Yeah, sure. All right, great. Good afternoon, everyone. I have the pleasure today of sitting here with Barry Hytinen, the CFO of Iron Mountain. Welcome back, Barry. It's always great to have you here in San Francisco.
Thank you, Calvin. It is great to be here.
So before I get started, let me just read the disclosure note. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales rep. All right, well, you've been here a few times now, Barry. And so you get the backdrop, presenting to a bunch of TMT investors. I think it's always fascinating for most people to actually hear what Iron Mountain does and what they're up to now. So maybe you could just start with an overview of what the company is. I think most people understand Iron Mountain as a document and records management business. But maybe go over what's in the asset portfolio and, more importantly, why they exist together.
Sure. OK. And thanks again for having us, Calvin. I think most people know us as a records management company, the leading kind of market leader in records management. And that's how the company got started. And it's been around for about 70 years, becoming the market leader in records. And so we operate in about 61 countries around the world. We have about 250,000 business-to-business clients. And maybe counterintuitive to the way folks usually think about us in light of the broader economy and paper, we have never stored more physical documents than we're storing today. And so our volume, our physical volume, has continued to grow very consistently, actually, modestly, slightly up each year for the last several years, quarter by quarter.
And we've grown our revenue in that part of the business in the high single-digit percentage range because of both pricing power as well as increased services around our digital solutions business. Now, what I just spoke about, the core records business that most people know us for, is today about 75% of our revenue. What's, I think, underappreciated is, over the last several years, the company has been growing disproportionately in three distinct business units that are all growing. The markets for those are each growing very fast. They are fairly fragmented markets. And they're markets where we think we're fairly advantaged. So one of those is data center, where we have last year, we did $600+ million of revenue. We have signed over 100 megawatts of new leasing each of the last three years. We just gave forward guidance for 125 megawatts this year.
So it'll be our fourth year in a row of doing that. And we've been winning with the winners. We have been growing disproportionately in our data center business through incremental volume from hyperscale clients. I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about data center, so I won't go too much further on that. But that's one of our key growth engines. The second one is our digital solutions business, which last year we exited the year on the fourth quarter run rate of being about a $500 million revenue business. It's been growing at north of 20% for the last several years. And that cross-sells off of our core business very easily because nearly all of our clients need some level of digital solutions work around their digital transformation agendas, digitization.
We have been building out software and services in that part of our business and generating much more recurring revenue. We think that that's another area that has a lot of growth in front of it. Then, our third growth agenda area is our Asset Lifecycle Management business, which is all about IT asset recycle, reuse. It's a very secularly growing portion of the economy. It's a very, very large TAM. We think we're already the largest player in that space. So it's very, very fragmented. There's two parts of that business. There's hyperscale decommissioning, where we are helping hyperscale clients with their need to refresh the gear inside data centers. On average, they do that about once every five years.
And so there's a very significant amount of visibility to future volume because of the lifecycle of gear and the amount of CapEx that's been going to building out data centers in the economy for the last many years. And then the other half of that business is our enterprise business, which is where we're working to cross-sell off of our core client base and then get into a service offering, which we think will grow meaningfully over the next several years. So I think when you look at our growth businesses, which are now 25% of the company, they're all growing north of 20%. And we expect them to continue to do that for a long time. And so that's the recipe for our total growth agenda of growing the company at a double-digit rate consistently, which is something we've been doing for the last several years.
Great. That makes a lot of sense, and maybe before we double-click into each of those businesses, maybe you could just step back. So with that collection of assets, we're obviously two months into 2025. You had your earnings recently. Maybe you could just talk about your strategic priorities for the year and with these assets, and then also, maybe in that, you can comment about Project Matterhorn, which was, for those of you who don't know, a couple of years ago, they set out some growth targets that Barry just referenced. Kind of put that into context with us, too, in that response.
Sure. So for 2025, our key initiatives are in our data center business. It's to grow that business. From a top-line perspective, it's going to grow in the high 20s, close to 30% top-line revenue growth. And that's thanks to significant commencements that we'll have throughout the year. We operate about 400 megawatts of capacity today. And we're like 98% leased in that space. But we're under construction on nearly 200 megawatts, of which we're all almost exclusively and totally pre-leased for. So it's just a matter for us of continuing to execute against our commencements and also, of course, book and sell another 125 megawatts of capacity. We're going to see our margins in data center also lift. We've guided to that being up about 400 basis points year- on- year, which is a continuation of the trend we saw late last year.
So in data center, it's about growing the top line, continuing to grow our bookings engine, as well as improving margin. In our Asset Lifecycle Management business, it's about continuing to grow at a very fast rate. We expect organic growth in the 20s% year- on -year. We are also in the process of integrating and driving a tremendous amount of cost synergies in some of the acquisitions we've recently made in that business and then continuing to cross-sell into new accounts and building our enterprise book of business. That's the focus on the ALM side. In our digital solutions business, it's about continuing to win new revenue from our DXP platform, which is a relatively new offering that we started selling into clients mid-last year. It's been very well received. It has a significant amount of recurring revenue capability.
And we'll be scaling that up throughout a variety of client implementations through the year and just continuing to win in that area. In the core, it's all about, and it has been for some time, continuing to grow our volume modestly and driving a considerable amount of pricing power. We have put forward already our revenue management actions, probably in the vicinity of 85%, 90% of everything that we'll do for the year is already in place and was so a couple of months ago at this point. And so it's about continuing to execute on behalf of our clients and drive very high customer satisfaction and offer them value-added services.
OK. That's great context. So maybe just to double-click on each of those segments, and I'll do it in the order you referenced it in. So maybe on data centers, if you could comment, I guess, a couple of the themes that are, I'm sure, on everyone's mind is AI. What does it mean for the sector and various data center players? Maybe you could elaborate what Iron Mountain is doing to support AI deployments. And you can also comment. I'm sure people would love to hear what you think of the DeepSeek announcement and what that means for you all.
Okay. So if you look at our data center platform today, as I mentioned earlier, we're operating about 400 megawatts. And you don't have to go back very far, five, six, seven years ago, where we were operating much less, like call it 100 megawatts. So we have been growing quite rapidly over the last several years, as I mentioned, winning with a lot of the key hyperscalers, the largest players out there. And so the vast majority of what we have in place, as well as what continues to commence, is not what I would consider AI generally because those are contracts that we've signed over the last few years and that we're ramping into. We do know that many of our hyperscale clients want sites to be AI-ready in the sense of if they want to have water-based cooling, for example, to the rack.
So we have the capability to do that. All of our new builds are AI-ready. And I think as we look at our pipeline, there's clearly more opportunity for incremental AI deployments in the future. But we're not even there yet in terms of what's commencing. So I think that's the next leg of growth for both us and the broader industry. I would tell you that from a DeepSeek standpoint, when we've talked to our key clients on the hyperscale side, none of them have indicated any change in their plans to us. And I think that's both what you've seen publicly as well as what we continue to hear privately. If anything, our pipeline continues to grow.
Interesting. So maybe on the pipeline point, and both from a development pipeline and just your leasing pipeline, I think two of the things that people have been focused on are this time to power, power as a constraint, or finding an adequate supply of power, and then also how it maybe translates into your yield, your yield on development. I know you made some comments on your last earnings call about basically being pretty disciplined and seeking out certain return thresholds or otherwise passing on the business, and so maybe you could elaborate on those two things.
Yeah. So certainly, I would say, broadly speaking, the industry is quite power constrained. And I don't see that changing in the near future. In fact, it's probably going to be years before we work through all of the power constraints in the market. I think that bodes fairly well for developers like ourselves and for yields in light of the fact that there tends to be a fairly significant supply-demand imbalance from a standpoint of it's just hard to keep up with the amount of demand that's out there. And furthermore, when you look at the long lead times on power transmission, whether it be transmission lines, transformers, what have you, if you could be looking at, depending upon the site, anywhere from a couple of years to many years to get power to places that don't have it today.
And so that puts a bigger premium, I think, on what is available to sell over the next one, two, three years. When you look at the amount of demand that's out there from the hyperscale clients over, say, the next decade, it doesn't seem to be there's nowhere near enough power to supply as much demand as they're calling for. And so I think that bodes very well from a standpoint of for the foreseeable future, Calvin. And on the return side, returns have been rising over the last several years. And in some respects, they naturally should in light of the cost of capital has gone up. But if you look at hyperscale cash-on-cash unlevered returns, a few years ago, we and most, I think, in the industry would have been writing in the sevens to eights vicinity.
And I don't think anybody in the industry really is writing, let's say, below double digit at this point, so 10, 11, 12. And you certainly hear about teens from time to time in certain geographies and with certain deployments. And I see that generally continuing. If you look at our average price year- over- year in terms of what we signed, last year we did 116 megawatts. The year before that, we did, I think, 124 megawatts. And year -over -year, the average price per megawatt was up about 40%.
Maybe one more question about your data center business. You made a recent announcement on a JV in the Middle East a couple of months ago. Maybe you can elaborate kind of what were the motivations behind that and why did you choose that particular structure?
Yeah, so that's with Ooredoo, and we're thrilled to be partnering with them. For those of you who aren't familiar with Ooredoo, it is a publicly listed company in Qatar. It is the leading telecommunications player in that space, and they have their own proprietary data centers, and they've won some hyperscale contracts to be built out over time, and I think we were thrilled to have them approach us about partnering because, as they've said publicly, they were looking for a partner that could bring the capability of working with hyperscalers in terms of design, construction, and working with them in terms of how to sell into that marketplace, into those key client relationships.
In light of the strong leasing that our team has done and the deep relationships we've had over many years with the major hyperscalers, I think it was a good example of where we can create incremental value. Ooredoo will, through its data center subsidiary, continue to build out sites in the greater region, not just in Qatar, but throughout. We'll be partnering with them. We'll generate some fee income. We also have a call option to increase our ownership over time in that transaction. We see it as a nice way to get into a market that we hadn't had any exposure to. As you know, Calvin, we weren't in the Middle East at all with our data center presence, although we have a good-sized records business and Asset Lifecycle Management businesses building that market, as is our digital solutions business.
So it gives us another opportunity to play in the space as well as partner with a key player. It's a model that isn't necessarily the one that we're leading with, obviously, in other markets. But in some selected markets, it makes a lot of sense, especially in a marketplace like that one where we'll be working with a company that is obviously majority owned by a major sovereign wealth fund. And if you want to learn more about that, the CEO of Ooredoo spoke about it on CNBC recently. And so you can just Google that and find that. He summarizes the partnership quite well.
OK. So maybe switching gears then to your Asset Lifecycle Management. I think it's clear that the trends driving the data center business that we just talked about are also responsible for driving a lot of the growth in your Asset Lifecycle Management. But what should investors keep an eye on in terms of either growth areas or key metrics to kind of gauge your performance in this business? What should they be focused on?
Yeah. So I think the Asset Lifecycle Management business is an underappreciated portion of our story for a few reasons. One, it's a really big TAM. Think like $30 billion a year. Most of that is unpenetrated. Two, it's secularly growing. IT assets, privacy, concerns around PII, et cetera, are only getting bigger. And also, we're finding companies are more and more concerned about greenwashing. And so they want to have a partnership with someone who can, with a company that can properly dispose of and/or recycle, reuse IT gear after appropriately wiping it, for example. We've got a capability there that we're continuing to build out.
And we think over time, it is a market where clients will want to get to a single vendor relationship where they have a trusted partner, not unlike what they did with records, I might add, in that they have a consistent chain of custody and processes consistent around the world. And they get very clear certifications from us around that the gear was, in fact, wiped and then taken care of responsibly. And so that's a market that we think we can become a big player in. Where, as I mentioned earlier, we're already the largest player in that space. And it is one that tends to be able to build on itself over time because we generally find that we win with a client in a first implementation and then that morphs into a larger relationship.
Because generally speaking, most every corporate that's out there is using, if you will, a little patchwork quilt of a whole bunch of point players around the world or in a given geography to service them. And in light of the sensitivity of this sort of gear, we think it lends itself very well for them to rely on someone like us in that space. And so that's a market that we think can grow for a long period of time. And particularly on the enterprise side, the margins are very good. It's a service offering. And so you think like 20%-30% flow-through EBITDA margins and growing. And the reason that's expanding for us is we have continued to acquire as well as organically build out our own processing capability where we get the full margin chain.
Whereas historically, we were getting a relatively small slice of the economics. As we've built out and bought into that space, we're getting a lot more of the value chain. And then on the hyperscale side, it's very much more of a project-oriented book of business, in some cases multi-year relationships whereby we are decommissioning the assets in hyperscale data centers. Now that one is more of a revenue share model where we might get, let's say, 20 points on the dollar of whatever we recycle and resell for the client. And in that case, we do get some more price volatility in terms of what's going on in the price of gear that we're selling. Over the last year, pricing has been slightly up to sort of steady. And that's what we're expecting, kind of steady in here for 2025.
But we're seeing considerable volume increases in that business as we've won more deals with the hyperscalers and the next level of data center operators. In terms of key metrics, it would be revenue growth, organic growth in terms of revenue, as well as, I would say, synergy capture. If you look at our margin trajectory in that part of our business, we went from actually losing some money in that business a couple of years ago to we made money throughout all of last year and increasingly so with margins lifting. And I think both parts of our business, the hyperscale and the enterprise, can continue to move the margins higher. So there's some nice self-help in that business as we continue to scale up, Calvin.
You alluded to this a little bit earlier when you talked about the landscape being fragmented and you're using M&A to kind of fill in parts of the value chain. But maybe you could just talk about how you see M&A being a growth lever with regards to this product. What would be the typical acquisition profile you'd look at?
Yeah. So we have made a few selected acquisitions on the enterprise side to my point earlier about acquiring capability to do all of the processing end- to- end, so from winning the client relationship pickup to end disposal and/or reselling. And that's how you get the full margin chain of the business. And so we have been selectively acquiring for that capability. And the thing about that market, to your point about it being very fragmented, is the largest probably deal that we've seen is of the order of $100 million-$150 million kind of revenue kind of company. And generally speaking, the multiples we've been seeing, or at least that we're willing to pay, are kind of single digits. So think like six, seven, eight times. And then we synergize that down to, on average, five or less.
And so we think it's sort of a build versus buy equation in terms of acquisition. So of course, it takes a willing buyer and a willing seller. But we're out there. We're looking. We're actively working our pipeline. We've done, I guess, three deals in the last 13 months-14 months. They've been very successful. Each one of them is running ahead of our expectations, both on top line and bottom line. And I think to the extent we can continue to find deals like that, we will do them because it's not a huge call on capital. And it results in a very nice growth engine and cash flow capability for us.
The other thing I'll say is we're aiming to build out our network across the world because we want to be able to go to our clients and say, like we do on records, we can follow you wherever you are. And that will differentiate us considerably from what's available today. So we acquired a business in Australia that gave us processing capability across Australia. We acquired a business in the United States, which gave us broad capability in nearly all 50 states. And we have continued to acquire both in Europe and in the U.S. And we're looking to continue to do that, Calvin.
OK. Great. Well, certainly, definitely not last, but your biggest business. Let's talk about the core records management business first. So two topics I'd want to get your thoughts on. So one, obviously, this new administration, there's a lot of talk about government, DOGE efficiency, and driving gains there. Is that an opportunity for you? How does Iron Mountain think about their relationship with the government and the business opportunities there within?
Yeah. And I appreciate that question because it's certainly been in the news over the last few weeks as well. So we do business with over 200 federal agencies in the United States. And we've been doing business with them for years and years. Now in total, for the entire U.S. federal government, last year we did about $140 million of revenue, Calvin. Inside our core physical storage business, that was about $10 million of revenue and approximately 0.5% of our physical volume. To put that in perspective, I believe the National Archives that the U.S. government has, which is its own internal record center, is about 10X-12X the size of what we're storing for them. And then there are numerous other records centers throughout the federal government.
But in the core NARA, they refer to it as much larger than what we're storing for the federal government. Now with that said, what's the other $130 million of revenue? So it is disproportionately digital transformation and digitization work that we've been doing for various agencies as certain agencies have previously, over the last several years, embraced a level of digital transformation in which they're working from what might be medical files that they're trying to digitize, whether that be for permanent storage or to use in other applications like testing the efficacy of treatment, things of that nature. But that's something that has been a growth area for our digital business. And then the other part, which is a smaller portion of that $130 million, is we have a relatively small data center business with various federal agencies.
So I would say, in my estimation, we'll see how it all plays out. But I think there's actually probably more of a tailwind to us than a headwind because as agencies look to do more digital transformation, that's something that we've shown a strong capability and competency to do with the federal government. So we'd be happy to partner both directly as well as a subcontractor, which is how we go to market today.
OK. And so how would I package this into the outlook for the records management business for this coming year in terms of just growth rates, margin expansion, and just all the initiatives that you talked about on the digital solution side too? When you look at everything in aggregate, how should I think about that core business doing?
Yeah. So if you look at our total revenue out of the records business, we've been growing it at that kind of upper single digit rate for the last several years thanks to steady, slightly up volume, very strong digital solutions growth together with revenue management or pricing power. We expect to continue to generate strong pricing power for the foreseeable future. Something in that mid to upper single digit kind of level is not an unreasonable expectation. And then we also anticipate pretty steady volume, slightly up this year throughout the year. And so I think the outlook is very bright for our records business. And the incremental margins that we generate out of that business are very strong. And that's part of the other underappreciated portion of our story, Calvin, because we generate a lot of cash out of that business.
It's a very capital-light portion of our company, and then we can use both the growth and EBITDA coming out of it together with the cash flow to supplement incremental growth into things like data center.
Makes sense, so maybe I'll ask you one more question about just capital structure. And then we can open it up to some questions from the audience, so on your earnings, you hit a couple of really good milestones, like lowest leverage, I think around five times in a long, long time. You also hiked the dividend, I think 10% or 11%. How do you and the board think about capital allocation between dividend growth, buybacks, leverage, and even just what you mentioned earlier of just reinvesting in the businesses given how capital-intensive data centers is and the like?
So we've made a lot of progress, I would say, in terms of both our balance sheet as well as where our capital allocation is going over the last quite a few years. It wasn't that many years ago that we were about six times levered. And now we're down to five times. And we've been kind of at that level for a while now. And you're correct. It's the lowest level we've been at in over a decade. We aim to be right in that level again at the end of this year. We have a target leverage range of 4.5x to 5.5 x. So we're right at the midpoint of that. We also have a stated intention to pay our dividend at a low to mid 60% of AFFO. So we were right at 60% on our last quarter end.
So we raised the dividend commensurate with our payout ratio target range. We're now kind of on a pro forma basis credit right at the midpoint of the low to mid 60%. The way I think about allocating capital, though, to start with, is we have a lot of growth in front of us. We're operating in markets that are sustainably and secularly growing. And we aim to grow with them and/or take market share in all of them. And so the first call on the capital is really to continue to fuel the growth. And so we are putting a fair amount of capital into data center deployment and development of data centers. But the thing that makes our story a little bit unique, as I pointed out earlier, is we're basically just building the contract. Everything we have under construction right now, 96%, 97%, is pre-leased.
So we open it up. And those contracts begin to generate revenue from the hyperscale clients. And those are contracts that are 10 to 15 years in duration with escalators. And with the kind of return profile that I spoke about earlier, Calvin. So when I look at the business that we're allocating capital into in data center and what is to continue to commence over time, it's actually at a better return profile than what we're operating today. So there's kind of a natural tailwind in our business there. So a lot of capital going into data center in light of the strong leasing that we've had. The other parts of our business are fairly capital-light. We will, as your questions earlier implied, if we see opportunities in ALM to make selected acquisitions, we do that.
But again, in light of the size of those opportunities, it's not a big check, so to speak. And then you should absolutely be expecting us to continue to grow the dividend over time because we have a very favorable outlook for the growth of AFFO. We've been growing it at a high single, low double digit rate. And we expect to continue to do that.
OK. Great. Maybe let's see if there's any questions from the audience here.
Thanks so much for doing this. I'm interested in the site selection question because you see a lot of folks talking about the training being in these newer markets. But some like to do really sticking to core markets. How are you thinking about that? And to what extent is that dictated by your legacy real estate footprint? And tied into that, I'm interested in where you are doing the recycling. Obviously, the IT gear is in need of replacement. How do you think about those older data centers? Because you have a very young footprint that is very flexible in terms of its use. But there's a lot of stuff that dates back to we've heard Equinix looking to completely rebuild some of their older data centers.
So does that give you an advantage as well where you're not just taking out the IT equipment, but those may not be power dense enough to handle some of these new workloads? Does that give you another opportunity?
Yeah. Thanks for those questions. So on site selection, I would say we've recently acquired some additional land and power in Northern Virginia adjacent to our sites in the Manassas area that allow us to continue to expand our campus there. And we've got our own substation there that will help feed the incremental buildings that we'll be putting up there in the Manassas area. We also acquired land for the first time, over 200 megawatts worth, in Richmond. And we have sites to develop in Madrid, in Chicago. We've got a fair amount of land and power in India as well. The way we focus on site selection is based on our client contacts in terms of where do our hyperscale clients look to be adding capacity in the future in a third-party way as opposed to what they're doing on their own.
We aren't seeing any large language model training in the sites that we have. I agree with, I think, what you were alluding to there, which is that that's generally in other geographies than where we've historically been playing. I will tell you, we really like the portfolio that we have. And we will likely continue to add to both locations that we're already in. So we've added some land and power in London, for example, over the last couple of years, as well as Phoenix. I mentioned Northern Virginia. And we will selectively add additional locations over time, but very focused on where do our clients need capacity over the next two, four, five, six years.
In terms of the Asset Lifecycle Management, recycle, reuse, on the hyperscale side, there's a tremendous amount of volume of servers that just need to be decommissioned over time because it tends to be that the hyperscalers use it for, as I mentioned earlier, about five years. They're not taking the gear to obsolescence. There's a considerable residual value in what is there. Where we make our market is we physically roll the racks out of their sites. We bring them to one of our multiple facilities. We wipe anything that's been written to. In some cases, depending upon the relationship, we might then destroy the asset that it was written to because they're so concerned about the privacy nature of it. But in other cases, we could resell.
So then we're physically decommissioning the servers down to the core pieces, for example, the CPU, DRAM, et cetera. And then we sell that through. There's a huge in-building pipeline of demand there in terms of supply there, excuse me, coming out of the hyperscaler locations. In terms of additional third-party data centers, we have many of those as clients as well. But I will say the vast majority of the volume is with the large hyperscalers in that part of the business.
I think we have time for one more question if there is one. Or I'll ask one. I guess it's really interesting to me, given the size of Iron Mountain now. It's one of the largest REITs out there. And you're still not quite investment grade. Is that important to you all, CFO, trying to get to that investment grade status? How do you think about that?
So I think if you look at us, if we were viewed purely as a REIT based on the stated ratings dynamics that the agencies put out there, we would already be investment grade. So it is important to me in the sense of I feel like we should be there. Now, the good news is when we issue bonds, we generally have been able to price them quite well. And the commercial banking relationships we have, I think they are kind of essentially already think of us as investment grade. But of course, we'd rather pay less on the borrowing side. But I will say we're not going to slow down our growth just to get to investment grade. So we're going to continue to invest in our data center platform and our Asset Lifecycle Management platform, et cetera, because we've got such a large opportunity to grow with.
But I would be remiss to say that I'm not interested in being investment grade, Calvin. Yeah, I think we should be.
All right. Well, that's a good spot to end. And thank you again, Barry, for your time.
Thank you for having us.