the rapid adoption of public and private clouds in new markets. As a result, we're seeing significant growth for data centers across Europe, Latin America and Asia. On the other end of the spectrum, with the adoption of 5G and edge computing, data needs to be accessed in many disparate locations, not just in a consolidated single campus. This will accelerate with the continued adoption of the Internet of Things and the continued proliferation of smart devices. These are just a couple of examples of the diverse workloads and unique compute environments that will be necessary to accommodate the increasing relevance and mobility of data serving consumers and enterprises alike. With that as background, I'll turn it over to Mike Foust to provide some perspective.

Thank you, Jon. I appreciate the new title. I much prefer being the godfather of data centers rather than the grandfather. So I quite like that. As Jon mentioned, I've been in the data center industry for over 20 years since 2000. We've been developing, operating and investing in data centers around the world in 14 countries on 4 continents. So I've had the great opportunity to see the evolution of our industry close up and personal. And I've had the great pleasure of working with Digital Colony and Jon since 2015. And so it's been quite a great opportunity for me personally. In my experience, DigitalBridge strategy of developing both our hyperscale platform as well as our complementary edge platform is a real significant advantage. This allows our business to focus on the key competitive strengths and market segments while also leveraging the resources of the broader digital bridge community of companies and executives. We've already seen the benefits of this approach with the terrific success of DataBank and Vantage and now with Scala in Brazil, and their ability to serve the broad range of customers. These customers are global players, including cloud services, technology, finance and social media. And their requirements have been growing steadily, both in size, but also in sophistication. They need to work with strong data center providers who share their vision and who have the operational expertise and the scale to serve them across continents. With our large investment in operational excellence and in our world-class facilities, our companies have earned the confidence of these global players to allow us to partner with them in their dramatic growth. I've never seen stronger fundamentals in the data center sector that exist today, and that's after 20 years of tremendous growth. That growth includes the explosive expansion of cloud platforms and in all economic activity, including finance, social media, streaming, entertainment, retail, the whole gamut of what we do every day in our lives. And the increased focus of the edge to reduce latency and to deliver even new applications, many of which don't even exist today, but will in the next 5 years. This is indeed a very exciting time to be building and growing our data center platforms around the world. And now I'd like to turn the program back to Jon.

Thanks, Mike. We continue to appreciate and benefit from your insights in the sector. We acquired the company in 2016, and shortly thereafter, Raul took over as the CEO. He has led DataBank to be a market leader, outperforming his peers in the sector with smart acquisitions and strong organic growth. Raul?

Thanks, Jon. Thanks for having me today. I'm Raul Martynek. I'm the CEO of DataBank. I'm excited to tell you about the business. I've been in the communication sector, Internet infrastructure sector for over 25 years. Actually, Marc Ganzi and I have been colleagues and associates for 20 of those years. In 2015, after he had started DigitalBridge, I joined the team there to work on the data center strategy. So I joined Jon Mauck and Mike Foust. And at the time, we were formulating how to invest in the data center space, and we identified DataBank in early 2016 as a platform that we thought we could grow into a significant business. Marc's reputation and Ben's reputation is very well known within our sector. Obviously, they've had tremendous success, and I really was enamored with the idea around the convergence of digital infrastructure, cell towers, small cells, fiber, data centers and how those, as a collective unit, would kind of converge in the future. So it seemed like a super-exciting opportunity, and I jumped at it. DataBank was a business that we felt had a lot of really good traits. Number one, they had great customers. But as they have built up over a 5-year period, they had great facilities in the data center space, the asset quality is very important. And that's not just the data centers themselves, but also the customer contracts. And we felt that they also had kind of a demonstrated track record of operating and growing the business. What we saw was a business that had expanded to 6 markets, but that we could expand them into many, many more markets, which is what we've done over the last 4.5 years. DataBank was a company that, obviously, when we acquired it, was relatively small company. It was about $25 million of EBITDA, $50 million of revenue. It's the same story in terms of how do you take a business that -- from one level to the next. We identified some human talent that needed to come into the company, which we recruited and brought in. We also identified a number of acquisitions that we thought could expand the geography of the company because geography is a very important aspect of servicing customers in the data center space. And then working with DigitalBridge, we were able to identify targets, underwrite those targets, raise the capital to acquire them and also build out organically in these markets. So it's been a playbook that we've been using for 4.5 years and has culminated in kind of our largest transaction, which was the acquisition of 44 data centers from zColo. And now we are the largest private data center operator in the U.S. with 58 assets in 25 markets, and I believe, very well positioned to take advantage of this next phase of Internet infrastructure, which we call the edge. DigitalBridge has been our partner from the get-go. I mean, they have been -- I've worked with many investors over my 25-year career, and they are, hands down, the most thoughtful, the most proactive and the most value-add investor in the space. They not only know kind of the space cold, but they also are very, very good at helping our portfolio companies execute on their strategy, execute on our capital formation. To give an example, we just completed the first-ever multi-tenant enterprise data center securitization in the space that created over $200 million of cash flow for the company over the next 5 years and that's an effort we wouldn't have been able to get done without the help of DigitalBridge and their intense knowledge around the sector and also kind of capital formation. So they've been helpful in so many ways. We talk on a weekly basis, multiple times, and they're really just a part of our team and help us advance our strategy. So I think we're really excited at DataBank over what's going to happen in the next 5 or 10 years. This kind of movement towards the edge is a real dynamic and really the next phase, the next evolution of Internet infrastructure. With all of these customers having to deploy more infrastructure in more markets, we think that our geography is going to give us a significant advantage in capturing that demand. So we are very busy working on our strategy there and ensuring that we are well positioned to meet that demand. And I think with DataBank, the platform that we have and with our partnership with DigitalBridge, we're going to do really well in the future. And with that, I'll turn it back to you, Jon.

Thank you, Raul. I'm excited about the success the DataBank has already shown, including the transformative acquisition and integration of zColo and the future as DataBank continues to extend its leadership in North America. Now let me pass it to Sureel Choksi, the CEO of Vantage Data Centers. Vantage is the premier hyperscale data center platform in North America and now Europe. DigitalBridge acquired Vantage in 2017. And under the leadership of Sureel, the company has successfully expanded across North America and more recently into Europe to support continued customer demand. Let me pass it to Sureel. Let's talk more about Vantage. Sureel, off to you.

Thanks, Jon, and hello, everyone. I'm really excited to be here today to spend a few minutes with you talking to you about this amazing journey of unprecedented growth that we've been on at Vantage Data Centers with our partners at DigitalBridge. I first met Marc Ganzi and Jon Mauck and the DigitalBridge team about 5 years ago. Our former sponsor, Advantage, was selling the company. And when we met Marc, Jon and the team, we instantly clicked. What we were at the time was a regional provider. We have data centers in 2 markets, in Silicon Valley and in the Pacific Northwest. We had some strong hyperscale customer relationships and a reputation for operational excellence. But what DigitalBridge and we saw together was the opportunity to leverage that modestly sized regional hyperscale data center platform into something really special, and that's what we've done together over the course of the first 4.5 years of our partnership. First, we started by identifying expansion markets and opportunity to extend our platform from the Western U.S. to a broader U.S. play that started with an expansion to Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia is both the world's largest and most important data center market, albeit a very competitive one, but DigitalBridge supported our efforts to acquire greenfield site and ultimately built in a market, which has proven to be very successful for us and strategically important for our customers. Next up was Canada. Back in late 2018, we were starting to see emerging signs of demand from our hyperscale customers north of the border. We were working on greenfield site selection efforts, which are very difficult in a new country, and in particular, in the province of Québec, where a different language, French, is the primary mode of communication. Just about that time, DigitalBridge introduced us to the parent company of a provider called 4Degrees. They were thinking about selling their data center business at the time. They had a hyperscale tenant. They had 2 facilities. And ultimately, with DigitalBridge's support, we were able to execute on a proprietary M&A transaction to acquire into 2 markets and ultimately create a massive growth engine for Vantage and accelerate our time to market into Canada by about 2 years, which is really exciting. Next up was expansion internationally. But before we could do that, we had to start to think about how we could ensure that our investors had sufficient capital to be able to back Vantage to expand the business in a significant way beyond North America. We started working with DigitalBridge on a concept to bifurcate our North American business into what we now call DevCo versus SDC, a number of development assets that we're continuing to construct and lease for the benefit of our customers versus the stabilized assets in SDC. These are data centers that have been leased on a long-term basis, on a take-or-pay basis to the who's who of the hyperscalers who, of course, have phenomenal credit. We were able to structure a transaction whereby we divided that North American business into 2. And our existing investors, led by DigitalBridge, were able to sell a 90% interest in those stabilized assets to a new consortium of investors that ultimately, after a very competitive process, was won by Colony Capital, the parent of DigitalBridge. And so we were able to continue to work with partners who have been very good to us and give them a set of stabilized cash flows with very attractive characteristics. What that also did was it freed up and recycled capital to all of the Vantage investors, which enabled a major expansion effort into Europe. We initially developed a plan to invest greenfield across a handful of markets over a handful of years. But with DigitalBridge's support and partnership, we were able to accelerate that plan to expand to 6 markets within the first 18 years -- 18 months, excuse me, of operations. And also through an introduction that DigitalBridge made to the CEO of a company called Etix acquire, again, on a proprietary basis, a core asset and a hyperscale asset in Frankfurt with an anchored tenant hyperscaler that has since grown with us across multiple markets. So in total, we've been able to do 2 acquisitions in Europe, 2 acquisitions in North America. We now operate across 12 markets, soon to be several more than that, and we're a leading hyperscaler across each of those, investing more capital than any of our competitors. And we couldn't have done any of that without the support and the partnership over the years with DigitalBridge. With that, I'd like to turn it back over to you, Jon.

Thanks, Sureel. Appreciate the overview of the company and the hyperscale market opportunity. The last company we'll discuss in the context of the digital transformation is Scala, our hyperscale business in Latin America. I believe this business is ideally positioned to support the growth of cloud and digital content in Brazil and across the region. The fantastic leasing in the first year suggests our thesis was correct. Let me introduce my colleague, Geneviève who helped to lead the transaction to tell you more. Geneviève?

Hi, I'm Geneviève Maltais-Boisvert. I'm a principal at DigitalBridge, and I'm going to walk you through one of our new investments in Scala, a Brazilian hyperscale data center business we launched last year. It's a proprietary carve-out of data center assets from a large Brazilian internet media company. Scala is a business built to capitalize on the rapid growth in demand we're seeing for data center capacity in the region. In fact, DigitalBridge had been studying the Latin American data center market for years before we launched Scala. With strong regional adoption of cloud services and much of the storage and compute still not out of the U.S., we saw significant pent-up demand from our customers, the large hyperscalers and cloud players and a need for a strong player to serve the market. Latin America is generally undersupplied for data center capacity. As a result, we expect Scala's target metros to be the second fastest-growing region for hyperscalers worldwide. What are we building at Scala? Scala is already the second-largest hyperscale data center provider in Brazil with expansion plans across Latin America, driven by strong customer demand. The investment is well ahead of our underwriting plan, just 1 year after launch. So how is DigitalBridge contributing to the growth of Scala? If I had to summarize, people, customer relationships and strategic growth. People create alpha. It's one of our mantras. We assembled an experienced management team based in Brazil, led by Marcos Peigo, the CEO, who was formerly with IBM, and supported by DigitalBridge's deep bench of operating partners with experience in the region. Two, leveraging the customer relationships across the DigitalBridge ecosystem and putting the customer first. How do we say yes to customers? In less than a year, we grew the megawatt lease capacity by 50%, completing the first 2 years of the sales plan within the first 8 months. How did we do that? First, by solving a unique and complex problem for one of our customers who needed to deploy capacity using a new network configuration in a short period of time. Second, by using ESG as a competitive advantage. Scala recently announced that it is now certified carbon neutral, the first Latin American data center company with 100% of power sourced from renewable energy, a key competitive advantage for our customers who have set similar goals. Finally, growth. Focusing on expansion, both organically and via accretive M&A. In order to meet customer demand, unique capacity at the right time and the right location. With that, I'll wrap up this overview of Scala. It's a great example of the digital bridge value-add playbook at work, originating a proprietary idea, assembling a top-class management team and supporting its growth with capital and operating expertise. Over to you, Jon.

Thank you, Geneviève. I'm excited about the business and the opportunity in Latin America. Let me finish this section by saying thank you to everyone that joined the conversation. And now I'll pass it back to Marc.

This is where it gets really exciting and where we're looking ahead over the next 5 to 10 years. So how are networks evolving? Where should we be deploying capital and how do we generate returns in the future? Well, I'll give you a secret. What looks like foresight in retrospect is actually just listening to our customers. They consider us their partner, and they trust us to build these networks for them. So the easiest place to start in thinking about edge computing and where network architecture is going is to have a dialogue in a long-standing relationship with our customers. And this has always led us to the right place. The essential nature of fiber that informed our investment in Zayo is proof of that. We could see the growing need emerging at our customers, fiber to the tower, fiber to small cells, fiber to nodes, fiber to the edge, fiber to the enterprise. Speaking of the edge, you'll hear from the team about an innovative joint venture that we've launched with our partner, Liberty Global, focused on edge infrastructure. We think this will emerge as its own subsector within digital infrastructure. I've been saying for the last year that we believe data is gravitating towards the edge, living closer to consumers and enterprises. We hear it from our customers, and they want this access. All of this at the end of the day is converged networks. In edge data centers and RAN-access networks, C-RAN, Open-RAN hubs, this is where that activity happens, where you can bring applications and mobile connectivity together. This is very exciting. To talk more about these trends and the investments we're making to take advantage of these opportunities, I'm going to hand it over to my partner, Jon Mauck, who you've already met, and Warren Roll another one of our partners here at DigitalBridge.

Thank you, Marc. I'm here again this time with my partner and Managing Director, Warren Roll, who leads our global fiber and small cell strategy. Warren?

Thanks, Jon. We're here to introduce you to some of the companies we've invested in that are building digital infrastructure closer to the end user, whether that's a consumer or an enterprise. As Marc discussed, the next-generation edge networks are at the forefront of the need to reduce latency and take the user experience to the next level.

That's right. Here, it's all about speed. How do we take a network latency from 10 milliseconds down to 1 or 2 milliseconds? If you think about an AI system that recognized a worker stepping into a dangerous environment or if you look at the future and think about self-driving cars, speed matters. And that's our portfolio of companies are putting in place the networks to enable the next generation.

We've been investing in these types of companies and networks for a while. The first company we'll introduce you to, ExteNet Systems, is the largest private small cell owner and operator in the U.S. with over 30,000 outdoor and indoor nodes serving 89 markets across the U.S. We originally invested in ExteNet in 2015, 6 years ago. And we recently facilitated a follow-on investment of over $280 million to fund its future growth. Let me introduce you to Jim Hyde, the CEO of ExteNet, to talk a bit about outdoor small cells.

Well, thanks, Warren, and hello, everybody. It's really a pleasure to be here with you all today. As Warren said, I'm the President and CEO of ExteNet Systems. ExteNet is the largest owner and operator of indoor and outdoor DAS and small cell networks in the United States. To put a finer point on that, we have delivered indoor network solutions in over 300 iconic venues across the U.S., places like Cowboy Stadium, Barclays Center, Madison Square Garden, The Empire State Building. Those are all of our networks. Additionally, we're the largest privately held outdoor small cell provider in the U.S. We've deployed or have in construction over 32,000 outdoor small cell nodes, second only to Crown Castle here in the U.S. We serve primarily the large mobile network operators, real estate owners and operators, and very large enterprises. I came to join the DigitalBridge family just about 3 years ago, when Marc Ganzi and I, through mutual friends and acquaintances, really got to know each other better. In fact, I spent 20-plus years on the other side of the table. The other side of the table being as a customer. I ran wireless carriers both here and in Europe for over 20 years. And as I really started to get to know Marc better, it became clear that we shared a vision around where converged communications infrastructure was going, and it's really centered around what I call the 4 seats, which is coverage, capacity, connectivity and compute. When you wrap all of that up, you really start to think about what everybody refers to as IoT, that's everything connected to everything, right? Well, the enabler of the Internet of Things is what I call the real IoT. And the real IoT is the infrastructure of things, and that's what we do. That's what the portfolio of companies that cover fiber, towers, small cells and data centers, that's what we deliver to our shared customers. The experience with DigitalBridge and the opportunity to work together with the other portfolio companies to deliver a truly converged solution to our shared customers is what really differentiates us from the rest of the path, right? We can really bring the whole enchilada at the end of the day to mobile network operators, to large real estate owners and operators, and to very large enterprises everywhere. I'm very excited about the growth that we're going to experience together, the value that we're going to create. We're going to ride this 5G wave right to the next level. With that, I'll turn it over to Jon Mauck. Thanks once again, everybody, for your time today.

Thanks, Jim. You know Warren, another area that's crucial for achieving the performance we're talking about is the availability of fiber and lots of it, to small cells, to cell sites and to data centers. Our $14 billion take-private last year of Zayo networks was, in many ways, predicated on our thesis that fiber, the connective tissue binding all digital infrastructure, will play an increasingly important role in the evolution of the technology.

That's right, Jon. It's been over a year since we closed that transaction, and it's already proving to be a cornerstone of our strategy. Zayo serves a growing global market with over 130,000 route miles of fiber. This is our largest investment in the portfolio and the largest privately owned fiber network in North America. I'm also excited that we've partnered with Steve Smith, Zayo CEO. He is the former CEO of Equinix. During Steve's 10 years at Equinix, he grew revenues tenfold and equity value 17x. It's a testament to both DigitalBridge and the size of the global fiber opportunity that Steve agreed to join Zayo and elevate the company into the next stage of growth. With that intro, I'd like to hand it over to Steve to give us some insight into the opportunities he sees ahead for Zayo and some of his early impressions since joining the company.

Thanks, Warren. Good to see everybody. I'm excited to be here to represent Zayo today, since joining in late October of 2020. So I'm in my seventh month now and really exciting -- enjoying the opportunity and excited about the future here. My -- many of you know that I spent a little over a decade running an adjacent company called Equinix that we grew into a global leader, and there's a lot of similarities here that I'm seeing, and it's actually part of my decision to come here. So there's a great opportunity to work closely with DigitalBridge to transition this company into a leader worldwide, where it's been in the past. And I'm super excited about that opportunity, particularly since the world is going through this level of digital transformation. Pretty much every company in the world has got that as a top 3 agenda item. When I evaluated the opportunity to assess this, I asked myself a couple of questions, one was, is there category power still in this business model? And is there company power with Zayo? From a category standpoint, I knew that fiber was critical to the evolving digital ecosystem in the infrastructure space. No question. And I also knew that it was largely insulated from any technology advancements. Very few businesses have the ability to not worry about getting disrupted, and this company has a great position in terms of -- there's really nothing out there that's positioned to disrupt fiber in the industry. So as you think about the big macro and the secular trends, 5G, the next wave of cloud, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, more compute storage networking moving to the edge, all of this requires more connectivity and more network density. So I knew that the category was powerful. From a company standpoint, I really wanted to dig in and understand historically, I knew there was a competitive edge from the roll-up of all the acquisitions here. But I really wanted to understand that our density in the metros did our long-haul route, uniqueness still hold in terms of competitive differentiation in the industry. And I did learn very quickly across North America, Western Europe and Canada, we had still had a very, very strong position. So from my perspective, we're off to a great start here, taking Zayo to the next chapter, evolving the business, improving the market sales and operational readiness of this company for the next decade. Now our core business includes our focus on diverse lit and dark fiber networks, providing critical connectivity and thousands to thousands of data centers, enterprises, fiber to the tower, critical companies, some of the largest companies in the world in across over 400 markets today. So we're very well positioned to provide that capability. Providing that mission-critical capability and that connectivity for these sophisticated companies is at the core of our value proposition. And it's very, very powerful differentiation. When I think about the future, our focus to date, as many of you know, has been providing basically what I refer to as big pipes to big customers. And that's been tower backhaul and intercity long-haul networks, data center connectivity, et cetera. The next chapter is going to continue pressing our strength and pressing our vantage in those areas. In addition, we're really going to take advantage of our 37,000 lit buildings that we've accumulated through all these acquisitions to get to the customers that are in these buildings in and around all of this fiber around these buildings. And these will be small, medium and large customers, and we'll infill around that and increase our network utilization by attacking those customers in and around those fiber demarcs in all these locations across North America and Western Europe. That's a big differentiator as we go forward, and we're going to really double down in that area. This ties in very nicely to the focus that DigitalBridge is taking to push and look for opportunities that are moving compute storage networking further out to the edge. We're going to be perfectly positioned to participate in that. And as the industry progresses to put more compute and networking further out to the Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 markets, DigitalBridge is looking there. We will be looking in parallel, and I think the combination of the 2 of us will find very interesting opportunities. Plenty of capital is aimed at this space. We're going to be right there along with it. It will be a major part of the next wave of all of this unfolding, and I'm super excited about the opportunity we have to win in this space. So as we look to extend platform Zayo around the world, it's super exciting and reassuring to me to know that Marc and Warren and the rest of the team at DigitalBridge is super interested and very focused about this industry in particular. Industry knowledge, industry expertise is a differentiator, and it's great to have them as part of our next phase of growth. The collaboration has been very high with the DigitalBridge portfolio companies, very high with the management team. And Marc has done a terrific job helping us get ready for the next chapter here. The last thing I would say is having a sponsor like DigitalBridge that understands the critical nature of our business is a huge differentiator in the industry, and we're going to leverage that. So thank you again for the time today. I hope you have a great rest of the meeting today. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jon.

Thanks, Steve. We're looking forward to seeing how Steve leverages his experience to further Zayo's plan. Now that we've talked about some of the active investments we've made in the past few years, designed to position our portfolio for the future, let's talk about what we're doing today to address the opportunities we see over the next 5 years.

Yes. These are fresh off the press. The first investment we want to cover is Boingo, a deal we closed earlier this month. Like Zayo, it's a take-private and a company we think was misunderstood by the public markets, where a quarter-to-quarter focus can sometimes get in the way of doing the right thing from a longer-term perspective. At the heart of Boingo, our relationships and experience building wireless networks that we believe will become increasingly central to the fabric of future networks. Let me talk to you a little bit about why we made this very unique investment. We love what Boingo has accomplished over the last decade, transforming into a dominant indoor mobile network neutral host provider. For nearly 20 years, Boingo has built wireless networks that reach over 1 billion consumers annually, operating nearly 100 indoor distributed antenna systems, or DAS, networks. With over 40,000 DAS nodes, Boingo is the largest operator of indoor DAS and commercial WiFi networks in the world, with a business strategy built around acquiring long-term wireless rights at large venues, building high-quality wireless networks at those venues and monetizing those wireless networks by signing long-term agreements with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and hopefully, DISH in the coming years. We followed Boingo for years as it successfully diversified its revenue base from legacy retail WiFi into wireless DAS and offload, and we've been waiting for the right entry point. This was a very complicated deal that required a tremendous amount of industry and technical knowledge that we built in-house with our deep bench of partners. Our collective DAS experience, combined with our take-private expertise were vital ingredients that led to our successful acquisition at an attractive valuation. DigitalBridge is unique in our ability to drive alpha in our investments, unlike any other sponsor through active participation and involvement that augments our management teams. We acquired Boingo to capitalize on the next wave of indoor 5G growth and are sponsoring the leading management team in the industry, led by Mike Finley and Peter Hovenier. Our thesis to create alpha includes our collective network. We will leverage our long-standing relationships with the carriers and commercial venues to help Boingo expand its pipeline and drive growth. Also, with the CBRS auction now complete and WiFi 6 on its way, we will work closely with the management team and our network to build enterprise private networks as this will be the next big wave of indoor growth. Our strategic M&A capabilities will come into play here. We believe the indoor wireless infrastructure landscape remains fragmented, and Boingo is a terrific platform that we can help scale. Lastly, Boingo is an incredible complement to the DigitalBridge family. As we continue to build 5G networks with our customers, Boingo will gain access to some of the best companies and management teams in the industry, that means better solutions as we see continued convergence with fiber, small cells and edge compute. Boingo will be able to collaborate more effectively with Zayo, Vertical Bridge, DataBank and ExteNet. We're very excited about our investment in Boingo and the growth we see ahead for indoor DAS and WiFi infrastructure.

Thanks, Warren. Great overview of the company and the opportunity. The last company we'll discuss today is another very recent fund investment, AtlasEdge Data Centres. You may have seen our joint venture announcement last month in partnership with Liberty Global. AtlasEdge is an innovative edge infrastructure platform that we're building to serve the growing European demand for scalable data center infrastructure that brings application and content closer to the edge, as you just described. It's a company that leverages Liberty's global existing infrastructure footprint, unlocking value for them and turning this into a platform for growth. One of our colleagues in London, who helped lead the transaction, Manjari Govada will tell you more about it. Manjari?

Thanks, Jon. Hi, everyone. I'm Manjari Govada. I'm a principal in our London office. I'm really happy to be here today to talk to you about AtlasEdge, a new edge data center platform that we recently launched in partnership with Liberty Global. We're really excited about this platform because we think that it's really built for the future of edge infrastructure and edge demand. What that looks like is it's even closer to the end user. It's highly interconnected, and it's built for speed. As we think about the future for demand and how that's going to be driven really at the intersection of apps and mobility, we think this platform is really poised to take advantage of that. What's exciting about this platform, though, is that it's actually built on an existing base. From its launch, it will have over 100 edge sites across the U.K., Switzerland, Ireland and Poland. And this is because of our partnership with Liberty Global who are unlocking value on their balance sheet and contributing their assets. But as we see it, this is just the beginning. We're building AtlasEdge to be a pan-European platform that really extends the fabric of connectivity across the continent. So what differentiates AtlasEdge? First and foremost, it's scale. AtlasEdge is really unique, and there are no other platforms like it on the market right now. What that means and what we believe is that it's not just going to be helping meet customer demands in the near term, but actually help shape customer demand over time as we reduce the overall latency to their end customers. Second, the long-term anchor revenue base. This platform is unique in that it's going to have a stable cash flow base right out of the box because of the long-term, 10-year-plus anchor contracts that are going to be in place. And what we think that does is actually really sets the business up for scale and success as the edge demand materializes over time. And then third, the shareholder base. We think this is a $1 billion-plus opportunity. And with Liberty's unique carrier relationships and DigitalBridge's operating expertise, this business is going to be really set up for success. So on that DigitalBridge piece, in particular. First, we think of this transaction as not just a proprietary deal, but really a proprietary idea. We've been working closely with Liberty Global over the last 6 months to build the business plan from scratch so it's been designed with scale and growth in mind. Second, Josh Joshi, who will be joining us as Executive Chairman and is a DigitalBridge operating partner. Josh was the CFO of Interxion, which was sold to Digital Realty recently for over $8 billion. Josh shows the data center platform and the data center market in Europe like a few other executives do and that we're working together with him to build the management team is really exciting to us. And then lastly, the DigitalBridge M&A playbook. We've got a really unique list of opportunities and tuck-in M&A that we've lined up for this platform. As we think about the value-add that this can bring in not just acquiring additional businesses, but actually integrating them into the business, we think this is going to be so critical to the future growth of this platform as we think about the pan-European footprint that we want to build across the U.K. and Europe. So with that, I'll close. But as you can see, we're really thrilled about this platform and really value our partnership with Liberty Global as we're launching this platform. AtlasEdge has a great team and a great strategy and it's really going to be designed to meet the demand of the networks of the future. And we can't wait to take you along on the ride with us. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I'm going to pass it over to Ben, who will talk about DigitalBridge's value add.

Thanks, Manjari. Following those thematic presentations, I'd like to highlight the importance of relationships and our approach to digital infrastructure investing. With 3 decades of experience in the sector, we have unique access to customers, people and opportunities. Clients trust us with key elements of their network and business. We have the broadest, deepest team of operating partners and investment professionals in the business, creating a unique network of proprietary deal flow with most of our transactions directly sourced and negotiated. At the heart of our model is the mentality of owners and operators of critical network infrastructure. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce Liam Stewart, our COO, who will walk through the power of our platform in greater detail. After that, Marc, Matty and Jeff are going to discuss ESG and DEI and how we are proactively infusing those principles across our portfolio, bringing these subjects front and center where they belong. With that, I'll turn it over to Liam to get started.

I'm Liam Stewart. I am the Chief Operating Officer at DigitalBridge. I'm here to talk about DigitalBridge's value-add as an investment manager. Our key objective at DigitalBridge is that we want to make great companies, and we want to work with great management teams to make that vision a reality. And when I think about that vision of what being great means, it comes down to 3 themes. The first is how do we enhance returns for our investors? The second one is, how do we do meaningful things for our customers? And the third one is, how do we make these compelling businesses for our stakeholders, in particular, for our employees, but also for the communities in which our portfolio companies operate? One of the things that really differentiates us as a management team is deep operational experience in digital infrastructure businesses. And we, ourselves, as a management team, have been successful in building these businesses and delivering returns to our investors. And so we have a good idea of what works and a pretty clear idea of what doesn't work. And so we make sure that we draw on both those positive and negative experiences. And I think because a lot of us have that operational background, we spend a lot of time making sure we have the right athletes in the right spots. This is very dynamic. Human capital is one of the fundamental drivers of growth. And so if you drill down into what we've done in our portfolio companies, we've done a lot of management augmentation. Take, for example, Zayo, where we were very fortunate to be able to bring Steve Smith onboard as Chief Executive Officer, someone who was a pioneering executive in the public data center space. That's really characteristic of how we try and augment and supplement talent at the portfolio company level. And then those portfolio companies CEOs and CFOs and COOs, we then surround them with a lot of industry expertise, whether it's our leadership team here at DigitalBridge or our network of operating advisers, people who have effectively been there and done that and bring a lot of experience to the table. The second thing that having operating experience really emphasizes is how important the platform is, ensuring that we can relentlessly measure the critical metrics that drive value, investing in real-time decision-making capabilities, embedding scalable systems and processes. So that as we grow these businesses, we're generating positive operating leverage and then utilizing that platform so we can deploy growth capital effectively and really asking ourselves, are we being as efficient as we possibly can? Are we measuring the right things? Are we incentivizing the right things? Another thing that we spend a lot of time thinking about and focusing on is capital structure, and we're really fortunate in the sense that a few of our leadership team are just phenomenal in this regard. And so my partner, Tom Yanagi is going to say a few words about our capital markets practice. Tom?

Thanks so much, Liam. Hi. I'm Tom Yanagi, Head of Debt Capital Markets here at DigitalBridge, which I've been leading since I joined in June of 2014. I will be providing you with some insight into how we finance our investment activities and help our companies to finance their long-term growth objectives. Like all infrastructure, our portfolio of digital infrastructure companies is capital-intensive. And as such, access to efficient debt financing is the key to the success of our business. Over the last several years, we've executed over $25 billion in financings, supporting DigitalBridge's acquisition activities and refinancings as well as portfolio company capital needs. Over the years, we've issued Term Loan A, Term Loan B, secured notes, high-yield, holdco notes and ABS. Equally important is developing a deep understanding of the business being financed. While debt quantum and financing costs may garner most of the headlines, ensuring that sufficient flexibility is provided to support rather than hinder operating performance is also paramount. To that end, a key part of my role is to partner with our best-in-class management teams as we develop and execute our financing plans. I think it may be worth taking a minute to highlight our experience in the ABS market. DigitalBridge has executed 14 securitizations, including a number of first of its kind ABS issuances across the different digital infrastructure subsectors. Examples include the first-ever hyperscale data center securitization, Vantage; the first small cell securitization, ExteNet; and the first enterprise edge data center securitization, DataBank. The DataBank financing is a great example and one that I'm particularly proud of. Earlier this year, we executed DataBank's $758 million inaugural ABS issuance. This was the first-ever securitization of a multi-tenant edge data center and was a complex innovative deal requiring a year-long process working with rating agencies and introducing the sector to the ABS investor community. When we brought it to market in February, the financing received tremendous interest and was many times oversubscribed. When completed, we added more than $200 million in liquidity and reduced borrowing costs by more than 50%, creating substantial value for DataBank shareholders. Supporting the strategic financing needs of our companies is one of the key pillars of the DigitalBridge value-add playbook, and the DataBank securitization is a great example of the value we can deliver. Consistent with all my partners at DigitalBridge, we are constantly driven to find ways to support the growth of our companies and drive return for our investors.

Today, you'll hear from Jeff and Matty about our bold commitments to ESG. I've put in place several initiatives that we believe are best-in-class and ahead of the curve as it relates for our peer group. First, net-zero 2030. This is our plan to get DigitalBridge and all of our portfolio companies to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. We've created a diverse and talented workforce through mentorship, internships, recruiting, and most importantly, providing an equal pathway for careers, around compensation and promotions. It is so critical to create a framework where we've leveled the playing field. This is important to me. It's important to our investors. It's important to our employees. And mostly, it's important to all of our stakeholders.

I'm Jeff Ginsberg, Chief Administrative Officer of our Investment Management business, and I chair our ESG Committee. I'm happy to be here today with my partner, Matty Yohannan, our Chief of Staff, who is leading a powerful DEI transformation across the firm. Our ESG committee is composed of 10 diverse members across the organization, drawn from different business units and seniority levels and offices around the globe. Our senior team and many of our portfolio company managers have worked together for years and in some cases, decades. We've always operated our businesses with a sense of purpose as responsible investors and stewards of capital. Over the past 3 years, we have taken the firm's commitment to ESG issues to new heights, become a signatory to the principles for responsible investment, integrating ESG analysis into due diligence processes and establishing a program that sets clear expectations with our portfolio companies ensuring they have a strong foundation to manage and report on ESG issues. And it's making a real impact.

Exactly, Jeff. Taking strong action on climate change is one of our top priorities. Rapid decarbonization is a business imperative in the digital infrastructure sector. To that end, our portfolio company, Vertical Bridge, announced last year that it had become the world's first carbon-neutral tower company. And Scala, our hyperscale data center business in Brazil, recently announced its carbon-neutral status, purchasing 100% of its energy from renewable power sources. These are great steps, but we need to do more.

Yes, we do. And so we have. We have announced a bold science-based commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, a commitment across all of our portfolio companies. Our net-zero 2030 action plan has 5 key elements: first, measure. We are going to measure and establish our carbon footprint by the end of 2021. Two, partner. We're going to work with leading organizations and frameworks to validate our progress in a transparent manner. Three, road maps. Every company will approve a net-zero road map by the end of 2022. Four, interim targets. We are going to have each company set specific emissions reduction targets by the end of 2025. And finally, measure and report. We will develop a structured and transparent approach to reporting on our progress. Bottom line, in order to affect real change, we need to own the facts, that means changing our behavior and prioritizing the reduction of energy consumption, the sourcing of renewable power and the decarbonization of our supply chain, purchasing carbon removals and offsets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must be a last resort. We are already a member of several organizations to ensure we have a best-in-class industry framework for our ESG program, including BSR, PRI, PREA and net-zero asset managers. These are fantastic organizations that will help us achieve our goals. I've said the word transparent a few times today because it's critical to us in the ESG world, but it's also a key tenet of our approach to governance, diversity, equity and inclusion.

Absolutely, Jeff. One of my mantras in life is talent is universal, opportunity is not. In today's increasingly digital world, diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace and in our business practices have never been more important. Talent is quite literally the lifeblood of our organization, our DigitalBridge family. As you probably heard my partner, Marc Ganzi say, people create alpha, not the assets. Put simply, diverse teams drive more fully informed decisions and, ultimately, better outcomes.

Absolutely Matty. And building an inclusive culture that promotes and champions a set of values built upon mutual respect, acceptance, fairness and equality is a core tenet for us.

100%. I will give you 2 examples, our summer analyst program and our investment in iMPACTDATA. Yesterday, March the first day of DigitalBridge's inaugural summer analyst program. The objective of this program is to serve as a foundational piece of the firm's talent development pipeline. We have partnered with 3 leading organizations to source this talent: the Sponsors For Educational Opportunity, Young Women in Finance and Kipp New Jersey. Three of our summer analysts come from the SEO Career program. SEO Career recruits and trains high achieving, underrepresented minorities for challenging summer internships that lead to coveted full-time jobs at leading investment firms and Fortune 500 companies. As an alumnus, the SEO Career program, in particular, is near and dear to me. It was my first opportunity at Wall Street over 25 years ago.

That's amazing. What's next?

This next initiative focuses on the E in DEI equity. And I'm incredibly excited about it. iMPACTDATA, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, iMPACTDATA is launching a network of distributed colo data centers. In conjunction with the United Negro College Fund, DigitalBridge and iMPACTDATA are partnering alongside our nation's most respected historically black colleges and universities to build secure digital learning and colo data centers, known as Dream Centers. These Dream Centers will provide enterprises better access to the data while expanding digital infrastructure and workforce development in underserved communities. Impact data is creating a connected ecosystem where enterprises can leverage their data for good to advance student learning, sustain HBCUs and transform historically disinvested communities. We're really excited about the business prospects and the social impact we expect this investment to achieve. Stay tuned. With that, we'll turn it back to Severin.

We'd like to turn now to a business and financial overview to give you some perspective on the organization we're building and what our financial model looks like now and in the future. We'll start by connecting again with Kevin Smithen, our Chief Commercial Officer. Kevin is responsible for raising capital around our investment management business. He'll be joined by 2 of his partners, Leslie Golden, and Latifa Tefridj-Gaillard to discuss the growth we're seeing in our IM business and some of the drivers of the increasing institutional interest in digital infrastructure, a sector that has notably shown resilience and growth through a tumultuous macroeconomic period. Next, we'll hear from Justin Chang, our Head of Asia, again. Justin will walk us through why Asia? Why now? Finally, Jacky Wu, our CFO, will cover our financial or updating our near and medium-term guidance, discussing our financial model in greater detail, and introducing you to some of his colleagues that are helping him build a scalable, extensible platform that serves DigitalBridge and our partner companies. With that, I'll turn it over to Kevin.

Thanks, Severin. I'm joined today by my partner, Leslie Golden, Managing Director of Global Capital Formation and Investor Relations. As we get into the business overview and start to look at how all of this experience and expertise manifests itself in a growing investment management business, I want to talk about a few DigitalBridge characteristics that are really resonating with investors. What's unique about what we're doing? At its core, DigitalBridge is all about providing flexible and creative solutions across digital infrastructure for our clients, whether they are hyperscale cloud providers, mobile network operators or pensions and sovereign wealth funds. We want to be their strategic digital infrastructure partner of choice. So our fundraising strategy starts here, building the breadth and the depth of our customer relationships. To address the needs of our top LPs, this means creating bespoke investment programs across several products and multiple geographies, including co-invest. These LPs increasingly view us as the leader with scale across the entire $400 billion a year digital infrastructure asset class, including private equity, private credit and listed securities.

At the same time, we are looking to continue to expand the number of our LP relationships, which have doubled in the past 3 years, and we're on track to double again by 2024. As our investment portfolio has expanded into Europe and now Asia, our investor base is also growing extensively in these regions. Relationships are also at the heart of our next key differentiator. Our ability to source proprietary deals, this is key. As we continue to follow the logos as they grow globally, that's driving strategic conversations that turn into proprietary ideas and proprietary deals. Specifically, 8 of the 10 platform investments and 16 of 19 add-on acquisitions in our inaugural fund were all sourced on a proprietary basis.

This ability to go direct, leveraging our deep industry relationships allows us to focus on developing exclusive dialogues with new potential partners. This is how we create long-term value for our investors. Finally, co-invest. Our track record and ability to create co-invest opportunities for private LPs alongside our fund investments really sets the DigitalBridge platform apart. We have almost $3 billion in FEEUM generating fees and carry to our IM business through this program. We've been able to deliver a 1.5x to co-invest ratio on LP fund commitments, which is well ahead of LP's expectations. So expanding strategic relationships with our LPs, accessing proprietary deal flow and providing a steady stream of co-invest opportunities are a few of unique aspects of the DigitalBridge value proposition. Leslie, what other factors are LPs focused on?

I think ESG, once a nice to have, is now a must have, and the ability to showcase our leading ESG initiatives and programs is key to growing our investor base. Digital Colony is committed to responsible investing by actively integrating environmental, social and governance principles into our investment process, including due diligence and ongoing asset management. We consider both macro level and company-specific ESG issues in consultation with various third-party ESG standards and frameworks. We review a broad range of environmental, social and governance factors and how they can materially influence the performance of a potential investment. Diversity, equity and inclusion is also a key priority. To establish DigitalBridge as a leader in DEI, we recently formed a DEI Steering Committee to focus on a 4-pillar plan to drive mentorships and internships, recruiting, hiring, and incentives and promotions. The objective of our DEI initiative is to institute a programmatic and scalable structure that facilitates the composition of a diverse workforce reflective of the constituencies and communities in which we serve as a corporate citizen. I am incredibly proud of the tremendous strides we have made, and I am confident that we will continue to be viewed as a leader on the ESG front.

With that, we'll turn it over to our partner, Latifa Tefridj-Gaillard, Head of European Capital Formation based in London. Latifa, can you please tell us a little bit about what you're seeing in Europe?

Thank you very much, Kevin. So yes, here, the key trend across LPs in Europe has continued to be the search for yield in a very low rate environment. Asset owners have been increasingly reliant on private markets across equity and credit to deliver those returns. So there is a lot of uncertainty at the moment about the post-pandemic world. But one thing is certain is that things are going to be more digital, and more sustainable. So I would like to highlight 3 aspects of the DigitalBridge strategy that resonates really well with a European. First, they really appreciate the access to a very resilient and mission-critical asset class with a huge market opportunity. This is a $400 billion opportunity growing at mid to high single digit annually with significant CapEx needs across 5G, IoT, Edge and the Cloud. So we've seen increasingly that investors are trying to tilt their portfolio towards those growth sectors of the economy that have to be very resilient. Over the last 12 months, 65% of the M&A activity has been concentrated on 3 sectors: health care, tech and financials. The second area of focus from LPs is the access to differentiated and sizable co-investment opportunities. It is increasingly competitive market here, and there is a lot of dry powder with robust credit markets and economies are recovering. So it is essential to have a differentiated strategy. LPs are increasingly looking for strategic partners with global expertise that can deliver sourcing and structuring capabilities for proprietary transactions. Finally, there is another key area of focus, which is sustainability. All these LPs are trying to support their local economies. They're delivering returns for their stakeholders and all of these needs to be done in a sustainable fashion. They like the role that private markets, and more specifically, private equity have played recently as a stabilizing force for portfolio company, providing them with cash and helping them pivot their business where necessary. This has saved many jobs and businesses recently. Here, at DigitalBridge, they particularly like the very tangible ESG approach that we have through the investment cycle from the due diligence into the asset management and the ongoing monitoring of our portfolio companies and known investments. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Justin Chang now.

Thanks, Latifa. We really see an immense opportunity to apply the same DigitalBridge playbook that's worked so well for over 25 years to the fast-growing and fast digitizing economies of Asia. So why Asia and why now? First of all, the fundamentals in Asia are very attractive. The fundamental growth drivers, macroeconomic factors are very compelling. So any time you're investing in a region of the world where you have those strong macro tailwinds, that's a good thing. Second, the digital infrastructure development in these markets, in many cases is 3, 4, 5 years or more behind the U.S. and Europe. So the inflection point is right now. Third, our customers are taking us there, whether it's the cloud companies or the wireless carriers, the customers we work with every day in the U.S., in Europe and Latin America, they're expanding to Asia or they're already in Asia and they need our help. And so they're taking us there, and we're going hand-in-hand with them. This has been a core competitive differentiator for us from the beginning, and it continues to be in Asia. Fourth, there's very few digital infrastructure players of scale in the region, and there's none that bring the convergence that we bring across edge and hyperscale data centers, across wireless towers, fiber, small cells, et cetera. And fifth, the problems our customers are trying to solve in Asia are the same as our problems that we're solving for them in the U.S. and Europe, right? For the cloud computing companies, it's how do I get consistent, reliable capacity as I grow and trying to keep up with these customers' growth is a feat in and of itself and something we've done well around the world. For the wireless carriers, it's how do I expand network coverage? How do I finish building out 4G and then 5G? And how do I do it while creating value, unlocking value in my embedded captive infrastructure assets right? At the same time, Asia is complicated. It's not easy, it's not 1 market, it's not monolithic. It's a complicated collection of different economies, different cultures, different business environments. So to be successful in Asia, you really need a very effective and efficient combination of a global platform and true local and regional management expertise on the ground in the region. Asia is also relationship-driven and highly inefficient. And quite frankly, that plays to our strengths, right? And while Asia is new to the firm, it's not new to many of us who've worked in that region over the last 20-plus years. So what's our strategy and what's our competitive differentiation? When we look at investment opportunities in Asia, there's really 5 core criteria we focus on right from the very beginning: Number one is we focus on scale businesses. And while this is easy to say, it's hard to do. Scale is important everywhere, but it's especially important in this part of the world. And our ability to both buy and build, to develop and to do all these things together allows us to create scale companies in many situations where it's difficult for other investors to do. And that's a core tenet of what we do. Second, we want to invest in and we want to build Pan-Asian businesses, right? We don't want businesses that can just be successful in their home market. We want companies that can succeed across multiple markets in Asia. Why? Number one, more scale; number two, more growth; number three, it allows us to serve our customers better. That's what they want. And importantly, it allows us, when we get to exiting in 5 to 7 years, a multimarket business in Asia has many more exit opportunities, and that's critically important for us. Fourth, differentiated local management teams. From the very beginning, from the very first time, we look at investment. We talk about who's the management team in the region, on the ground, that's going to run this business for us. That's critically important and you have to have that expertise on the ground, been there and done that, people you know, people you trust, and that's a key tenet of anything we do in the region. And finally, local partners and co-investors. Alongside ourselves and our management teams, we really want to have the right local partners where that's relevant. They can be strategic, financial, operating partners, government partners, which help us address some of the local and regional issues that come up in these parts of the world. From a thematic standpoint, initially, we decided to focus on 2 investment platforms: one in hyperscale data centers and the other in towers. Agile data centers is our hyperscale data center platform focused on buying and developing hyperscale data center assets in the developed markets of Asia. So we're headquartered in Singapore with people and operations on the ground in Japan, Korea, Australia, Taiwan and Singapore. The customers were serving the same customers we serve around the world, right? It's the U.S. web scalers as they expand Asia, and it's the Japanese and Chinese web scalers as they expand outside their home markets to other parts of Asia. EdgePoint is our towers platform focused on the ASEAN markets, in particular, Indonesia and Malaysia. These are high-growth economies, attractive demographics and very fragmented markets. So there's a big opportunity to be a consolidator, to be a market leader, to be a thought leader and to do so at very attractive valuations. So we launched in Asia 15 months ago. We couldn't be happier with our progress. We're way ahead of where we thought we'd be and what's next? So as we look ahead, thematically, we're focused on Edge data centers, fiber and small cells. From a geographic standpoint, we're targeting upwards of 2/3 of our Asian focused capital on the developed markets of Asia and about 1/3 on the developing markets, especially the high-growth economies of Southeast Asia. But as I step back and take a bit of a longer-term view, we have to remember, Asia represents over 3 billion of the world's population. And the digital infrastructure is woefully underinvested. Most of that population is in reach today. So the opportunities over the next decade are really extraordinary. We see immense opportunities for what we do in Asia, and we're really only in the first or second inning. And with that, let me turn it over to Jacky Wu, who's going to take us through the financial overview.

You've heard throughout the day from my amazing DigitalBridge operating partners. And now I'm going to spend some time walking you through our financial forecast for our business. Looking ahead to our guidance and long-term earnings framework, given recent successes, including a phenomenal DCP II first closing, a strong leasing pipeline at DataBank and Vantage Stabilized Data Centers and continued accelerated monetization and simplification at our legacy businesses and G&A. We are increasing our 2021 guidance as well as our longer-term forecast for the key drivers of our digital transformation. We are increasing our digital management fee revenues target range to $145 million to $155 million in 2021 and digital fee-related earnings target range to $90 million to $95 million. For Digital Operating segment, we are increasing our target range to $130 million to $140 million of revenues and $55 million to $60 million of EBITDA in 2021, driven by organic growth and bolt-on acquisitions in our existing investments. In addition to our 2021 guidance, we are updating our 2023 digital targets that we discussed last quarter. And for the first time, we have added a 2025 framework for our key driver metrics, we're increasing our target range for digital fee revenues to $180 million to $230 million by 2023, and $240 million to $300 million by 2025. We are targeting digital fee-related earnings of $110 million to $140 million by 2023 and $140 million to $200 million by 2025. These 2023 and 2025 targets are anticipated to be achieved an expansion of products and scope of our investment offerings. In addition, we expect to achieve in the range of $175 million to $225 million of digital operating EBITDA by 2023 and $225 million to $275 million by 2025. We have a strong pipeline of potential acquisitions to rotate proceeds received from our legacy monetization, and we're excited to execute on them. Turning to our corporate cost savings plan that was announced in the first quarter of 2020. The company has outperformed our original $40 million cost savings through various initiatives, including the reduction of almost half of the company's non-digital workforce and office footprint. As part of the digital transformation, the company has completed strategic divestitures and undergone cost rationalization efforts, that have significantly decreased G&A to operate much more efficiently. The G&A savings related to the legacy non-digital business was partially offset by additional investments we have made into our digital platform in order to support the future and sustained growth that we are expecting in the near and long term. We continue to expect continued company cash G&A of $100 million to $120 million after the digital transformation is complete and through the first quarter, we are ahead of that plan at approximately $150 million of cash G&A from continuing operation, which is what we had previously targeted by the end of 2021. While margins will continue to improve, we anticipate modest growth in G&A as our digital revenues continue to scale. We've laid out a very simple example to show you how our business model works and the power of the DigitalBridge platform? Our sector leading investment management business allows us to raise third-party fee bearing capital to enhance DigitalBridge shareholder returns and high-quality digital infrastructure assets. Our digital bridge model is simple, but unique, where both our investment management business and our operating expertise work hand-in-hand with a $1.5 billion deployment of capital alongside third-party co-investors and our strong ability to implement strategic financing alternatives. We are able to turn $1.5 billion of firepower into a $5 billion total investment. As we manage and operate these assets, we not only collect high-margin investment management fees, but we're also enjoying strong, stable and long-term core organic growth rates, underpinned by contracted escalation rates and additional growth drivers, such as tuck-in acquisitions and new capital builds. The combination of these drivers more than doubles our return on invested capital from day 1 by -- and to year 10. This underscores the phenomenal firepower of our platform. Our unique combination of investment management, our operating powers and our significant tailwinds in our digital infrastructure sector generates a simple, but compounding return to our shareholders, not just immediately, but on a long-term and sustainable basis. So with that, I'd like to introduce you to some of my other partners: Maarten Derksen, Brian Lee and Sonia Kim, where we will join in the roundtable to discuss the power of our G&A platform as well as the scalable, extensible nature of our platform. Thank you. One of the unique aspects of the DigitalBridge platform is that we use our finance team as a tool to drive operational improvements and create value at our managed companies leveraging the strength of the public vehicle together with DigitalBridge's operational excellence and entrepreneurial culture to drive best-in-class people, processes and systems. DigitalBridge has a diverse team of finance leaders that create value at our global portfolio companies. This team helps build a financial roadmap for each portfolio company and works besides CFOs and finance teams to track progress and ensure financial reporting improvements at each firm. This gives our investment team and our management partners better data to drive decisions and allocate capital. I'd like to introduce Brian Lee, our Corporate Treasurer; Sonia Kim, our Chief Accounting Officer; and Maarten Derksen, our Managing Director of Global Tax, who I've invited to discuss how we'd execute this. Brian, can you elaborate on how financial operations has really been a value-add for this organization?

Yes. For example, Advantage, which is both a portfolio company and a large balance sheet interest, our corporate treasury and IT teams collaborated to improve their ERP system as well as their financial planning and treasury processes. With the ERP system, we worked with our vendor to extend our volume pricing, implement our customized modules and train our partners to utilize the software more efficiently. We did the same with our financial planning software to improve Vantage's construction management. With respect to treasury, we streamlined a lot of manual payment processing tasks with tailored protocols and machine learning software. All of this not only had the effect of reducing back office costs, but also reducing back office headaches to free up Vantage to focus on what they do best. We also deployed similar efficiencies on a couple of other portfolio companies, and we're really just getting started with this hub-and-spoke approach across all of our portfolio companies.

Thanks, Brian. And now we'll turn it over to Sonia Kim, our Chief Accounting Officer. Sonia, I know you and your team were able to help Databank recently.

Yes, that's right. For example, DataBank's acquisition of zColo were helping implement a general ledger mapping solution that was devised for our legacy real estate businesses. You can ask any accountant who's been through an M&A transaction about the pain of merging multiple data sets that come from multiple systems and the manual task of mapping accounting data using spreadsheets. Our team was able to come up with a technology solution that takes all of that disparate data and maps it to our ledgers to minimize manual interface and the risk of human error. So as you can see, we're getting really good at solving problems. And we're working on ways to augment our portfolio companies, finance operations to create value and provide IPO readiness to ultimately create liquidity opportunities for our investors.

Maarten, as Managing Director of Tax at DigitalBridge, what have you focused most on?

Well, I'm focused -- Jacky, I'm focused on being to operate as a true partner to our internal and external stakeholders versus operating as a back-office function, making sure the team does not get bogged down on work streams that are somewhat of a commodity, routine tax compliance, K-1 preparation being 2 of those. Use of best-in-class technology and a smart outsourced model to focus the team on the matters that drive incremental value for our organization is very important. This approach also ensures that as a tax team, we will stay nimble and agile while we are scaling the organization, including our assets under management.

Now what are those important value drivers in your view?

In my view, Jacky, there are 3: one, partnering with our portfolio companies; two, real-time deal structuring side-by-side our digital operating and IM investment professionals; and lastly, addressing the structural needs of our LPs in a fund or co-invest capacity and being integrated with Investor Relations team.

Thanks, Maarten; thanks, Sonia; and thanks, Brian for joining us today. Our core value is transforming what most companies would ordinarily view as a traditional cost center into one that drives incremental value to our companies and stakeholders. And that is part of the DigitalBridge playbook. Thank you all for joining us today.

Thanks, Jacky, and thank you to our entire accounting team. Understanding the back-office capabilities and understanding how we scale platforms is so critical to how we build great and sustainable businesses. And getting to that point and building great and sustainable businesses, the most important thing that we have to make as asset allocators is the decision to ultimately whether we buy or build. And this to us is really one of the great differentiators at DigitalBridge today, is we have that capability to build great companies through acquisitions or through greenfield. Joined by my partner, Ben Jenkins. And Ben, I thought we'd just talk a little bit about the framework and how we make those decisions and, ultimately, thinking through the last decade where we've been in investment committee together, thinking through those decisions, whether we buy or build, and I thought this would be a great forum to talk a little bit about that between the 2 of us.

Sure. And thank you. The framework is the same, really, whether it's a buy or build decision, the same underwriting. We've talked about the 4 corners and the key elements in our process. It ultimately then becomes a relative value question when we see M&A multiples creeping up to well beyond replacement cost, then the economics of new builds become more attractive. But you still need the same elements that we look for in every deal, which is asset quality, customer quality and, of course, the management teams.

When we were sitting in those investment communities, you and I debate this. All the time, we've been debating it for the 20-plus years we've known each other. But when we think about those 4 corners of underwriting, drilling a little bit deeper down, talk about location, asset quality a little bit.

Sure. So because this is physical infrastructure, the location does matter. But it's not in the traditional main-on-main real estate sense, but rather how close it is to the relevant customers, what the fiber connectivity is, what the power supply is and, most importantly, how protected it is, how defensible is that location.

Yes, the strategic mode is so important and ultimately being able to get those permits and close the zoning door behind you is something we've always talked about, having an indelible location ultimately accrues to the benefit of our customers, which is a really good next topic just around counterparty credit risk.

Sure. So that lease is the primary nexus of our business. So a long-term lease with the likes of Amazon or Microsoft is very different from a short-term lease with a small or medium-sized enterprise. So obviously, the credit quality and tenure of those contracts matters a lot.

Yes. And that gets us to another point, which is the quality in that credit look through ultimately defines our capital structure and how we access the institutional debt market.

Yes. that's what primarily the rating agencies and, ultimately, bond investors are looking at, the underlying credit quality of those customers and the duration of those contracts.

So last 2 quadrants in ultimately defining that framework is market dynamics and people and platforms. Maybe start for a second a little bit on people and platforms?

Sure. I mean that's really most critical because without the management teams, none of this happens. And so we would underwrite them the same way, whether it's a buy or build decision looking for experience, the ability to scale and ultimately deliver value.

And then last but not least, just the dynamics of the marketplace today. What are we -- what's that debate that we have internally. It's all encompassing. It involves not just the dynamics of the growth. But we think a little bit bigger from a geopolitical perspective, currency, politics. Walk us through that a little bit?

Sure. So I mean you start with kind of basic supply-demand analysis, right, and whether we think there's going to be opportunity for the new infrastructure that we're buying or building. And then, yes, you would lay things like currency, macro risks on top of that. And then sort of competitive strategy, what else is in the market or could come into the market that might affect the asset we're considering.

So that's the key there, right? And we think about those 4 corners. And that ultimately frames the dialogue around buying versus building. And the key at DigitalBridge today is, we're super comfortable doing both and that is a capability that we have internally. And as I think about opportunities around the world today and where we're investing capital in that debate that we get to have every week in Investment Committee, maybe just a trip around the world as you and I see it for a couple of minutes for the benefit of the folks watching today. Why don't we start here in North America for a second? And I'll give the vertical and let's talk a little bit about whether we're buying or we're builders or maybe we're neither. Some of these situations are actually holds for us right now. But starting in a pretty easy asset class for investors to get their minds around hyperscale data centers here in North America, are you a buyer, are you a builder?

We're builders today with where M&A multiples are in the sector and our expertise and the proven operators we have at Vantage, that's a real competitive advantage for us. So we would be looking to build at essentially par compared to paying 3 or 4x replacement cost in the M&A market.

And then we take that into sort of edge and enterprise co-location. I would say we're probably doing both today. We're buying and we're building at the same time.

Yes, I'd say, on enterprise, probably more buying than building just given the availability of assets there. Edge is more of an emerging opportunity and, therefore, either building or reconfiguring is really the strategy there.

Pivot a little bit into fiber infrastructure and small cells for a second here in North America. Starting out with fiber today, where are we as a firm in terms of buy and build?

Well, again, I think we're more on the build side through Zayo. Again, very experienced operator with strong technical capability. They can build much cheaper than where M&A multiples are today. But we would look opportunistically in certain markets where we might be able to complement our footprint. And small cells, again, is more of a build strategy with ExteNet and now Boingo, those are great platforms to leverage. There aren't a lot of independent small cell companies to buy either. So that does tend to be more building.

Let's go down south. You and I have been investing in building companies since the late '90s in Latin America. We love the region. We've been able to, most importantly, not only invest in the region, but we've been able to exit in the region. [Foreign Language] for a second, but just towers in Latin America, how do you feel about that today in terms of buy versus build?

Again, probably a little bit of both, more building today between our platforms in Mexico and South America. We're doing a lot of building, but we would opportunistically consider acquisitions, too.

And you've spent a lot of time personally in the fiber sector in Latin America over the last 2 quarters, looking at a couple of opportunities. And how do you feel and where's your conviction around fiber in Latin America?

There, I think, there is a build opportunity. There's fiber-to-the-home as well as the enterprise and dark fiber routes that are less developed. And so there's good opportunity there. Ideally with an existing platform, I think, doing it truly de novo is hard, but there are ways to play it, whether that's through MTP or ATP or maybe a new platform that we could leverage.

And so -- and thinking about leveraging platforms, down in Latin America, we've actually used our tower companies to build small cell infrastructures. And that was really born out of the fact that we couldn't find anything to buy. There really isn't any small cell infrastructure to acquire. So we've naturally pivoted to building. And we're building small cell infrastructure in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico today. So really like the build strategy in small cells. Pivoting to data centers in Latin America real quick, hyperscale versus Edge and sort of traditional enterprise colo, what do you like better?

Yes. Again, I think on the hyperscale side, it's most likely new development. Again, the market there is not as evolved and there's new opportunities, new requirements that we're able to take advantage of through our Scala platform. I think on the enterprise side, it's a little more of a mixed bag. There are existing assets that can be acquired or repurposed, but there will be new build opportunities in that space, too.

Let's move on to Europe. We've now been in Europe. You and I have been investing and operating in Europe for over 2 decades. Today, in Europe, the tower business is front and center. We just made a big investment in a "Buy Strategy" and investing in Vantage Towers. But looking across Europe today, how do you feel going forward in terms of buy versus build?

I think there will be select opportunities to buy more tuck-in type acquisitions, but the bulk of the growth will be from new builds and having platforms like Vantage, like Digita is important in order to be able to take advantage of that.

And in terms of [ red light, green light ] small cell infrastructure in Europe today, do you see that as an emerging asset class over the next decade like it's emerged here in the U.S.?

I do. And FreshWave is experiencing that in the U.K., and I think certain markets on the continent will follow. So that's something we definitely have our eye on.

And as a logical progression of that fiber, what are your thoughts around fiber tenure, very competitive, a lot happening, a lot of big partnerships with carriers trying to build dark fiber. What's your perspective on it?

Well, I think it is a fairly crowded space today. And absent some dislocation that honestly we don't foresee. I think, that would be hard to find as a new entry point. But again, leveraging existing platforms like FreshWave, like the substantial business Zayo has in Europe, that's a way that we can still play that market.

You've talked about in hyperscale data centers, the comparative advantage in Latin Americas being our capability to build, same here in North America. I think we've demonstrated that at Vantage Europe, all of you got to hear from Sureel Choksi, who is our great CEO there, talk about Europe hyperscale data centers and what do you like about it right now between buy and build?

And we're doing both, clearly. There are some very interesting dynamics at play, including this whole notion of data sovereignty, where the EU has said that data regarding its citizens needs to be housed in Europe and then individual countries have gone even further and said their citizens' data needs to be held within the country. So that's spurring significant growth in hyperscale data centers, many of which are being built de novo, and Vantage is at the forefront of that.

It's interesting. On the enterprise side, we looked at a lot of opportunities over the last 5 or 6 years, couldn't get there. Ultimately, we passed on buying really hard to build enterprise colo. And so as you think about what we're doing going forward in edge computing and in enterprise co-location, where are you in terms of buy versus build on traditional data centers in Europe now?

Yes. Well, I think, the recently announced AtlasEdge partnership is a great example of taking that experience and acting on it in a different way, right? We were looking at various data centers and couldn't get there mainly on price. And then sort of changing the frame to more of the edge and thinking about what existing assets might be repurposed to take advantage of that. I think is a great strategy and there's lots of opportunity around that.

You've almost just created a third vertical, right? There's buy, there's build and then there's repurpose. And I agree with you. It's a great opportunity. Last frontier is Asia. We've just entered that market in the last couple of years. It's a market that's not foreign to you. You were the first boots on the ground for Blackstone, opening up their operations there in Asia. Justin Chang is running Asia for us who all of you have heard from today. Why don't we walk through a couple of those verticals and what insights you see over there. Maybe the easiest place to start is always towers in our DNA. where are you today buy versus build?

Yes. Look, I think, again, it's both, maybe buy, then build. We have our EdgePoint platform, which is growing very rapidly, doing both M&A and new build. And I think that will continue. We're looking, of course, at other markets. And there's much growth still to come between the final rollout of 4G and eventually 5G. So there's going to need to be significantly more towers across Asia and EdgePoint and potentially other platforms can take advantage of that.

EdgePoint is also doing small cell infrastructure and building cloud radio access network hubs in the countries that they operate. I also think Japan is one of those really interesting marketplaces for virtualized radio access networks. You think about what Rakuten is doing and what SoftBank has done, that could be a really interesting opportunity as well, maybe a buy-and-build strategy where we're helping virtualize that core of the network. So I think we keep our eye on that. That will be pretty exciting. So towers, small cells, moving into data centers in terms of Asia, looking at that bifurcation between retail enterprise, colo and edge and hyperscale, how do you see it unfolding for us over the next year in those 2 verticals?

So clearly, we are making a push on the hyperscale side through our Agile platform. And I think there's opportunity, clearly, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, even down to Singapore and Australia. So I see us being very active there on the hyperscale side.

Yes. All the web scalers tell us that the one marketplace around the globe where they need the most help and where they're going to turn up the most power compute is going to be in Asia. So that's a huge opportunity for us. Fiber, last vertical, last geography, what are your thoughts on dark and enterprise fiber in Asia?

Yes. I think that's somewhat more challenging given the market structures there. There tend to be significant national companies, many of them already very well established. And so creating or acquiring challengers to that is difficult. But there may be select markets where there's opportunity. And more than likely, that would be in building new routes because, again, as you say, the sort of requirements in those markets are growing exponentially.

And look, I think at the end of the day, given where M&A pricing activity is, as you just said, and what we've experienced in the last -- really, the last 24 months, this exponential rise in multiples has really provided a unique ability for us to pivot and focus more on our greenfield strategies. We think about the first fund that we deployed, what would you say about 70-30, 75-25 between brownfield and greenfield? Would that be a right distribution for the first one?

Yes, roughly.

And then this fund currently, are you seeing more sort of greenfield opportunity being deployed in this fund?

Yes, yes.

And where do you think that mix sits, 60-40 or 65-35?

Probably 60-40.

60-40?

Yes.

So we've just given you a little, a quick trip around the world between CEO and CIO. This is literally live thinking about what we're doing today at DigitalBridge. I would close in saying, particularly on this topic, Ben, the other thing is sometimes when we're thinking about buying assets in this marketplace today, one of the other levers that we've shown to be pretty adept at is, taking companies from a public vehicle into a private vehicle. And those are oftentimes complicated and difficult to maneuver. But I think what makes that unique is, we've been able to navigate that. We've been able to form a lot of capital at scale. And most importantly, we've been able to partner with shareholders and management teams to get those companies to the right place, whether it's our experience with Zayo and working with our partners, EQT and Fidelity, thinking about Boingo, which is a new transaction. And certainly, Landmark, which was a transaction we recently announced. So when we're thinking about big scale opportunities, sometimes some of those best opportunities are bringing a company out of a public format into a private format. Do you see that there's more of those opportunities on a global basis?

Yes, I think so. And as you said, not only changing the form, but also the strategy and doing it outside of the public eye is a much easier proposition than trying to do that when you're subject to quarterly reporting and analyst expectations.

Yes. Well, you've got the chance to hear from Steve Smith earlier today. That's exactly what we've done at Zayo is, we've created massive change there and business transformation, which if they were a public vehicle, they would have been probably pretty heavily criticized. But we've been able to take that business in the last year, really transform it, transform culture, really simplify the business and ultimately create value. Well, this has been a lot of fun, Ben. I enjoy always our dialogue and our debates, and I look forward to many more decades working with you and continuing the debate.

Likewise. Thank you.

Thanks. Well, here we are at the end today. I want to thank you for spending time with us, and learning more about DigitalBridge and our differentiated approach to investing and operating in digital infrastructure. Just to recap today and some of the things that we had talked about. First and foremost, the market. A great opportunity sits in front of us, and we want you to join us in that journey. Second thing is strategy. Our differentiated approach to owning, operating and managing this infrastructure. We hope today that you got a real glimpse into how we do it and the intricacies that are required to build next-generation digital infrastructure. And last but not least, management, our people. You've got great exposure to some of the best executives around the world today that have been entrusted with this digital infrastructure and managing these great companies. I want to thank all of the people that made this happen today. First and foremost, the participants, my trusted partners and all of our employees and their dedication through this trying pandemic. I want to thank my Board for their support and direction and, most importantly, I want to thank our partners, our customers and investors for their faith and trust. We're poised to win. So let's go get it. Thank you.