Well, good morning. For those joining us via the webcast, welcome back to Citi's 2023 Communications, Media, and Entertainment Conference. For those of you I haven't met, I'm Michael Rollins, and I cover the communication services and infrastructure categories for Citi Research. Before we get started, I'd like to mention that we do have disclosures available at the registration desk and on the Citi Velocity page from which you're streaming the audio. We're gonna work to incorporate your questions into today's discussion.
If you're in the room, you can click the button on the microphone, and we'll get to you. If you're streaming, there should be a question box for you to enter in your questions. With all that out of the way, I'd like to welcome back Marc Ganzi, President and CEO of DigitalBridge. Marc, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks, Michael. It's good to be back here again.
Well, to kick us off, it's kind of a tradition just to take a step back as we're entering the new year, and we'd like to learn more about the strategic and operating priorities for DigitalBridge and maybe how they're different than they were a year ago.
Well, look, we're kind of 3 years into this journey of transforming the company, and I think we're now into sort of the final quarter of that transformation. We think it's actually pretty simple, 23. I think when the world gets complicated, it's always good leadership is about making things really simple. Simple for our shareholders, simple for our employees, simple for our partners. I take a step back and I say, there's 3 things that we need to do, and I think we will do well this year. First and foremost is simplification. You know, historically, we've had 2 different businesses. We've had our operating business, and we've had our investment management platform.
We made the signal over a year ago that, by de-risking that we were gonna move towards an asset-light digital infrastructure ownership model. We're now in the final phase of that. We have two assets that sit in our operating side of our business that have now both moved into continuation funds. That makes it really easy in terms of direction of travel for investors to understand where we're going with those two assets this year. First, with DataBank, really fantastic transaction last year. Great execution for our shareholders. Most importantly, retaining that asset, but just moving it from operating to IM. You know, today we have that 11% stake in that business, and we'll continue to fundraise, Michael, through the end of June.
As we fundraise, ultimately I wanna get that position between 5%-8%, which is a natural GP stake in a fund. That is a single asset fund. It's a continuation fund. We did that with Swiss Life and EDF, now we've had other investors join that fund. It was great execution. We got to retain the asset. We have a new long-term permanent capital structure in place, which helps the company grow. We've got long-term fee and carry, which is great for our investment management business. It really was hitting on all sort of three, you know, key priorities that we that we laid out for DataBank last year. On the Vantage side, we have about a 12% stake in Vantage SDC. It's a great business.
That asset, set of assets is also in a continuation fund, you know, long-term fee, permanent capital, and moving quite well. We believe ultimately we'd like to rightsized that position and get it in a good place and move it permanently over to the investment management side. Why are we doing that? Those are really the last two operating assets that we have. That'll complete, you know, approximately a $105 billion-$110 billion asset rotation in three years. It was really tremendous. We feel good about that, but there's no victory laps. We gotta keep going out and executing. As we made the decision to move asset light, comes our second set of priorities behind simplification, which is form capital.
We did a great job forming capital last year in a very tough market. I think you hear it from public LPs and private LPs alike that if you're a public LP and you're a hedge fund and you're out raising money, you know how hard it is. You're facing redemptions, and you know that you're only as good as the last quarter performance. On the private side, you've now heard commentary from the likes of Blackstone and Carlyle and TPG and EQT and others that saying that capital formation is getting harder. In the face of that, we laid out some priorities last year in terms of what we wanted to raise.
We, you know, clearly went out and did a great job of executing against that plan in terms of forming capital in a tough market. We feel good about our capital formation plan for this year and next year. Our guidance remains unchanged. I know that may come as a surprise because I think other folks that are in the asset light business or alternative asset management business will tell you it's gonna be harder to raise capital. Why do we have conviction around those things? We have conviction because we're in a great asset class. We have a great track record. We are the largest, you know, private owner and operator of digital infrastructure globally today.
Pro forma for the Switch closing and Deutsche Telekom closing and the AMP transaction, will be north of $70 billion of assets under management. That puts us in a pretty unique category in terms of our size and our scale. The one thing we do hear on a global basis is that size and scale does matter, and I'll come to that as our third priority as the last one. Capital formation remains in sharp focus. I've spent the last 90 days, I spent the entire Q4 traveling around the world talking to LPs. I reached out to about pretty much of our top 100 limited partners globally. Have a very good sense of what's on their mind, you know, where their denominator has gone in the last year.
How are they thinking about asset allocation? Where does infrastructure fit? Where do real assets fit? Where does digital infrastructure fit? We feel really confident that that remains a high priority for most global LPs. That's sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, pension systems, and endowments. We feel very strongly about our ability to form capital. We're now over the 90% threshold on fund 2. We continue to raise capital in our core fund, in our credit fund, and we also had successful co-investment strategies that were executed in the Q4, like a Switch and like a Deutsche Telekom Towers, where we continue to raise third-party capital. We feel like we're in a very good spot, and we do feel like that our business is different from others.
We've developed a very natural strategic moat in digital infrastructure that others just don't have. We're in an asset class where allocators are still confident they can put capital to work in private digital infrastructure, where we feel like we have a dominant position. The third priority for me in 23 is it's all about the 27 companies we own. Operating performance is everything. We had a very good Q3, as you saw in our marks. Our portfolio, fund one and fund two, actually marked up when our peers had funds that were marking down. What's interesting is we have great independence in how we value those assets in those portfolio companies. Discounted cash flow methodology, private market multiples, and public market multiples. There's a sort of triangle effect on how you market.
What is working in our operating companies today, Mike, is leasing. Organic growth persisted in Q3. We're now seeing the early results of the Q4. Organic growth remained intact. Our businesses hit their objectives for the year. Leasing was strong. New construction starts were quite strong. The technical fundamentals of what we're doing down at our operating businesses are working. That's really the key for our LPs and for what we do. As a product of that, when you build really unique platforms and you build great companies, they retain their value. We demonstrated that with the sale of Wildstone, we demonstrated that with the sale of Vantage Towers, and we demonstrated that with the exit on DataBank. Three fantastic exits where the multiples were well in the mid to high 20s.
That kind of defies what's happening in the public markets. I think there is this disconnect between private and public markets, so I have to focus on private markets. I have to focus on our 27 CEOs, those 27 companies, and making sure that we continue to support them, give them capital when appropriate, and making sure that they maintain strong liquidity. Through sort of this, you know, this sort of turbulent macro environment, we've actually been deleveraging our portfolio. We moved net leverage from 43% to 41% on a loan-to-value basis this year through the Q3. We'll have the statistics on the Q4 soon.
That's what's unique about digital infrastructure. I tell public investors this all the time. Go back and take a photograph of what the markets look like in Q4 2001 and Q4 2008. If you had the conviction to invest in digital infrastructure, take that photograph in the Q4 of 2003, take that photograph in the Q4 of 2010, you'll see the results. Great fund managers, you know, made a strong career in history out of betting on digital infrastructure in a time where the market was perhaps going the other way, some folks were even shorting the thesis.
I think from my perspective, this is one of the most resilient asset classes out there. Our customers continue to invest. Our customers continue to do business with us. This is not new. I mean, we saw that in 2001, we saw that in 2008. Customers continue to put CapEx into the ground and into the facilities because they have to. One thing that we learned in 2008 is people are certainly willing to turn over the keys to their car and give the deed to their house, but God forbid they turn off their social media account or their home broadband. Those two things did not happen.
Mm-hmm.
I like the resilience of our business model. The channel checks with our customers in the Q4 were arguably guarded. You know, there's things happening in tech that are difficult, but these aren't any difficulties that you and I didn't see in 2002 and that we didn't see in 2009. A lot of similarities, and there are some differences too, and we can talk through some of those nuances. I think the state of DigitalBridge today is a lot stronger than it was certainly 3 years ago when I got in the chair and certainly better than it was 1 year ago. I think the growth that we're delivering in our asset-light model and the investment management platform is pretty outstanding.
you know, we're forecasting, you know, 40% CAGR growth this year in our investment management business. That's pretty stunning. Any digital infrastructure business that's gonna deliver 40% growth, that's a stock I think people wanna pay attention to. That's what we're focused on. We have confidence and conviction in our plan, and, we've had a rich history of hitting or exceeding our numbers. We're gonna go out and do that in 2023.
It's a super helpful introduction and gives us a lot to drill down into. You know, maybe one of the comments that, you know, you're describing about the difference between public and private markets. It's been a little bit of a theme for the comm infrastructure management teams that we've met with over the last day and a half. And, you know, I think there's a little surprise on their part for the level of disconnect. Does it surprise you know, given some of the comments that you were just sharing with us, that there is this disconnect, and does it also encourage you to widen your lens to not just look at private investment opportunities but public opportunities given the disconnect?
Yeah. Absolutely. I think some of the best ideas that we've had in the last 2 to 3 years have been taking public companies that were misunderstood and bringing them private. Great example of that was Boingo. You know, that was a business that investors really struggled with. It required incremental CapEx to grow it. There was a change in CEO. There was a change in strategy. We totally understood what Mike Finley was doing, and we knew if we could get Mike private and we could give him capital and he could focus on private enterprise 5G networks instead of worrying about, you know, airplane Wi-Fi, we thought that was a good bet. It turned out that was right.
He's done an excellent job executing. That's a good example of working through the public markets to create a private outcome. I'll make one comment, which is one thing that, again, this is sort of 90-day tour, twice through Asia, twice through the Middle East, twice through Europe. A lot of travel. You know, one consistent theme came out of that, which is still major institutional investors today, Mike, are under allocated to infrastructure. There's a possibility, you know, most of that asset allocation is between 4% and 5% in infrastructure. Some asset allocators think they could go from 4%- 10%. That's a lot of growth. A lot of asset allocators think they're overweight private equity, and they're overweight, you know, liquid securities, i.e.
hedge funds or long funds. We do think our space is a space that's growing. The TAM in terms of the total addressable market is, you know, now north of $13 trillion in digital infrastructure. It's growing at sort of circa $400 billion-$500 billion a year. There's a lot of growth left in what we're doing, and I think investors recognize that. What does that mean? It means that folks like ourselves and other really accomplished and strong investors like Brookfield and Macquarie and EQT and Stonepeak and Blackstone and others are building large infrastructure practices. They've made a clear decision that they wanna put at least 20%-25% of their asset allocation into digital, which is a great opportunity for us. They're all looking for high-quality platforms.
I mean, we look at the transaction we do with Antin, who's a great infrastructure manager, publicly traded out of Europe. They bought our digital media infrastructure business called Wildstone. They valued the platform. They valued the 27 years of contracted cash flows as well, which is very rare. It's the only, you know, roll-up of digital media assets in Europe, and we put that together. We backed the management team. That's one thing that's really interesting. People talk to me about, "Okay, so how do you play this next cycle?" That's one of the questions I got from a lot of your investors this morning.
I said, "Look, we've historically, we've allocated capital in fund 1 and fund 2 to brand-new businesses where we back management teams, or we go out and we buy the best set of assets that we can find, where there's an existing management team, where we can augment it and grow it like we're doing with Switch." We're not afraid to do either. I'm not afraid to build a business, which I've done throughout my 28 years, and I'm not afraid to back great management teams. What's interesting about this next chapter is there's now I get to go back to 2001 and 2008, where we see dislocation.
As we chart our next strategy and what we're doing with the capital that we're forming right now, I look at it as we're adding sort of a third sleeve to what we're gonna do in this next strategy. We're thinking about ways to provide capital to dislocated businesses. We're still gonna go out and find the best assets we can and back the best management teams. We're also going to start a few new businesses as well. This is really the heart of our DNA and what makes me excited about what we're doing in 23.
You mentioned the strength of leasing that you're seeing for your portfolio. Can you unpack that a little bit more in terms of some of the businesses and the products where you're seeing that strength of leasing? Are there any businesses or parts of the portfolio that may be lagging where you want them to be?
Yeah. That's a great question. I think I'm gonna go fast 'cause I know you had some other stuff you wanted to cover. Look, it's back to towers again, right? I think towers has been one of the great resilient asset classes. All of our tower businesses performed really well this year. We don't have the Q4 data fully unpacked yet, but we telegraphed on the call the Q3 data was really strong.
You know, tower cash flow globally across our five different tower businesses was up about, you know, 22% year-over-year. That was a really strong print on the, on, really on the tailwinds of 5G, which we still think there's another good year or two of CapEx spend that's required just to get to a one-to-one overlay on top of LTE. We move into 2025, 2026, and 2027, which will be densification-...
Mm-hmm.
Which will really favor small cells. Strong growth in towers. Towers is one of the leaders. hyperscale was by far the biggest leader. We had a close to 158%, you know, year-over-year CAGR growth, Q3 last year versus Q3 this year. That's just kind of a small snapshot. We gotta wait to see the full data gets unpacked, hyperscale leasing showed no signs of abating, really our businesses, Scala and Vantage, really benefited from that. Vantage is in three different continents, Europe, the U.S., and Asia. We like what we're seeing there. I think on the edge side, DataBank had a really good year. They delivered, they eked out, looks like, you know, a little bit stronger than 10% organic growth for the year.
You probably saw that with Charles and Equinix. They're posting very strong organic growth. We like Edge, we like interconnection. We think those are really hard to replicate assets. Atlas Edge and DataBank are our two edge strategies and both companies performed well. An underperformer was probably colo and managed services. You know, we've got one business left over in the managed services space. It actually held serve this year, so it kinda posted, you know, no EBITDA growth, which I think in managed services you're kinda sorta happy with in this environment. That is one sector that we navigated out of. We've got one asset left in it. And we've tried to stay clear of that sort of enterprise colo managed services model.
I know other folks are in that space, and we just think that space is really tough. The last thing that we like is private cloud. Really highly secure Tier 5 networks. Those are things that we're investing in. We like. This is obviously the Switch thesis of what we're doing with Rob and the team there and fantastic Q4 of leasing. I know previous public shareholders would hate to hear that, but they delivered in the Q4 in a big way, and they're gonna deliver next year. I think big Fortune 500 enterprises have tried the public cloud, and they think there's advantages and disadvantages to it.
I think smart organizations, you're seeing a hybrid IT approach, where there's some of the workloads are sitting in private environments like Switch and some are sitting in public environments like Vantage. We own both of those street corners now. We've got Vantage doing, you know, large public cloud hyperscale in the U.S., and we've got Switch doing large private cloud. I think we're gonna absolutely smash it with Switch. We're pretty excited about getting that company private. That's on the data center side. On the fiber side, you know, we don't have a lot of exposure to resi fiber. I think you know that. We have two small investments, one in the U.K. and one in Chile. We've been pretty, I don't wanna say negative on resi fiber. We like the business model.
We just didn't like it at 20-30 times. We think it's an asset class that trades in the low teens and, you know, on the cable side, trades in the high single digits. Valuation is key in that business. If valuations come down in a zone where we feel comfortable, I think you'll see us step into the resi fiber space and be a material investor. I think on the commercial fiber space, we've got a good business in Asia. We've got a business in Europe, and we've got a business in the U.S. Good execution here in the U.S. It was a, you know, good, strong push to the end of the year that helped us get numbers to record booking levels, and net installs picked up significantly in the Q4.
We had good, really strong execution in the Q4 at Zayo, which was good. That was a story that was a transition story. We brought a new management team, took the business from being a roll-up, but was heavily focused on M&A into an operating mode, which is hard. That takes some time to get there, we feel like the work we did in the back half of this year is now starting to pay off, and we're expecting, you know, we're generally very positive on enterprise fiber for next year. Small cells is kinda last sleeve. We've got a couple of different small cell businesses in Latin America, Asia, U.S., and Europe. I'd say, you know, good year, not a great year. Sort of posting in the kind of 8%-10% organic growth range.
I think that's part and parcel of the fact that densification is still, Mike, another one or two away. We're pretty optimistic for ExteNet and Freshwave in Europe and ExteNet in the U.S., you know, as 5G begins to densify. One hotspot, I would say, in small cells this year was indoor spending. Carriers started to spend again on the indoor side. We did see a lot of positive bookings growth, particularly in the U.K. and the U.S. on indoor networks, and also beginning to roll out private enterprise 5G networks, which we're pretty excited about.
You know, one thing that has also come up a bit over the last few months, at this conference is just this notion of faster digital transformation by corporates and enterprises, as it relates to data center demand, as it relates to fiber. Is this something that you're really seeing accelerate as companies are adapting to a longer hybrid workforce? Is this something that's potentially insulated from the macro or, you know, is this something that's sensitive to whatever the macro conditions end up being for, you know, U.S. and other parts of the world?
I think that the corporate wallet share for IT spend and telco spend is merging, right? I think I know for example, in our company, we've put all of the telecom and IT spend under one person. They're now responsible for that part of the P&L. I think other corporates have done the same as part of their digital transformation strategy. I don't think I'm reinventing the wheel there. I think products like SD-WAN are working because it's nimble and it's diverse and people like that flexibility. I think also corporates really wanna dial up their capacity and dial it down when they want it, and that's the flexibility that SD-WAN gives you. I think we talked about private cloud earlier.
We've seen, you know, a bigger wallet size in the Fortune 500 logos move to private cloud or a hybrid private public cloud model, and I think that's a bit of the future. Look, there's certain workloads that all corporates wanna control, and then there's certain workloads they're prepared to put in the cloud. You're gonna see more of that. Again, that was the thesis we had on Switch, and I think it'll. We'll see how that plays out this year, but it's so far looking quite positive. The last thing I would say is just private 5G networks. You have to think about 5G networks, private 5G networks in kinda 3 different environments. You know, one is a corporate environment. Like, for example, we now have our own private 5G network at DigitalBridge.
When you come into our campus, you can jump onto our network and, as a guest, or you can jump in as a registered user. That toggle now happens effortlessly. If I park my car, the minute I enter sort of our headquarters parking lot, my phone immediately trips onto our network, and that handoff is seamless. Remember, we talked a lot about handoff.
Right.
Three, four years ago.
Yeah.
Would that work? Would it be seamless? Well, it is seamless. Once we're on my network, then all my network resources sit on my phone, and I'm highly secure at that point. There's a lot of comfort as, you know, as an employee, as an executive, that when I'm on that network, I can do what I wanna do. We're seeing more of that. We're seeing that at Boingo, we're seeing that at ExteNet, we're seeing that at Freshwave, and we're also seeing commercial landlords willing to pay for private 5G networks. A lot of what we did with the big MGM signing between ExteNet and MGM is we're building and administrating their private 5G network. We're also running their new Wi-Fi 6 network. Anyone that was previously on their old Wi-Fi network, that's being shut down.
All the customers now know that the old, you know, mobility network is shut down, and if you're on that network, it's dead. If you're not on the new, you know, Wi-Fi 6 network, you're gonna have no coverage in any of MGM's hotels or properties, you know, starting Q2 next year. There's a lot of advantage for a corporate user to control that infrastructure, to control that wireless environment from a private perspective, but also from a public perspective.
I think the apps, the exciting things that MGM is doing with their private network is pretty cool. We're learning a lot as we go down that road with their CIO and their senior leadership, and that was a huge, huge win for ExteNet. You know, we've almost got all the carriers now signed up on that, on that network. We're seeing more of those opportunities. You can see those in convention centers, football stadiums. You can see them in casinos. There's this commercial applications, there's the private business applications, and then there's gonna be this public aspect of, you know, of private 5G networks, when we start seeing municipalities and counties and federal agencies get involved in that.
There's a long runway on private 5G networks. I think that's one of the great massively misunderstood segments of digital infrastructure right now is private 5G networks. We're at the front edge of it with Boingo and Freshwave and Extenet. We're seeing a lot of that activity. In infrastructure, we're seeing digital logistics, how it's impacting airports and ports. We have a major project going with LaGuardia Airport, where we're overlaying private 5G networks.
We're now looking to put those private 5G networks into the airports that AMP Capital owns, so AMP Capital. We're closing on that next week, that takes us more and a little bit into core infrastructure. We think we can take our digital toolkit, and we can overlay that onto traditional infrastructure assets, which is pretty exciting. You talk about digital transformation. Digital transformation can really impact an airport. For example, you know, you take an airport like Luton in London, big airport, kind of a tertiary airport.
If you can change the way a cycle time of when a plane lands from when it's turned and gets back up in the air, or you can change the cycle time of how somebody checks in or how a bag gets routed or how fast somebody orders a coffee from, you know, from Caffè Nero or something, these are things that, real examples of digital transformation, where you're creating more transactions, you're creating more revenue, and with the digital overlay, it changes the investment thesis. This was some of the thinking behind the AMP Capital acquisition that we're closing on.
Are these activities, in your mind, sensitive to the macro backdrop? If we go into recession, do companies say, "Okay, I can live with what I have for a year or two longer?" Or are there real issues and urgency?
Yeah.
you know, these connectivity solutions for their customers or employees?
As Southwest Airlines?
Okay.
I'm joking, but I'm not joking at the same time. I think certain corporate enterprises really understand how digital transformation can positively impact, you know, the core of the business. Delta learned this the hard way, six years ago when they had that major outage in their Atlanta data center. What did they do? They moved to a hybrid IT structure where they had public and private clouds, and they had redundancy. That's an extreme example, right? I think we are seeing more corporate users that are facing those businesses that have a combination of consumer and logistics at the same time. If you don't have redundancy in digital, not only in bandwidth and wireless and data center capacity, but how do you integrate those things to ultimately effectuate operations and workflows?
This is the big conversation we have with corporate users, is how can I take digital? How can I take this investment and then bring it down to the operating level to figure out what are the KPIs and metrics that actually really move our business, right? This is kind of the DNA that I'm pushing down on our 27 companies right now, which is: How do we get smarter? How do we get faster? How do we transact quicker? This is exactly what we've been doing at Zayo for the last better part of 9 months, is how do we impact service delivery? How do you take net installs from gapping out at 120 days to putting someone on a network in 30 days?
Mm-hmm.
How do you do that? You do that through digital transformation. That's an example of where we're implementing that at an asset management level, where we actually have the data, we have the KPIs. You know, for most organizations, you'd be surprised how people don't have control of their data. Like, first thing, the first thing I tell our CEOs is, like, first you gotta control the data. Before you can go start thinking about what your cycle times are and what your metrics are, you better have a really good handle on your data. Once you have the handle on the data, you can begin to weaponize it in different silos, internally and externally, right? You make the decision about what software tools you're gonna use.
Many organizations run out and say, "I'm gonna go buy this software package." Okay, that's a great idea, but do you understand what that software package is capable of doing? And do you have the data to correctly upload and populate that to get to the right place? It's the same stuff we've been doing at DigitalBridge for the last three years in transforming our company, is making sure that we can deliver that data quicker and faster on the performance of our investments back to our LPs and to our public investors as well, which we're doing a much better job of.
I think it was a long-winded way of saying that I think some organizations prioritize this and some don't. I think you're gonna see an environment much like a one in 2008 where CapEx is cut. I think everyone just has to brace for that. It doesn't mean that it's a bad reality for us. I think we performed really well in 2009 and 2010. We had, you know, solid double-digit organic growth when I was running GTP.
Mm-hmm.
Look, customers are still spending money. I mean, that's the key. You can't turn off CapEx, as I said at the beginning of this conversation. We remain, you know, optimistic around our business plan for 2023. I wake up every day, Michael, and I control the variables that I can control. I can't control interest rates. I can't control inflation. I can't control the public equity markets. What I can control is, you know, our business, making it simple for public investors to understand it, deleveraging our business, growing our AUM, growing capital formation, and continuing to deliver great outcomes when we do exit assets for LPs. That's my focus.
You know, one of the things that you talked about in the past, and it might be under the heading of better together, but by having the portfolio that you have, it gives you an ability to cross-sell and, you know, serve your customers with a broader array of product, service, and solution. You know, where is that sitting today? Have you been able to measure some of those benefits?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, the easiest is back here at home in the U.S. We have the largest private tower company, we have the largest private fiber company, we have the largest private hyperscale data center operator, and we have the largest private edge data center operator in DataBank, and we have the largest private small cell operator. That's a unique arsenal of companies. We have five of the, basically the category killers in private digital infrastructure. Those five companies collaborate highly, particularly as it relates to backhaul and connectivity. We now have a big network in Zayo where, you know, Vantage and ExteNet and Vertical Bridge and DataBank all use Zayo. Switch had a huge relationship with Zayo, and now that's getting even bigger.
Now that we've added the largest operator of private cloud environments, it's a really interesting way to do it. I think the collaboration is that as new sort of network spend goes out. Those CEOs now talk and they're very collaborative. We just came out of a week-long CEO summit where first week of December, we bring all our CEOs together. That's what they do. They sit around, they talk about, collaborate, how do we win more market share by going together. You know, that works in situations like a Microsoft. It works in a situation like a DISH or a T-Mobile, where our teams are really collaborating to go grab more market share. They are. The results on an organic basis at those portfolio companies were really strong this year.
As you look at just kinda zooming back out to DigitalBridge, how will DigitalBridge convey value to shareholders in 2023?
Yeah. Look, we laid out a really clear roadmap on some of the parts analysis of, look, here's what our balance sheet assets are worth, here's what our GP position is worth, you know, where the balance sheet is invested in funds. Here's what the investment manager looks like standalone, here's what the carry's worth. When you add those components up, you can see that there's a big disconnect between our valuation and where we trade today, which is fine. I accept that. Where we're moving to is an EPS model.
We're moving to a more easy to understand model by the end of this year, where people can look at top line revenue, earnings, EBITDA, EPS, and that just comes with the simplification and what I call the sort of final quarter of the transformation of the business. Once investors get moved and migrated to that, and they understand there's no existential risk to the balance sheet as we move stuff from operating into IM, that really massively de-levers the business. As we continue to do things like pay off our converts at the beginning of April this year, it just gets easier, right? Less leverage, more predictable earnings, stronger EPS. These are things investors really want to know at the end of the day. It's our job to make it easy for investors to understand it.
Maybe that falls on me for not doing a good job of conveying that. I think we're now in a position where we have a much simpler story. We're growing really fast. I think we highlighted the CAGR growth in investment management. Any digital infrastructure business that's growing at 40% a year CAGR, that's something I think investors should pay attention to. This is a market that's based on today. It's not about the hype or the futures, it's about the technical and the fundamentals. We get that. We hear that feedback from investors. We've taken that feedback in, and I think you'll see in our presentations this year, it'll be very clear what the roadmap is and how we move to this earnings-driven model.
I just finished in saying that, you know, it's been an interesting three years, but now we're on the back end of this thing. It has gotten a lot easier, and it's a lot easier for us to understand. I think the last thing that investors need to understand is the asset-light model that we're doing. This is an interesting way to own digital infrastructure. We think it's a faster-growing model, and that the revenues that we generate from IM are fundamentally longer than traditional digital infrastructure cash flows. You know, our shortest fund is, our traditional funds are 10-year funds. You know, our continuation funds, like DataBank and Manage, have no end of fund life. When you're, when you're forecasting or you're doing a discounted cash flow analysis on our fees, we don't have short-lived funds.
We don't have funds that are 3 to 5 years opportunistic or private equity funds. We have long duration infrastructure funds. It's very easy to underwrite our cash flows. As we raise new capital and we form new capital, it has a really nice layering on effect as we bring on new capital this year. It comes in at a very high margin. You know, we've really got the team in place. We don't really need to go out and hire a bunch of new people. You're gonna see the benefits of scale this year in DigitalBridge as we go out and form new capital.
Does that longer duration, in your mind, reduce the sensitivity to interest rates or increase the sensitivity to rates?
Well, look, at the corporate level, we basically have two forms of debt today, which is our securitized debt, which is fixed, and then we have our convert, which we're paying off in April, as I said earlier. We have a VFN, we don't draw on it. It's drawn at zero. We don't have a lot of corporate debt per se. If you're looking for the roadmap on DigitalBridge on where we're going with our corporate debt stack, you know, we'll continue to access the ABS market 'cause we're the first ones to do an investment management ABS deal. We're gonna continue to tap that market because I think the rating agencies and bond investors understand the long-term nature of our cash flows.
If you look at the ARD date on our securitization and you look at our weighted average, you know, fund, which has, you know, typically 10-11 years left on it, you can see that the cash flows go way past the ARD date on the securitization. It really gives a lot of comfort to investors around the security of that. Once again, as you move the operating debt over to IM and that disappears, it just gets a lot easier for folks to understand our corporate debt profile.
Just lastly, how should investors think about the opportunity for cash repatriation in the future?
Well, look, I think right now our cash position is very strong. We have over $700 million of cash today sitting on our balance sheet. Jacky's done a spectacular job selling assets and putting ourselves in a good position to have cash. The bar is high on where we put that cash to work. We went out and bought shares in the last quarter, which indicated we felt like our stock was undervalued. Our capital allocation policy has been, look, we're gonna try to buy back shares where it makes sense, where we think it's a strong value. We're gonna pay off debt, which we've telegraphed to the street is a high priority for us. We're gonna reinvest, like we're doing with AMP Capital next week, where we can find value.
We're buying something at a single-digit multiple that's very akin to our core business. I think you know my background. We've known each other over 20 years. In 2008, you know, we had a lot of capital that we raised, and we went out and we were pretty aggressive in 2009 and 2010 and rolled up a lot of assets. We think that opportunity exists, Michael, in the investment management business. There are adjacencies that we like renewable energy, private equity, other forms of infrastructure, other forms of digital infrastructure. There's gonna be a lot of investment managers, you know, up for sale at a good value, and we'll be very hawkish about it, and it has to have a very high return right now. Everything, the bar is moved.
Marc, thanks for your time today.
Thanks, Michael. Appreciate it. Good to see you.
Great to see you.