Equinix, Inc. (EQIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
December 1, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystAll right. Great. I'm Sami Badri with Credit Suisse. Thank you all for joining us. We have the Equinix team today. Steve Madden, VP of Digital Transformation and Segmentation Marketing; and Chip Newcom, Director of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Thank you both for joining us.
Steve Madden
executiveThanks for having us. And quickly, before we dive in, just to cover it off. Some of the things we may be saying today are forward-looking in nature. Please look at our SEC disclosures for risks and uncertainties related to these disclosures.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystAll right. Great.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystSo I kind of wanted to ask the big and most topical question, and it's related to industry consolidation. And it includes some of the takeouts we've seen recently or the announced takeouts. What are the implications of the industry consolidating to an Equinix? Like what -- if there is going to be a change in either your day-to-day business life or any kind of maybe other kind of by-product from consolidation, what would it be?
Chip Newcom
executiveWell, I would say, first, a lot of the deals that we've seen to date have more so been sort of private equity taking out public players. And so in the context of those types of deals, we're largely not playing in that segment of the market. So the wholesale segment of the market that the PE players have been going after largely feels more like a -- more of a traditional real estate type of play where it's arbitrage over cost of capital. And that's never been our segment of the space. So from that standpoint, we're not seeing any real shift. I think the more interesting one is the CoreSite-AMT deal, which admittedly feels a lot about what's the edge going to be. And I think from our perspective, as we think about the edge, we feel like we're the best manifestation of that aggregated edge wherever you want to be around the world. So the fact that we're in 65 markets around the world, we're roughly 20 milliseconds of round trip latency to 80% plus of the population, as you look at most of North America, Western Europe and large parts of Asia Pacific. So from that standpoint, it's where -- how is the edge going to evolve? In terms of use cases, and Steve, you can talk to this more.
Steve Madden
executiveYes.
Chip Newcom
executiveWhat's going to be that need to push further out from that kind of macro edge that we now exist in for a lot of the metros.
Steve Madden
executiveYes. And we're seeing -- we actually have a report that shows there's tremendous growth happening at the edge. There's more data, more consumption. And there is a demand for more kinds of compute in certain spaces to be out there. We've been looking at that, too. But it's very specific, very niche, very few players involved. And it makes sense for tower companies, for example, to think through how am I going to offer not just a point of presence for your radio signals and things, but what if you want to co-locate some preprocessing or some precomputing functions, how would we go about doing that? And I think if you look at the tower companies overall for the last 10 to 20 years, what got them here and look at how technology is changing with 5G and Starlink and all these things going forward, tower itself is going to probably be less important. So what role will they play in that edge space? So we've been looking at that as they're very different in terms of it's not really consolidation, they're completely different activities that happened to happen at the same time. But if they're going into a market of trying to allocate space for certain bespoke clients and customers, how do you run a data center, how do you engage with customers, how do you handle ticketing systems, all those things, how do you work with big companies like large-scale multinational enterprises, government, et cetera, different. And so in a way that could have just acquired skill sets, research experience on how they build out a different business model going forward, and they happen to already have owned assets to do that.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. And then maybe just thinking about a scenario here where AMT predominantly focuses on just retail colocation, so something a bit up Equinix's alley. Could AMT be a formidable rival?
Chip Newcom
executiveYes. I mean, hard to say on that one. Certainly, look, we're already competing with CoreSite within the Americas. And look, they're a good credible competitor from that standpoint. In terms of how we think about our value prop, though, really, as we think about the value proposition of Equinix, it's not just about 1 country. It's about this global platform that we've created, where if you wanted to deploy in 5 different countries across 10 different metros and do that all with 1 consistent provider, we're the only game in town to be able to do that. And oh, by the way, if you need cloud access, access to more than 1,800 networks, we're going to be the natural place that you're going to come to. That deal doesn't really change that global scale and reach that we already have.
Steve Madden
executiveRight. I was going to say the same thing. Yes, they've acquired assets that were already in competitive markets with Equinix, but that was true before. It's not new or different. I think with anything, the tower and the relationship Equinix has had with tower companies has been more of economic -- mutual economic benefit, because they're part of the value chain, from the last mile back to us as an aggregate hub back to cloud. And so no, I don't think that they're going to be -- show up as a direct line competitor for retail space because what makes retail spaces, what Chip said, is this is a place where you can find the shortest distance to all the people you want to do business with. Very different than who's looking after proximity to a factory or proximity to a location where we're not going to be close to. And we've been looking at that market, too. So if we were going to go into the far edge and worry about that, then yes, that would be a space where I see that come up. But we're watching that, too, in that if there's a use case for low latency at the far edge, like automotive -- autonomous vehicles, et cetera, smart factories, we are already 10 milliseconds or 20 round trip from almost the entire population coverage with our locations now. After 5G, that's going to go down to like 5 milliseconds. So then, the amount of use cases that are even latency sensitive is going to go lower, right, because the latency is going to go down. So there's only going to be really bespoke niche things that are obviously going to be valuable and worthwhile doing, but that's a very small like market segment for us. And that's not really worth or really not what we do, right? I can see a need for it. It just wouldn't be we need that we would pursue.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystAnd then I want to shift gears to hyperscale. A couple of years ago, you set out on a course to start building XScale type facilities or these facilities under the XScale JVs. How has the retail colocation cross-pollination between XScale sites and then the retail colo or carrier-neutral sites? How has that been progressing?
Steve Madden
executiveWell, I mean, I can start with that one and pass it to Chip. The reason we did XScale is there are strategic locations where there isn't even a cloud ecosystem and the ecosystem is not growing. And what we can do in that space is bring a location or a facility where we can bring in the clouds, bring in the networks and actually start a much more amplified growth of business in that region. So new markets and new areas. That's why it's not typically America because it's already pretty saturated, but other locations. And we don't have to do it using our own capital, right? That's what the JV structure is for. But it's helping the reach and growth of provider side services in more regions, which is what we all want, right? We want that to grow further at the edge. It's not on the books of retail because we're investing in the retail space to sort of put the money into either broadening the reach of our platform itself into new market metros or capacity and depth in where we're seeing the most pressure in terms of demand. So they're 2 complementary things. They do service the same sort of symbolic model, but they're not conflicting with each other, right, in that regard.
Chip Newcom
executiveYes. And I'd say in terms of the way it has been manifesting itself, it's seeing continued success within the cloud ecosystem and with the enterprise. So it's the fact that we're not just winning the now 100 megawatts worth of capacity that we booked into the XScale JVs. It's also the continuation of winning those on-ramps. And anytime you can say yes to key ecosystem customers, where they're then going to become even more gravitational for the rest of the ecosystem, that has benefits and trickle-down effects, too, where like as you think about the enterprise and the amount of momentum we're seeing there, it's a fact that we are the home of the hybrid and multi-cloud for the enterprise as they're thinking differently. So it's -- I would say, it's still early on in terms of what we're looking to do with XScale, but we're seeing very healthy ecosystem activity coming from it.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. Got it. I wanted to shift gears again on topics and talk about the metaverse because that's now very topical. It's coming up in different ways. You guys are obviously very relevant just given the network hubs and points you guys operate on and control. What does the metaverse mean for Equinix?
Steve Madden
executiveWell, I mean, let's start with what does the metaverse mean for anybody. We're definitely seeing a lot more -- as we digitize the physical world, there's a lot more edge-to-cloud architectures being built, gaming infrastructures, multimedia, Netflix, Zoom and unified communication. And the metaverse or virtual reality, augmented reality is just another manifestation of a use case on an edge-to-cloud architecture. And so yes, there's a lot of business cases for using it. Even at Equinix, a lot of our IBX techs and data center construction people have looked at augmented reality to actually landscape and look at plans and look at where air conditioning units are going to be and show what buildings were going to look like before they're even finished. There's practical use cases in manufacturing, Caterpillar uses it. But is it materially changing the nature of what we're already seeing or already doing? It's like, no. It's actually another use case for having more and more data processing at the edge, in headsets, visors, computers, et cetera, with strong connectivity back to exchange points and back to cloud. And so I think what we'll find is that this is another 1 of a lot of bidirectional data moving from edge to cloud architectures overall.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. Got it. One of the biggest trends of 2021 has been enterprise activity strength. But as we start rounding out 2021 and going into 2022, could you just give us an idea on how to characterize the enterprise demand or the funnel or just some of the trends you're looking at to point to what could be an indication of demand into 2022?
Steve Madden
executiveYes. I mean, well, the shift to digital is happening across all industries, and it was before COVID, right? Everyone was sort of trying to figure out how digital implied new ways of delivering value, digitizing existing infrastructure and services and interacting completely differently with the world. That was happening at a pace, right? And some of our customers way ahead, we call them the Peloton and the bike race. Others are kind of moving along at a slower rate. When COVID happened and the pandemic shifted and changed traffic patterns, moved employees out to the edge, had to rethink supply chain issues and things like that, people that had a strong digital infrastructure were able to adapt fairly quickly and/or survive it better or adapt better. People that didn't, like an industry-wise health care, education, food logistics services, et cetera were further behind and with that, had to react pretty quickly. So what happened then was we saw a lot of headroom in provider capacity and even customer capacity get eaten up with adapting to those changes and shifts. So a lot of them with free capacity headroom consumed in 2020. And the backfill of that being replenished now and the speed of increase of people panicking that they've got to go faster, it's not a visionary plan now. It's kind of mandatory. It's increased the pace of change. So it's a combination of providers, pre-provisioning hardware, backfilling capital or capacity that was eaten in 2020 and going faster. That is unfolding in what we're seeing right now. And is that going to slow down? No. It's manifesting itself in either more usership of services than direct ownership. Customers don't really want to own the assets ideally. They just want to subscribe because things change so quickly. And it's much easier for large partners of ours to provision bulk equipment and just hand it out to people than to have 50 companies go on, procure 50 switches, 50 different ways. So we're seeing a shift in way supply is coming in to try and accelerate that, make it easier. But I think what's happened now is people have realized that their 5-year plan is actually now like a 2- to 3-year plan, and they're going to move quicker.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystJust to round out and just to summarize it, 2022 looks like it's going to be bigger, just given some of the factors you're talking about versus 2021, just...
Steve Madden
executiveFollowing the trends, we're seeing a compound annual growth of just growth in interconnection bandwidth is like 48%. Data is growing at 50% compound annual growth. That's not changing. People are going to need to put that somewhere, connect it and wire it up. So yes, we would expect that the trend would continue through to 2022.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. When we look at Americas versus Europe versus APAC, how do these stories kind of all look a little bit -- maybe you could just compare and contrast where these regions are in their respective narratives.
Steve Madden
executiveAmerica is definitely in the lead. And I would say by looking at our own research and data science, Europe is about a year behind. In some cases, APAC is about 2 years behind, just in terms of what they're doing and how fast they're doing it. The complexities are also different. In Europe, you've got lots of multiple countries. It's much more complex to build out a global infrastructure than it is in the U.S. Same with Asia. You have multiple countries. It's not like you're trying to stitch 2 states together. You've got Singapore and Hong Kong, 2 different countries. So it's slower, but the growth rates are actually also higher. Even though they're coming from a more moderate base, the growth rates are higher in those regions. And that's a lot to do with America pushing out into Europe and pushing out into APAC with export business and growth. And a lot of our customers being global multinational enterprises start usually with the U.S. as a region and then expand that model out into the other regions over time. So it tends to follow. But I think for different reasons, where we've seen a difference is data sovereignty requirements in Europe has driven a lot more localization of data. And in APAC, automotive for Japan, South Korea has been a big deal. And so we're seeing a lot of both manufacturing growth and government activity in APAC.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystOkay. Got it. Got it. One thing I want to hit on is 2021 has rounded out to be, obviously, a very busy year. And your churn is starting to look like it's a little bit lower than what we're all historically are typically used to seeing. So could we just unpack on what's going on? Is it -- is this kind of a more durable and consistent level of churn that we're seeing now, the run rate? Or is churn expected to go back up to where it used to be north of 10%?
Steve Madden
executiveI can speak to sort of things we're doing to try and reduce investing in churn, but I'll let Chip in, so in terms of our economics. But we have been focusing and spending a lot more time on making sure we're getting the right customer with the right workload and use case into the facility, even to the extent that we would turn down business if it just really wasn't a good fit. Because even though they might be excited about it now, within a year or so, they'd start to realize that this wasn't maybe a good fit, and we don't want to be in that situation. So we do a lot of analysis, a lot of modeling and a lot of understanding our customers' workloads and practices to have a conversation on where we think, what they're trying to do more holistically, how much of that should go in Equinix, how much of that should go on cloud, how much of that should go somewhere else. So having a much more real conversation and a much more fruitful and beneficial conversation over time. Wherever we've done that, churn has been zero. So the more of the mainstream growth in investment and development of the customers, we can get towards that model, then the better off for always going to be.
Chip Newcom
executiveYes. And in terms of the rate in a given quarter, as we've said, we expect it to be between that 2% to 2.5% range. It has nicely trended down towards the lower side of that range. For the full year this year, as we said on the Q3 call, we're still expecting it to average between that 2% to 2.5% range. But from our perspective, I think what Steve was saying is spot on. It really is about if you can book the right kind of business to prevent that future churn, that then naturally is going to push things down to the lower end of that range. So the other factor, too, that's been impacting us the last couple of years has been Verizon, where we knew that when we bought those assets, we knew that there was going to be an element of needing to rightsize the facilities. Admittedly, that took a little bit longer than we would have expected. The benefit being that we got a lot more revenue in the process, but it just took longer. Now that we're through that process, that's some of what's pushed us towards the lower end of that range is not having to deal with those assets and that sort of slow drip of churn coming out of them.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. Got it. Last time we were here in person, I think Equinix's percentage of revenue from the channel was about 30%. Last quarter, you guys came in at 35%. Where is the stabilized, normalized level that this could go? Is this a 50% of revenue trajectory? Or is this 35% looking like the destination?
Chip Newcom
executiveI would say in terms of where we would hope the channel to go, if we can get it to 50% or greater, that would be awesome. And part of what we've found, and I think this goes to the enterprise discussion that you were having earlier with Steve, is that working with the channel is a great way to go after and prosecute the enterprise opportunity. Because the reality of setting up a distributed hybrid multi-cloud strategy for an enterprise, they need partners to do that. So they're going to be working with the WWTs and the Accentures, those system integrators. They want to work with their NSPs like an AT&T or a Verizon or an Orange as well as then key technology vendors, all of whom are key channel partners with us, where 75% of our channel bookings were coming from those strategic alliance, technology partners plus then resellers like the NSPs. So that's a great repeatable business and one that we found because we've got 600-plus quota-bearing heads. But when they've got multiples of that going out and pursuing the enterprise, coming together with a bundled solution and, in many cases, a lot of channel wins, it's not just 1 partner, it can be a whole group of different partners going out and prosecuting 1 opportunity, that shortens the sales cycle. You're going in with someone who's already a trusted adviser, and that then helps us move along the enterprise opportunity.
Steve Madden
executiveAnd I think -- I was just going to add on to Chip's point that when we say channel, people usually think reseller just reselling our stuff. But he's right, there's actually much more in terms of skills and assistance and practices that are enabling our customers to move much faster, shrinking the selling cycle, but also the amount of things being offered on the platform are quite large. So if you're going to move to a platform where everyone you want to buy from and who you want to sell to happens to already be there, then that's where this whole platform, we call it Platform Equinix for that reason, it's yes, we're showing it as a channel, but it's actually the ecosystem growing. And for each of those partners that sell something with Platform Equinix, and we might make $1, they're making at least $10. So it's sort of -- that's sort of where we sort of see it is going right now. The reason why we think it's going to keep going is we haven't even taken into account that they're also selling to each other. So Zoom, for example, is a big customer of ours. So a Seagate offering the hyperscale storage. But there's announcement that came out earlier this year, Zoom is now storing all their voice recordings from video calls on Seagate, both of which are growing and building on Platform Equinix. So our partners are also buying and selling across each other as well, and we want that ecosystem growth to keep going. And the last thing I would just throw in is that those partners, even though it's 35% of the revenue, it was more than 60% of our new logos being added to the platform came from channel as well. So this ecosystem is growing itself as well.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. Got it. Well, actually one clarification I would also make is you're right, they're not IT resellers because your channel partners are actually major technology companies, which makes the DNA of your channel look a little bit different than everyone else's channel. The other thing I wanted to hit on was DISH and Open RAN and 5G and your new announcement with DISH. Being their partners on what they're planning on deploying, can you just walk us through this relationship?
Steve Madden
executiveYes.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystAnd this may seem very incrementally new to a lot of people in the industry, at least in the investment community. But for you, you've probably seen elements of this for some of the other telcos. Maybe you could just touch on DISH and their initiative.
Steve Madden
executiveYes. So look at what's happening first. Like I always start with the why. If we look at the growth of, like I said, data and traffic and bandwidth, anything else, interconnection inside our facilities is growing, it's 10x the size of the Internet. Then you've got kind of this whole last mile of bandwidth to end-user consumers, which is not growing anywhere near as fast or as quickly scaled. 5G and all these technologies are adding so much incremental bandwidth that we need for this digital economy to keep going. So all of the last-mile players, WiFi broadband, everyone, DISH, et cetera, Starlink, all these guys are trying to figure out, how do we increase the accessibility in bandwidth and bring that revenue back up to compensate for the fact that it's not keeping up with internal data and cloud? And so we have set up a lab in Infomart in Dallas, with a number of different providers. And it's not just -- it's not that we're just working on RAN, Open RAN on those different standards, we are helping with the standards bodies. But also they're trying to figure out how do I provision and scale on-demand capacity from the endpoint all the way back to the cloud? And there's not very many people who can do that programmatically. And we can because our infrastructure is API-driven and programmatic all the way through. So they're able to start test deployment and operating deployment models with us at scale. And that's why you're sort of starting to see these -- we're going to start offering these new services together as partners because they're already going to be in our location anyway, and we have this programmatic ability to scale it at the level they're going to need to. And the last thing I would just add to that is it's not even just from the provider side. Of course, we work with a lot of enterprise customers who are really interested in this technology becoming available, and they want to be beta testers and pilot users of that infrastructure. So we connect them together. So let me introduce you to these people, and you guys can figure out what you want to try. One example is a rental car company wants to move off private LTE for all their tablets in the field and get on to like network-as-a-service with 5G. And like how do you hook us into that? How do you get us going? Because that's a big chunk of our deployment revenue across different branches. So we're trying to, again, get the business going, get the standards going, get it to move faster. And because we're the ecosystem sort of center point, we have that opportunity to participate that way.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. Got it. I want to talk about and go back to kind of almost the same conversation that we discussed on AMT and just some of the consolidation and just this idea of just industry convergence, data centers and the micro data centers and you even have like XScale, that could be perceived as a bit of a convergence theme. How -- where are we in this convergence idea, right? Are we -- or is it happening now? Is it going to take many years to come before we start seeing several more communication infrastructure convergence assets coming together? Can you just walk us through your thinking on that?
Steve Madden
executiveSure. I mean, you're talking about data centers specifically. I'm watching companies trying to merge, like NSPs buying media companies and then divesting them. Like in some cases, it might make sense for these things to come together. But if they're completely fundamentally different models, and you're not specialized or hyperspecialized at any one thing, you're actually going to do worse off or be worse off in the digital market. So I think all of these things are required, are going to exist and coexist and they have to for the economy to grow. But that doesn't mean that owning them end-to-end or soup to nuts is going to give you any more greater advantage than anybody else. I think if anything, it detracts you that you can't be the best at a particular field if you're spreading yourself so thin. So I don't know if it's convergence per se or just coincidence. I think as what we said earlier, there's a lot of things happening where people are trying to say, "Hey, I'm going to have to get in a new market, right? I'm a tower company. Towers are going to become less important over the next 5 to 10 years. So by then, what should I look like? And what should I be delivering? And how do I start going down that path?" Very different than, I'm acquiring more capacity or more facilities in more locations because I'm trying to expand my reach, which is where, if we do an M&A deal, it's not so much consolidation. It's that we want to get into a new market. And that might be a really quick and easy way to do that because someone has done most of the leg work, and we're very good at that. So I mean let's -- that was my view.
Chip Newcom
executiveYes. And I would say also, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, but for us, where we play and where we think our strong suit is, is all around the ecosystems and being that platform where buyers and sellers of digital services can come together. Now I think the convergence question is, where does that convergence need to occur? And right now, it's at the sort of aggregated edge metro level within our data centers. One would imagine just from a pure physics or size perspective, creating an equivalent ecosystem at the base of the tower is going to be relatively difficult. So as Steve was saying earlier, a lot of the traffic just naturally is going to have to come back to some key aggregation point. And now will there potentially be a need for smaller data centers or something that's slightly further out relative to that aggregated macro edge that Equinix represents? Maybe. We're studying it. It's the kind of thing we're going to continue to look at. But at least as of right now, we feel like for the vast majority of applications and use cases, a lot of that traffic that even, regardless of whatever the convergence ends up looking like, is still naturally going to have to come back to the ecosystems that we've created within our facilities. And that's really where we think the high value creation is, and that's part of the part of the business that we enjoy is the fact that we can drive higher returns from these ecosystems.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystAnd then I wanted to kind of hit on the buy-versus-partner idea here. And specifically, the micro-edge data center theme or idea. Is this a -- Equinix build it themselves? Or is this an Equinix should probably partner for something like this type of opportunity?
Steve Madden
executiveYou mean if we were going to do anything in the fire edge or micro edge?
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystThat's right.
Steve Madden
executiveWe've explored different ideas of, a, how would you do it? And then the second part is, how would you finance it and whether or not to even be part of our business. We've had that conversation for many years. Like as Chip said, we're paying attention to it. But at the moment, that's not a market that we think has enough demand or is equivalent to what we do to want us to invest in that, which is why I think we're interested in seeing what the tower companies do and what other people do. And it's not just the tower companies. They're a huge -- already today, Seagate, for example, flies in helicopter, petabytes of data from offshore ships to our facility to upload to cloud. And there's a lot of data movement happening in horrible ways because there isn't a better answer that is going to show a need for providing more infrastructure at the edge. I just don't think at the moment, Equinix is necessarily, in our current business, the way we're currently doing it, doing anything there. Could we, like we do with JVs and XScale? Anything is possible. It's just at the moment, if 5G -- when 5G comes into more fruition, like I said, the latency that's already from our facility to the edge is going to be halved, if not corded. So then how much is going to be left that's going to be needed to be moved further out? And then is that still worth us going into as a whole business unit or not? I think -- I just think we'll wait and see. I just know that data is going to grow and the need is going to grow, and it's going to be there. But so is the space we're really in, right, is already growing exponentially, too. And we've got to cover for that. And we -- and in terms of cloud, we've done nothing but partner with the cloud to help them with XScale to get into new locations. So whatever we would do is to try, and like Chip said, make sure the ecosystem is, healthy scaling and not being slowed down.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. I wanted to come -- go back to a topic, it's more current regarding energy costs. So given the metrics or the dynamics that we're actually playing out in 3Q of 2021, obviously, power costs went up in some regions. How is that trending in 4Q '21? And do you see a similar issue or a persistence of that dynamic playing out through 2022?
Chip Newcom
executiveYes. So as it relates to the fourth quarter, as we said on the Q3 earnings call, we're fully hedged in terms of our utility needs through the end of this year. And then just like the way that we manage our foreign exchange exposures, we feather into our power costs over time with the goal being to try to smooth out any peaks and troughs of what we would see in terms of how that flows through into our cost model. And we've been very successful at doing that historically. Power as a percentage of revenue has ranged between 10% and 12% for the last however many years. And so we have been actively feathering in. That's part of what we said on the call was that, as you look at unregulated utility markets, we're in 85% hedged in those markets as we look to 2022. So in terms of -- this is -- it's part of the business that we're always focused in on. Certainly, there are going to be markets where we'll have to look at do we need to adjust customer pricing because of increases in utilities costs? And we're looking at all of those factors. But then when we get to February, we'll update the market on what we're expecting for next year. But like all years, it's another factor that we have to play into how we're going to run the business for next year.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. Got it. I did want to talk about just some of the moving pieces with just operating expenses. And year-to-date 2021, you probably saw a little bit lighter operating expenses because of less travel, less sales and marketing, all that. How do you -- how is Equinix positioning and planning for 2022?
Chip Newcom
executiveWell, we sort of joke, we were talking about this in meetings earlier today, but every year, this comes up, and we know that there's natural operating leverage in the business. So from -- the question then is how much of that do you drop through to the bottom line relative to reinvesting back in the business, whether it's investing in the sales force and expanding that out, investing in our products and services or investing in other new activities like XScale. And so we'll look at all of those various different factors. But I'd say less so looking necessarily at 2022, but looking over the long-term time horizon. We know, to hit the targets that we put out at Analyst Day back in June, we know that there needs to be natural operating leverage in the business. And part of what we've been investing behind in '21, and it will continue into '22, is how do we get more efficient with our SG&A burden. So how do we get more efficient so that we've got more machine to customer conversations in terms of the sales force not having to touch every single deal, not having to touch all of the channel deals. So how do you get more efficient with that or get more efficient with back-office functions as well? So from our perspective, the goal is still very much to drive margins up into the right over time. Any given year, admittedly, we're going to have to look at what is the operating plan. But recognizing that, to hit our Analyst Day targets we laid out back in June, we know we're going to have to expand our margins to 50% by 2025.
Steve Madden
executiveRight.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystGot it. Got it. Well, Chip, Steve, thank you very much for the time.
Steve Madden
executiveThank you.
Ahmed Sami Badri
analystWe really appreciate you guys coming out and telling us more about your company.
Steve Madden
executiveThank you very much.
Chip Newcom
executiveThanks, Sami.
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