DigitalBridge Group, Inc. (DBRG)

Investor Day 2021

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Jun 22, 2021

Hello. I'm Severn White, the head of investor relations for Digital Bridge. 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, hear from some of the amazing people across our organization. In fact, if there's one takeaway, one thing we want you to understand about Digital Bridge 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 Mark Ganzi, our president and CEO. We're gonna break today down into five sections, an introduction to our business led by Mark, a case study section that will give you some insight into our background investing successfully across three major thematics, meeting some of our key executives and CEOs, a business and financial overview led by Jackie 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 Mark Ganzi, our President and CEO. Mark? Thanks, Sev. Hi. I'm Mark Yancey, president and CEO of Digital Bridge. Thank you for joining us today. This is a great day for Digital Bridge. 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 02/2013 when we established a new platform built on two 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, Digital Bridge two point o, formerly known as Digital Colony, was about taking that operating platform and 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, Digital Bridge three point zero, 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. Digital infrastructure is the backbone of connectivity. How we communicate, how we share information, how we consume content, and how we work is driving opportunities in five g infrastructure, fiber networks, hyperscale, and edge computing. The pace of technological change And growth of And also a of That's why at Digital Bridge, we are laser focused on investment opportunities in these key areas. A team with over two decades of experience leading one of the world's largest digital infrastructure investment firms, leveraging our deep operational expertise, we know how to serve the growing needs of our customers globally. Our greatest competition is our own capacity to see, shape, and serve the needs of a fully digital interconnected future. This is our story to tell. The time to invest in the infrastructure of tomorrow is today. We are investors. We are operators. We are builders. We are Digital Bridge. 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. And particularly, persistently low global interest rates are driving investor interest in 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 twenty seven 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 a trusted set of hands. 99.99% uptime, the five nines 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 that took down electricity grids across the state earlier this year, Databank's data centers delivered. You'll get to meet Rahul Martinek, the CEO there, today. This is active infrastructure. It's on twenty four seven, 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 over 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 Digital Ridge 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 two strategic pillars: first, digital operating second, our digital investment management platform, two 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 Digital Bridge three point zero. 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 our 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, Mark. Now we're gonna turn to a case study section covering three powerful thematics that we're leveraged to, five g, 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 Digital Bridge 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 five g, 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, cofounder and chief investment officer at Digital Bridge. I oversee our fund investments. Mark and I have been partners for over fifteen years since we started working together when we invested in Mark's company, Global Tower Partners, when I was at Blackstone. After GTP was sold to American Tower in 02/2013, Mark 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 a senior managing director here at Digital Bridge. Today, Ben and I are going to cover the first of three thematic presentations. This one is about five g. 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 five g. What is it, some of the opportunities it creates, and the investment cycle associated with it? Five g is the next generation of mobile connectivity, a revolution in speed and capacity that will not era in enterprise mobility as AI driven device to device communication drives exponential growth in mobile data traffic. Ericsson's twenty twenty one mobile report shows global mobile data traffic ramping from 50 exabytes a month in 2020 to almost five times that level by 2025. Investments in five g will create the capacity to serve both consumer and enterprise demand. Macro cell towers will continue to be central to effective multilayer five g networks, anchoring the mid and low band spectrum deployments that are pivotal to ubiquitous coverage. To enable this first stage of five g, GMSA estimates $1,000,000,000,000 of CapEx will be spent on a global basis over the next six years. In The United States alone, over $80,000,000,000 has committed in just the last year for Spectrum. Deploying capital efficiently into this next cycle will be crucial to carriers and network providers around the world. This makes the shared infrastructure neutral host model of independent tower companies more compelling than ever. Digital Bridge's eight tower co investments operating and growing around the world will benefit from this powerful investment cycle and the improved connectivity that it will deliver. Okay. So you can see why we're so excited about the prospects for five g. Some really interesting use cases and a lot of associated investment opportunities. I hope one of the takeaways here as we discuss five g 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, two g to three g to four g, 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 two to three to four g. And what you've seen at each stage is growth in the number of towers from 60,000 in 1999 to a hundred and twenty thousand ten years later as the four g rollout kicked off. And today, we're over 200,000 traditional towers here in The United States. On a global basis, ex China, that number is over 3,000,000 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 US carriers investing over 80,000,000,000 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 five g. 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 five g rollout. We'll also be part of that solution. Originally, these consolidators maintained 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 and A. Let's talk about how we've successfully executed on these cycles in the past. Specifically, we'll cover two investments, Global Tower Partners or GTP, which Mark founded in 02/2003, and the second is Vertical Bridge, which was founded in 02/2014 by the former GTP team. Now I'm gonna ask Mark 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. Mark, take it away. Thanks, Ben. GTP started in 02/2003, was formed by a view that the tower sector could perhaps have a different approach, how you could build a better company. So I made that decision back then alongside of my partners to build, at that point, what we believed was gonna 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 $4,800,000,000 in 02/2013. 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 built a tower company. And along that road, there were five 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 nineties 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 and 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 three fifty ms and A transactions in ten years. It was an epic amount of M and A, but we had a great team. And most importantly, we had a framework for how you acquired and built 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 Digital Bridge. 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 and 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 02/2005, we did the first cell tower securitization. We went on to hit that marketplace four more times. Today, here at Digital Bridge, 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 and 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 the key partners here at Digital Bridge. Thanks, Mark. GTP was an incredible experience where many of us began working together for the first time. In fact, when it was sold in 02/2013, Mark 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 Digital Bridge. One of our first investments was founding Vertical Bridge in 02/2014 in partnership with Alex Gellman, who'd been the COO of GTP. Alex is gonna 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 cofounders 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 US 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 and 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 twenty fourteen. 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 partner partnered with them at three subsidiaries, acquiring towers from T Mobile, from AT and T, and from myHeartRadio, among others. I've been in this industry for a long time, and I've had many sponsors and investors in my career. Digital Bridge is truly unique. There and there are three aspects that stand out for me for Digital Bridge versus other sponsors. First of all, in the early days, they were extremely helpful on the m and 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 a speed and at a level we could not have done on our own. For example, our first securitization was really viewed as g t p seven more than vertical bridge one, and that helped us tremendously. So all told now, we we have over 2,000,000,000 of equity commitments and nearly 3,000,000,000 of debt facilities, including 1,700,000,000.0 raised through six ABS financings. Lastly, a but not least, a major benefit of being a DB company is the perspective it gives us across The US and the world in communications infrastructure. In The US, we're allied with leaders across all other areas of communications infrastructure, including Zayo, Databank, and Extonet. 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 US. 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 five g market and continue to outperform all of our competitors. And with that, I'd like to say thank you, Digital Bridge, and I'd like to hand it back to Ben and Steven. Thanks, Alex. What's really compelling about the tower playbook that both Mark 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 eight 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 four 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 five g investment here in The US and across the globe, many markets are still in the early stages of their four g deployments. That asynchronous rollout allows us to transfer knowledge we develop in early adapter 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 Taraco experience. We'll start by introducing you to Justin Chang, who leads Digital Bridge'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 Stephen 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 set really interesting set of, regional growth economies, but the four gs penetration levels are pretty low, right? So the experience and the expertise that we have watching and participating in the four gs cycle in The US 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 two countries, the population of those two countries is over 300,000,000 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 five g, 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 levels. 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 underinvested 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 two 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 two acquisitions in Indonesia. We've done three 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 ten 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 at EdgePoint grow and scale from a strategic and an operational standpoint. And we're already doing that. Strategic M and A and finance are two areas where we're already leveraging the global playbook, bringing 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, 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 digital bridge tower consolidation play. We've done it in The US. 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 five g thematic, I'd like to introduce you to Kevin Smithin, our chief commercial officer and head of strategy, who helps secure our investment in Vantage Towers. Hi. I'm Kevin Smithin, the chief commercial and strategy officer at Digital Bridge. I'm happy to walk you through our recent €500,000,000 strategic cornerstone investment in Vantage Towers. Vodafone's recent TowerCo spin off, 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 five g infrastructure opportunity. It operates in four of the largest markets, Germany, Spain, Italy, and The UK, and has number one or number two position in nine 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 five g. With tenancy ratios across the portfolio at 1.6 times tenants per tower and just 1.2 times in its core German market, there is an incredible amount of capacity to expand, especially when you compare that to a market like The US. 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 built to suit commitments over the next five 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 digital bridge can be very impactful. We will help mold Vantage into an independent tower co 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 five g densification drives lease up on existing towers, especially in Germany where the challenger brand Drillisch is going to be building out a five g network and there are also mandatory five g coverage requirements for the three incumbent operators. We are very bullish on the German tower market a result of these factors. Specifically, Vantage is building a number of white spots or built to suit towers with three investment grade anchor tenants. These are some of the highest IRR built 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, Digital Bridge is well positioned to be a key financial partner to Vantage Towers as it takes advantage of M and A opportunities across Europe. Digital Bridge, 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 whirlwind tour of the last twenty 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 Advantage Towers. This is going to continue to be a robust area of investment. As you saw earlier, towers are crucial to the fabric of five g, 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 four g, no one foresaw Uber, TikTok, Zoom, Airbnb, just to name a few. Five g 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 John Malk, who leads our global data center practice, to join us and talk about our next thematic, digital transformation. Hi. I'm, John Mock, a senior managing director at Digital Bridge. 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 enterprise 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 hand it off to Mike Fouse, one of the firm's senior advisers who will join us remotely. Mike, who I referred to as the godfather of data centers, was the founder of Digital Realty and its CEO and serves as the chairman of two of our important data center businesses, DataBank and Vantage. I'll issue those two 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 Digital Bridge'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. Digital transformation, the infusion of digital technology into the DNA of businesses across all industries continues to drive growth in the digital economy. Harnessing the power of data is at the heart of these transformations. To put that into perspective, ninety percent of the world's data today was created in just the last two years. As this data becomes more valuable, where it resides, how it's transported, its security and its availability become increasingly relevant. Today, it's not just the data center's megawatt capacity, it's the level of connectedness and fiber availability that creates value. These are the powerful forces driving demand for new data center capacity on a global basis, estimated to require $1,300,000,000,000 in investment over the next six years to meet demand. For Digital Bridge, it's an addressable market of over $200,000,000,000 in revenue next year, doubling to $400,000,000,000 by 2025. We already operate some of the fastest growing data center businesses serving the world's leading web scale and cloud providers all the way to the edge. This is one of the most exciting areas of investment in digital infrastructure today, with new workloads and data mobility continuing to drive digital transformation forward. Wow. A $1,300,000,000,000 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 two 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 five g 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 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 Faust to provide some perspective. Thank you, John. I appreciate the new title. I I much prefer being the godfather of data centers rather than the grandfather, So I quite like that. As John mentioned, I've been in the data center industry for over twenty years, since February. We've been developing, operating, and investing in data centers around the world in 14 countries on four 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 John, since 2015. So it's been quite a great opportunity for me personally. In my experience, Digital Bridge's 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 a 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 than existed today, and that's after twenty 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 five 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 John. Thanks, Mike. We continue to appreciate and benefit from your insights in the sector. We acquired the company in 02/2016, and shortly thereafter, Rahul 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. Rahul? Hey. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me today. I'm I'm Roland Martinick. I'm the CEO of DataBank. Excited to tell you about the business. I've been in the communication sector, Internet infrastructure sector for over twenty five years. Actually, Mark Anzey and I have been colleagues and associates for twenty of those years. In 02/2015 after he had started Digital Bridge, I joined the team there to work on the data center strategy. So I joined John Malk and Mike Faust. And at the time, we were formulating how to invest in the data center space, and we identified DataBank in early two thousand sixteen as a platform that we thought we could grow into a significant business. Mark's reputation and Ben's reputation, is very well known within our sector. Obviously, they've had tremendous success, and I really was, you know, enamored with the the idea around the convergence of digital infrastructure, cell towers, small cells, fiber, data centers, and how those as a collective unit would kinda converge in the future. So it seemed like a super exciting, opportunity, and, I jumped at it. DataBank was a business that, you know, we felt had a lot of really, good traits. Number one, they had great customers, but that's they had built up over over a five year period. They had great facilities, in the data center space. The asset quality is very important, and that's not just the the data centers themselves, but also the, the customer contracts. And we felt that they also had kind of a a demonstrated track record of operating, and growing the business. What we saw was a business that, you know, had expanded to to six markets, but that, you know, the we could expand them into many, many more markets, which is what we've done over the last four and a half years. DataBank was a company that obviously, when we acquired it, was a relatively small company. It was about 25,000,000 of EBITDA, about 50,000,000 of revenue. You know, it's the same story in terms of, you know, how do you take a business that from one level to the next. You know, we identified some human talent that needed to come into the company, which we recruited and brought in. We also identified a 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 a data center space. And then working with with Digital Bridge, 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 four and a half years and has culminated in kind of our largest transaction, which was the acquisition of 44 data centers from Zee Colo. And now we are the largest private data center operator in The US, 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. Digital Bridge has been our partner from the get go. I mean, they have been the you know, I've worked with many investors over my twenty five 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, you know, cold, but they also are very, very good at helping our portfolio companies execute on their strategy, execute on our capital formation. You know, to give an example, we just completed the first ever a multitenant enterprise data center securitization in the space that created over 200,000,000 of cash flow for the company, over the next five years. And that's an effort we wouldn't have been able to get done without the, the help of of Digital Bridge and their intense knowledge around the sector and also kinda, capital formation. So they've been 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 we're really excited at Databank over the well, you know, what's gonna happen in the next five or ten years. This this kind of movement towards the edge is a real dynamic in really the next phase or the next evolution of Internet infrastructure. You know, with all these customers having to deploy more infrastructure in more markets, we think that our geography is gonna 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 to meet that demand. And I think with Databank, the platform that we have and with our partnership with Digital Bridge, we're gonna we're gonna do really well in the future. Then with that, I'll turn it back to you, John. 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 reach you to Sareel Chotzky, the CEO of Vantage Data Centers. Vantage is the premier hyperscale data center platform in North America and now Europe. Digital Bridge acquired Vantage in 02/2017, and under the leadership of Surreal, the company has successfully expanded across North America and more recently into Europe to support continued customer demand. Let me pass it to Sareel to talk more about Vantage. Sareel, off to you. Thanks, John, 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 Digital Bridge. You know, I first met, Mark Ganzi and John Mach and the Digital Bridge team about five years ago, our former sponsor, Advantage, was selling the company. And when we met Mark, John, and the team, we instantly clicked. What we were at the time was a regional provider. We have data centers in two markets, in Silicon Valley and in the Pacific Northwest. We had some strong hyperscale customer relationships and a reputation for operational excellence. But what Digital Bridge 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 four and a half years of our partnership. First, we started by identifying expansion markets and opportunity to extend our platform from the Western US to a broader US 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 Digital Bridge supported our efforts to acquire Greenfield site and ultimately build 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 twenty eighteen, 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 Quebec where a different language, French, is the primary mode of communication. Just about that time, Digital Bridge introduced us to the parent company of a provider called Four Degrees. They were thinking about selling their data center business at the time. They had a hyperscale tenant. They had two facilities. And ultimately, with Digital Bridge's support, we were able to execute on a proprietary m and a transaction, to acquire into two markets and ultimately create a massive growth engine, for Vantage and accelerate our time to market into Canada by about two years, which is really exciting. Next step 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 backvantage to expand the business in a significant way beyond North America. We started working with Digital Bridge 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 where what whereby we divided that North American business into two. And our existing investors led by Digital Bridge 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 Digital Bridge. And so we were able to continue to work with partners who've been very good to us and give them a set of stabilized cash flows with very attractive characteristics. What that also did is 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 Digital Bridge's support and partnership, we were able to accelerate that plan to expand to six markets within the first eighteen months, excuse me, of operations. And also through an introduction that Digital Bridge made to the CEO of a company called Ethics, acquire again on a proprietary basis a core asset in hyper a hyperscale asset in Frankfurt, with an anchor tenant, hyperscaler that has since grown with us across multiple markets. So in total, we've been able to do two 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 Digital Bridge. With that, I'd like to turn it back over to you, John. Thanks, Suril. 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, Jean Vievre, who helped to lead the transaction to tell you more. Jean Vievre? Hi. I'm Jean Vievre Malzeboisin. I'm a principal at Digital Bridge, and I'm going to walk you through one of our new investments, 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 and demand we're seeing for data center capacity in the region. In fact, Digital Bridge 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 managed 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 one year after launch. So how is Digital Bridge 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 mentors. We assembled an experienced management team based in Brazil led by Marcos Feo, the CEO, who was formerly with IBM and supported by Digital Bridge's deep bench of operating partners with experience in the region. Two, leveraging the customer relationships across the Digital Bridge 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 two years of the sales plan within the first eight 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 customers who have set similar goals. Finally, growth, focusing on expansion both organically and via accretive M and A. In order to meet customer demand, you need 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, John. Thank you, Jean Bieff. 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 Mark. This is where it gets really exciting and where we're looking ahead over the next five to ten 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 and 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, in RAN access networks, CRAN, 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, John Mach, who you've already met, and Warren Rohl, another one of our partners here at Digital Bridge. Thank you, Mark. I'm here again this time with my partner and managing director, Warren Rohl, who leads our global fiber and small cell strategy. Warren? Thanks, John. 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 Mark 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 ten milliseconds down to one or two milliseconds? If you think about an AI system that recognizes 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 where our portfolio 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, Extonet Systems, is the largest private small cell owner and operator in The US with over 30,000 outdoor and indoor nodes serving 89 markets across The US. We originally invested in Extonet in 02/2015, '6 years ago, and we recently facilitated a follow on investment of over 280,000,000 to fund its future growth. Let me introduce you to Jim Hyde, the CEO of Extonet, 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 Extonet Systems. Extonet 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've delivered indoor network solutions in over 300 iconic venues across The US. Places like Cowboys 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 US. We've deployed or have in construction over 32,000 outdoor small cell nodes, second only to Crown Castle here in The US. We serve primarily the large mobile network operators, real estate owners and operators, and very large enterprises. You know, I came to join the Digital Bridge family just about three years ago when Mark Ganzi and I, through mutual friends and acquaintances, really got to know each other better. In fact, I spent twenty 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 twenty years. And as I really started to get to know Mark 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 four c's, 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. You know, the experience with with Digital Bridge 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 pack. 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 five g wave right to the next level. With that, I'll turn it over to John Mop. 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 $14,000,000,000 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 topology. That's right, John. 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 a 30,000 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 to be the CEO. He's the former CEO of Equinix. During Steve's ten years at Equinix, he grew revenues tenfold and equity value 17x. It's a testament to both Digital Bridge 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 twenty twenty. So I'm in my seventh month now and and, really exciting the opportunity and excited about the future here. 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 as it was actually part of my decision to come here. So there's a great opportunity to work closely with Digital Bridge 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 three 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, five gs, the next wave of cloud, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, more compute storage and 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, that our long haul route uniqueness still hold in terms of competitive differentiation in the industry. And I did learn very quickly that 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 thousands to thousands of data centers, enterprises, fiber to the tower, critical companies, some of the largest companies in the world and 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 today, 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, etcetera. The next chapter is going to continue pressing our strength and pressing our advantage in those areas. In addition, we're really going to take advantage of our 37,000 lift 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 demarks in all these locations across North America and Western Europe. That's a big differentiator as we go forward, we're going to really double down in that area. This ties in very nicely to the focus that Digital Bridge is taking to push and look for opportunities that are moving compute, storage, and 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 two, tier three, tier four markets, Digital Bridge is looking there. We will be looking in parallel. And I think the combination of the two of us will find very interesting opportunities. Plenty of capital is aimed at this space. We're gonna be right there along with it. We'll 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 PlatformZayo around the world, it's super exciting and reassuring to me to know that Mark and Warren and the rest of the team at Digital Bridge 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 Digital Bridge portfolio companies, very high with the management team, and Mark has done a terrific job helping us get ready for the next chapter here. And the last thing I would say is having a sponsor like Digital Bridge that understands the critical nature of our business is a huge differentiator in the industry, and we're gonna leverage that. So thank you again for the time today. I hope you have a great rest of meeting today. And with that, I'll turn it over to John. 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 five years. Yes. These are fresh off the press. The first investment we wanna 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 are 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 twenty years, Boingo has built wireless networks that reach over 1,000,000,000 consumers annually, operating nearly a hundred indoor distributed antenna systems or DaaS networks. With over 40,000 DaaS nodes, Bongo is the largest operator of indoor DaaS and commercial Wi Fi 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 and 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 Wi Fi 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 DaaS experience, combined with our take private expertise, were vital ingredients that led to our successful acquisition at an attractive valuation. Digital Bridge 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 five gs growth and are sponsoring the leading management team in the industry led by Mike Finley and Peter Hovaneer. 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 Wi Fi six 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 and 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 Digital Bridge family. As we continue to build five g 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 Extranet. We're very excited about our investment in Boingo and the growth we see ahead for indoor DAS and Wi Fi infrastructure. Thanks, Warren. Great overview of the company and the opportunity. The last company we'll discuss today is another very recent fund investment, Atlas Edge data centers. You may have seen our joint venture announcement last month in partnership with Liberty Global. Atlas Edge 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, Mandri Gavada, will tell you more about it. Mandri? Thanks, John. Hi, everyone. I'm Mandri Gavada. I'm a principal in our London office. I'm really happy to be here today to talk to you about Atlas Edge, 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'll have over a hundred edge sites across The UK, 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 Atlas Edge to be a pan European platform that really extends the fabric of connectivity across the continent. So what differentiates Atlas Edge? First and foremost, its scale. Atlas Edge 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 ten year plus anchor contracts that are gonna 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 billion dollar plus opportunity, and with Liberty's unique carrier relationships and Digital Bridge's operating expertise, this business is going to be really set up for success. So on that Digital Bridge 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 six 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 as a Digital Bridge operating partner. Josh was the CFO of Interxion, which was sold to Digital Realty recently for over $8,000,000,000. Josh shows the the data center platform and the data center market in Europe like 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 digital bridge m and a playbook. We've got a really unique list of opportunities and tuck in m and 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 wanna build across The UK 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. Atlas Edge has a great team and a great strategy, and it's really going to be designed to meet the demands 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 gonna pass it over to Ben, who'll talk about Digital Bridge's value add. Thanks, Mondri. Following those thematic presentations, I'd like to highlight the importance of relationships in our approach to digital infrastructure investing. With three 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, Mark, Matti, and Jeff are gonna 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 Digital Bridge. I'm here to talk about Digital Bridge's value add as an investment manager. Our key objective at Digital Bridge 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 three things. 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 experience 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 on board 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 Digital Bridge 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 Yonagi, is going to say a few words about our capital markets practice. Tom? Thanks so much, Liam. Hi. I'm Tom Yonagi, head of Dent Capital Markets here at Digital Bridge, which I've been leading since I joined in February. 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 a key to the success of our business. Over the last several years, we've executed over $25,000,000,000 in financings, supporting Digital Bridge'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. Digital Bridge has executed 14 seconduritizations, including a number of first of its kind AVS issuances across the different digital infrastructure subsectors. Examples include the first ever hyperscale data center securitization Vantage, the first small cell securitization Extonet, 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 seven hundred and fifty eight million dollar 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 $200,000,000 in liquidity and reduced borrowing costs by more than 50%, creating substantial value for DataVac shareholders. Supporting the strategic financing needs of our companies is one of the key pillars of the Digital value add playbook, and the data bank securitization is a great example of the value we can deliver. Consistent with all my partners at Digital Bridge, 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 Matti 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 to our peer group. First, Net Zero two thousand 30. This is our plan to get Digital Bridge and all of our portfolio companies to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 02/1930. We've created a diverse and talented workforce through mentorship, internships, recruiting, and most importantly, 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, Matti O'Hannon, 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 in 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 three 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 '20 '30 action plan has five key elements. First, measure. We are going to measure and establish our carbon footprint by the end of twenty twenty one. Two, partner. We're gonna 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 twenty twenty two. Four, interim targets. We are gonna have each company set specific emissions reduction targets by the end of twenty twenty five. 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 digital bridge family. As you probably heard my partner, Mark Ganzi, say, people create alpha, not the assets. But 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 two examples, our summer analyst program and our investment in impact data. Yesterday marks the first day of Digital Bridge'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 three 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 on Wall Street over twenty five 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. Impact Data. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Impact Data is launching a network of distributed colo data centers. In conjunction with the United Negro College Fund, Digital Bridge and Impact Data 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's responsible for raising capital around our investment management business. He'll be joined by two of his partners, Leslie Golden and Latifa Tafrij Ghajard, to discuss the growth we're seeing in our I'm 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, Jackie Wu, our CFO, will cover our financial overview, 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 Digital Bridge 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 wanna talk about a few Digital Bridge characteristics that are really resonating with investors. What's unique about what we're doing? At its core, Digital Bridge 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 $400,000,000,000 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 three 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, eight 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 Digital Bridge platform apart. We have almost $3,000,000,000 in fee generating fees and carry to our I'm business through this program. We've been able to deliver a 1.5 times 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 the unique aspects of the Digital Bridge 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 Digital Bridge as a leader in DEI, we recently formed a DEI steering committee to focus on a four 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 Tefrej Gayard, 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 gonna be more digital and more sustainable. So I would like to highlight three aspects of the digital bridge strategy that resonate really well with our European LPs. First, they really appreciate the access to a very resilient and mission critical asset class with a huge market opportunity. This is a $400,000,000,000 opportunity growing at mid to high single digit annually with significant CapEx needs across five g, 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 proven to be very resilient. Over the last twelve months, sixty five percent of the m and a activity has been concentrated on three 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 Digital Bridge, 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 loan 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 digital bridge playbook that's worked so well for over twenty five 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 anytime you're investing in a regional 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 three, four, five years or more behind The US 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 US, in Europe, in Latin America, they're expanding to Asia, where 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 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, etcetera. And fifth, the problems our customers are trying to solve in Asia are the same exact problems that we're solving for them in The US 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 four g and then five g, And how do I do it while creating value, unlocking value in my embedded embedded captive, infrastructure assets? Right? At the same time, Asia's complicated. It's not easy. It's not one 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, to the firm, it's not new to many of us who've worked in that region over the last twenty plus years. So what's our strategy and what's our competitive differentiation? When we look at investment opportunities in Asia, there's really five 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 wanna invest in and we wanna 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 five to seven years, a multi market 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 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 wanna 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, that come up in these parts, these parts of the world. From a thematic standpoint, initially, decided to focus on two 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 in operations on the ground in Japan, Korea, Australia, Taiwan and Singapore. The customers we're serving are the same customers we serve around the world, right? It's The US webscalers as they expand to Asia, and it's the Japanese and Chinese webscalers 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 two thirds of our Asian focused capital on the developed markets of Asia and about a third 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 3,000,000,000 of the world's population, and the digital infrastructure is woefully underinvested in. Most of that population isn't reached 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 Jackie Wu, who's gonna take us through the financial overview. You've heard throughout the day from my amazing Digital Bridge operating partners, and now I'm gonna 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 two first closing, a strong leasing pipeline at DataBank and Vantage stabilized data centers, and continued accelerated monetizations and simplification at our legacy businesses and G and 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 145,000,000 to $155,000,000 in 2021 and digital fee related earnings target range to 90,000,000 to $95,000,000. For our digital operating segment, we are increasing our target range to $130,000,000 to $140,000,000 of revenues and $55,000,000 to $60,000,000 of EBITDA in 2021, driven by organic growth and bolt on acquisitions in our existing investments. In addition to our 2021 guidance, we're 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 a hundred and 80 million to $230,000,000 by 2023 and 240,000,000 to $300,000,000 by 2025. We are targeting digital fee related earnings of 110,000,000 to $140,000,000 by 2023 '1 hundred and '40 to $200,000,000 by 2025. These 2023 and 2025 targets are anticipated to be achieved in expansion of products and scope of our investment offerings. In addition, we expect to achieve in the range of a hundred and 75,000,000 to $225,000,000 of digital operating EBITDA by 2023 and $225,000,000 to $275,000,000 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 twenty twenty, the company has outperformed our original $40,000,000 cost savings through various initiatives, including the reduction of almost half of the company's nondigital 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 and A to operate much more efficiently. The G and A savings related to the legacy nondigital 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 and A of $100,000,000 to $120,000,000 after the digital transformation is complete. And through the first quarter, we are ahead of that plan at approximately $150,000,000 of cash G and A from continuing operation, which is what we had previously targeted by the end of twenty twenty one. While margins will continue to improve, we anticipate modest growth in g and 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 Digital Bridge platform. Our sector leading investment management business allows us to raise third party fee bearing capital to enhance Digital Bridge 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 $1,500,000,000 deployment of capital alongside third party coinvestors and our strong ability to implement strategic financing alternatives, we are able to turn 1 and a half billion dollars of firepower into a $5,000,000,000 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 one by into year ten. This underscores the phenomenal firepower of our platform, Our unique combination of investment management, our operating prowess, 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, Martin Gierksen, Brian Lee and Sonia Kim, where we will join in a roundtable to discuss our the power of our g and a platform as well as the scalable, extensible nature of our platform. Thank you. One of the unique aspects of the Digital Bridge 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 Digital Bridge's operational excellence and entrepreneurial culture to drive best in class people, processes, and systems. Digital Bridge has a diverse team of finance leaders that create value at our global portfolio companies. This team helps build a financial road map for each portfolio company and works beside 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 Martin Dirksen, 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 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 Sonya Kim, our chief accounting officer. Sonya, 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 and 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. Now, Martin, as managing director of tax at Digital Bridge, what are you focused most on? Well, I'm focused, Jackie, 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 one preparation being two of those. Use of best in class technology and a smart outsource 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, Jackie, there are three. One, partnering with our portfolio companies. Two, real time deal structuring side by side our digital operating and I'm investment professionals. And lastly, addressing the structural needs of our LPs in a fund or co invest capacity and being integrated with the investor relations team. Thanks, Martin. 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 Digital Bridge playbook. Thank you all for joining us today. Thanks, Jackie, 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. In getting to that point in 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 Digital Bridge today is we have that capability to build great companies through acquisitions or through greenfield. Joined by my partner, Ben Jenkins. And, Ben, 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 two 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 four corners and and the key elements in our process. It ultimately then becomes a relative value question. When we see M and 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. We're sitting in those investment committees. You and I debate this all the time. We've been debating it for the twenty plus years we've known each other. But, when we think about those four corners of underwriting, you know, 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. Yeah. 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 a really good next topic just around counterparty credit Sure. So, you know, 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 tenor of those contracts matters a lot. Yeah. And and 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 two quadrants in ultimately defining that framework is, market dynamics and 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 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, yeah, 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 four corners, and that ultimately frames the dialogue around buying versus building. And the key at at DigitalRich today is we're 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 in North America for a second? And And I'll give the vertical, and let's talk a little bit about whether we're buying or we're builders. Sure. Or maybe we're neither. Some of these situations 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 or you a builder? We're builders today with, where m and 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 three or four times replacement cost in the M and A market. And then we take that into sort of edge and and and enterprise colocation. I would say we're probably doing both today. We're buying and we're building at the same time. Yeah. I'd say on enterprise, probably more buying Yep. 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 and 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. You know, with Extonet 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 nineties 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. 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. You know, 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, two quarters looking at a couple of opportunities. And how do you feel and where's your conviction around fiber in Latin There, I think, there is a build opportunity. There's, you know, 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 in thinking about leveraging platforms, down in Latin America, we've actually used our tower companies to build small cell infrastructure. 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, you know, sort of traditional enterprise colo, what do you like better? Yeah. 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 two decades. Today in Europe, tower business is front and center. We just made a big investment in a, quote unquote, buy strategy in 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 do you see that as an emerging asset class over the next decade like it's emerged here in The US? I do. And, you know, Fresh Wave is experiencing that in The UK, 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, 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. Mhmm. 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 talked about in hyperscale data centers the the comparative advantage in Latin America as being our capability to build. Same same here in North America. I think we've demonstrated that at Vantage Europe. All of you got to hear from Sareel, Chosky, who is our great CEO there. Talk about Europe hyperscale data centers, and and what do you like about it right now between buy and build? Sure. And we're doing both, you know, there's 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, you know, 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. You know, it's interesting. You know, on the enterprise side, we looked at a lot of opportunities over the last five or six 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 colocation, where are you in terms of buy versus build on traditional data centers in Europe now? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, the recently announced Atlas Edge 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, then there's repurpose. And I agree with you. It's 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 Yeah. In our DNA. Where are you today, buy versus build? Yeah. Look, I think, again, it's both. Maybe buy then build. Mhmm. You know, we have, our EdgePoint platform, which is growing very rapidly, doing both, m and 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, you know, the final rollout of four g and eventually five g. So there's gonna need to be significantly more towers across Asia, and, EdgePoint and potentially other platforms can take advantage of that. You know, EdgePoint is also doing small cell infrastructure and building, cloud radio access network hubs, in in the countries that they operate. I I I also think Japan is one of those really interesting marketplaces for virtualized, you know, 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 in over the next year in in those two 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. Yeah. 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 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 in Asia? Yeah. I think that's somewhat more challenging given the market, structures there. 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, you know, 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 and A pricing activity is, as you just said, and what we've experienced in the last really, the last twenty four 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 fund? Roughly. And then this fund currently, are you seeing more ground sort of greenfield opportunity being deployed in this Yeah. And where do you think that mix sits? Sixty forty or 6535? Probably 6040. Sixty '40. Yeah. 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 Digital Bridge. I would close in saying, you know, 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 often times 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, in 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 are bringing a company out of a public format into a 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. Yeah. Well, you'll you you got the chance to hear from Steve Smith earlier today. That's exactly what we've done at Zayo is we've created massive, you know, 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 our dialogue and our debates. And, I look forward to many more decades working with you and and continuing the debate. Likewise. Thank you. Thanks. Well, here we are at the end today. I wanna thank you for spending time with us and learning more about Digital Bridge and our differentiated approach to investing and operating in digital infrastructure. Just to recap today and some of the things that we 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 got great exposure to some of the best executives around the world today that are been entrusted with this digital infrastructure and managing these great companies. I wanna 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 wanna thank my board for their support and direction. And most importantly, I wanna 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.

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