Equinix, Inc. (NASDAQ:EQIX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 6 of 10

Michael Rollins: Yes. So it looked like just on the Slide 12 and Slide 13, just to dig in just for another moment just to make sure I fully appreciate the difference. So it shows the 11% constant currency without power pass-through, 10% after the power pass-through and then it shows a difference in margin as well. So is that the $50 million to $60 million? Or is there an additional amount that we should just be thinking through when making the adjustments to compare it to what’s happening in 2023?

Keith Taylor: No. I mean, it’s relatively — is consistent with what we said. I mean, part of what you’re getting is a normalized versus a normalized without power pass-through. And so the difference between those two is we’re saying that if — we would have done a little bit better had we not been exposed to that Singapore exposure.

Michael Rollins: And then just on the cost for 2023, maybe moving to that, are there any specific sales or operational investments?

Keith Taylor: Yes, definitely. Let me give you a little color on that, Mike. So we — the investments that we were — and I’ve talked about this in a few different forums, that we’re holding a pretty tight line on G&A. We are definitely investing in the go-to-market engine so that’s a clear area of investment. I think we’ll be approaching closer to 700 quota-bearing heads. And so we’ve definitely made that investment. Some of those are — many of those were already on board at our Connect sales event — sales kickoff event and are raring to go for the year. But we’re still adding some as we speak. Product is really not an area of significant incremental investment, but we are adapting sort of exactly how we’re spending our product level investments.

Scott Crenshaw has come in on the digital services side, and I think we’re evolving our areas of focus. We’re going to continue to focus on — we think Metal continues to have significant opportunity. Network Edge is continuing to see momentum in the market. But I think evolving Metal to be a more foundational platform for the ecosystem to bring value to our platform is something we see a lot of value in. And so, we’re excited about the VMC on Equinix that partnership with VMware. And I think that’s sort of more of sort of the color of things to come in terms of more investment in the ecosystem. And so, I think that’s something you’re going to see. And then we’re also going to probably make some efficiency and continued efficiency programs that we think are going to drive long-term, either power efficiencies in terms of PUE improvement, and/or labor efficiencies in the business because we do believe that at some point down the road, we’re going to have to use margin expansion as a way to drive AFFO per share growth.

If you look at the current guide, it’s really being driven by top line growth and then flow through, right? And so — and we’re — but at a very healthy margin. So absent the PPI, we’re at about 48% margin, a little bit of an increase, about 10 bps from where we would have been in 2022. We would have been higher than that because we are delivering operating leverage on G&A and other areas of the business. But we’ve reinvested it into those areas that I just described for you.

Michael Rollins: And just finally on some examples of the ways that you’d like to enrich that platform in terms of the priorities you were sharing with us earlier in the call?

Page 6 of 10