Digital 9 makes a good start – Digital 9 Infrastructure has published its first set of results since its IPO in March 2021. It raised £300m then and expanded that by a further £450m over the course of the year. The year end NAV was 104.6p. The company also declared dividends totalling 4.5p (6p annualised), in line with its IPO target.
Capital deployed (including committed funds) during the period amounted to £462m and comprised:
- Aqua Comms – a leading owner and operator of 20,000km of modern subsea fibre systems, headquartered in Ireland;
- EMIC-1 – a partnership with Meta on a new 10,000km subsea fibre system connecting Europe and India;
- Verne Global – the leading Icelandic data centre platform, with 24MW capacity and 100% powered from renewable sources; and
- SeaEdge UK 1 – a data centre and subsea cable landing station in the UK.
Since the year end:
- In January 2022, the company announced a follow up investment of $93m into Verne Global to expand its capacity to 40MW.
- In January 2022, it raised further gross equity proceeds of £95.2m at 108p per share.
- In March 2022, it completed on a syndicated revolving credit facility of £300m from a consortium of banks, led by Royal Bank of Scotland International and including DNB (UK) Limited, Royal Bank of Canada and Santander. The facility will be used to finance acquisitions on a short-term basis.
The statement says that Aqua’s revenues are expected to grow at a steady 10% per annum over coming years. Its transatlantic cables have been upgraded to deliver 400GB. Cables from Dublin to Blackpool, including Isle of Man; and connecting Newcastle UK to Houstrup Denmark went live in Q1 2022. Verne Global outperformed its budgets in 2021, with revenues growing by 80%. Across its investments, D9 has a total of 95 customers generating an estimated recurring monthly revenue of £3.6m.
DGI9 : Digital 9 makes a good start