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Equinix, Inc. (EQIX)

Q4 2009 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 11, 2010

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Equinix Q4 conference call. All lines will be able to be on listen only and we will open up for questions. Also, today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time. I’d like to turn the call over to Jason Starr, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Jason Starr Welcome to our Q4 and fiscal year 2009 results conference call. Before we get started I would like to remind everyone that some of the statements that we’ll be making today are forward-looking in nature and involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary significantly from those statements and may be affected by the risks we identified in today’s press release and those identified in our filings with the SEC including our Form 10K filed on February 26, 2009 and Form 10Q filed on October 26, 2009. Equinix assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or comment on forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition, in light of regulation fair disclosure, it is Equinix’s policy not to comment on its financial guidance during the quarter unless it is done through an implicit public disclosure. In addition, we’ll provide non-GAAP measures on today’s conference call. We provide a reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a list of the reasons why the company’ uses these measures in today’s press release on the Equinix investor relations page at www.Equinix.com. We would also like to remind you that we post important information about the company on the investor relations page of our website. We encourage you to check our website regularly for the most current available information. With us today are Steve Smith, Equinix’s Chief Executive Officer and President; Keith Taylor, Equinix’s Chief Financial Officer; and Jarrett Appleby, Equinix’s Chief Marketing Officer. Following our prepared remarks we’ll be taking questions from sales side analyst. In the interest of wrapping this call up in one hour we would like to ask these analysts to limit any follow on questions to just one. At this time I’ll turn the call over to Steve.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

I’m pleased to report that Equinix delivered strong results in the fourth quarter with annual revenue growth of 25% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 40% which finishes off another outstanding year of top and bottom line growth, well ahead of industry rates. We’re very proud of these operating results especially when we consider the challenging economic environment that most companies faced worldwide in 2009. Given the uncertain economic outlook at this time last year we laid out a plan that provided us with maximum flexibility to scale our discretionary investments up or down as required by market conditions. As part of this flexibility we managed our business very aggressively to focus on the new reality at the time with an earn it before you spend it mindset. Of course, this also contributed to our strong over performance in 2009’s adjusted EBITDA result. As the year unfolded and the demand for our services remained strong, we made an important decision to continue to invest in the core of our business to better position us to capitalize on our longer term opportunity. As many competitors were constrained in their ability to invest in their growth, we’ve now gained an important competitive advantage. This decision enabled us to make significant progress on several important growth initiatives in 2009 beyond just achieving our key financial objectives. First, we continued the expansion of 14 of our 18 markets where we have been experiencing significant capacity constraints with over $300 million in expansion cap ex this past year. With today’s announcements we still have expansions underway in eight markets while we’re actively reviewing several others. By the close of 2010 these efforts will have expanded our cabinet capacity by approximately 60% since the end of 2007 for a total of over five million gross square feet…

Keith D. Taylor

Management

I’m pleased to provide you with our fourth quarter financial results, some highlights for the full year and provide you some insights in to our expectations for Q1 and the rest of 2010. Let me first state though that we continue to see signs of economic improvement although we’ll remain focused on our key leading indicators for the coming year to ensure we don’t over commit our resources. We’ll continue to be disciplined about our expansion decisions making appropriate investments in the areas that form the foundation of our future growth; that is our people primarily in sales, marketing and operations, our systems driving towards a global single instance of ORACLE and operations investing in the IBX operational reliability. With that as a backdrop let me get to the quarter and first discuss revenues. Our Q4 revenues were $242.6 million, a 7% quarter-over-quarter increase and up 27% over the same quarter last year reflecting strong sale performance across each of our three regions. The US dollar remained volatile during Q4 resulting in an fx benefit of $900,000 as we compare to the Q4 guidance rates or a $2.6 million benefit using the average rates in affect during the prior quarter. US revenues increased $144.5 million a 6% increase compared to last quarter reflecting strong bookings and revenue related to the delayed billings from some of the negotiate customer agreements that we entered in to during the first half of the year. European revenues increased to $64.5 million in the quarter a 6% sequential improvement, partially the result of growth in our power revenues and a stronger EU operating currency compared to the US dollar. Asia Pacific revenues increased to $33.6 million in the quarter, a 10% increase over the prior quarter driven by continued strong interconnection revenue growth and stronger…

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Let’s now shift our discussion to a quick review of some highlights and business trends that we saw in each of the three operating regions during the fourth quarter. In the US market, bookings were balanced across all vertical segments with the strongest quarter of outbound bookings to Europe and Asia that we’ve ever had. Overall, the pipeline remains very strong and actually increased in a couple of our key markets like New York, Chicago and the Mid Atlantic region. Our interconnection product count continues to grow with particular strength in DC and New York reflecting momentum in the network and financial ecosystems. On the inventory front, we have recently opened our expansions in downtown LA and Chicago and have projects underway in New York, DC and Silicon Valley to address the capacity constraints we expect to experience in these markets during the middle part of 2010. Lastly, in the Dallas market we’re evaluating options to address our constraints here as well. Overall, we’re not seeing any significant exchanges to the competitive landscape with pricing remaining firm for cabinets, power and interconnection. Finally, the length of some of our contracts are starting to go out past our two to three year historical average. In fact, we signed a 10 year contract with a Fortune 100 customer in Q4. Shifting to the European market, we saw strong top line growth with our strongest bookings quarter for the year offset in part by the two churns that Keith mentioned. Our bookings were comprised of a good mix of local and global deals with particular strength in enterprise and the financial services segments. We added a total of 44 new customers in the quarter. Our global scale and reach is definitely differentiating us from our competition when we look at the quantity of…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from David Barden – Bank of America Merrill Lynch. David Barden – Bank of America Merrill Lynch: I guess two if I could, the first one was just following up maybe Steve on the comments you made about the $110 million of the cap ex is kind of earmarked for projects that you haven’t really solidified yet, presumably new capacity builds that would impact 2011 expansion and growth. If you could clarify or confirm that, that would be helpful. The second, on the sequential monthly revenue per cabinet improvement can you kind of speak specifically to the relative impact to the pricing dynamics versus mix shifts within the demand profile from more advanced space, etc.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Let me start off with the first part of that and maybe Keith could address the pricing issue on that. The $110 cap ex that we signaled is made up of three buckets, $15 million for maintenance cap ex – is that the question you were asking David? David Barden – Bank of America Merrill Lynch: No, you made a comment about roughly $100 million of cap ex related to projects that you weren’t ready to discuss yet and presumably that was going to be new builds related to 2011. I just wanted some clarification.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

I’m sorry I thought you were referring to the $110. So the $110 that’s for other projects, that other activity that we have going on internally that we run through our internal review process, take to our board before we take it externally to the market. So there are several markets where we are watching the fill rates and we’re tracking the pipeline and all the stuff that we track in those markets and then when we make a decision to proceed based on fill rate analysis and when we think we’ll go dark or restricted, we make a decision, we run it through the internal gauntlet and then we kick it externally. David Barden – Bank of America Merrill Lynch: So that would explain if the market was kind of expecting $400 million cap ex, you’re looking at $400 to $500 million and the reason why we don’t see it on the build plans is because we just haven’t solidified it yet?

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Correct. On that piece that is a correct statement.

Keith D. Taylor

Management

On pricing David, hopefully what is happening is if you think about pricing and I call it on a spot basis with our service offering, pricing is remaining firm and stable, that is what we like to say with our investors and the people on the call today. So from that perspective, you’re not seeing any meaningful increase from a price point perspective other than customers are buying more products and services per average unit of measure today than they have in the past. Certainly as we’ve got higher powered cabinets today in all of our newer builds, customers are buying more power than they did in the past. So we typically think about 3% to 5% price increases on an annual basis but part of that and in addition to that part of it is customers are buying more products and services so incremental cross connect or additional power circuit and that’s one of the key drivers in our growth, particularly in the US.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Chris Larsen – Piper Jaffray. Chris Larsen – Piper Jaffray: Just a quick clarification, as I look at the guidance midpoint suggest EBITDA is relatively flat but revenues is up and I just want to clarify that is the extra or the incremental costs from the new facilities that you’re bringing on right now that you announced today before they get any revenues? Then secondly, Steve you mentioned something about cloud and I think there is a lot of investor concern that the cloud is going to have some sort of a negative impact on you. Are you seeing any comments from the customers on the enterprise side, “Hey look we’re going to start using somebody’s external cloud as a way to blunt our datacenter demand in the long term?” Or, any sort of pushback so far from your customers like that?

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Let me address the cloud piece first Chris. It is a good question but we’re positioning ourselves right now to be kind of the home of the cloud so for managed service providers the platform and the software guys and the infrastructure guys that are all deploying cloud, private and public deployments, we’re targeting several of these players to deploy their infrastructure with us and then provision the cloud offerings out of our datacenters. So, I think we’re very, very well positioned. Quite frankly, after we’ve done an inventory Chris of everything that we’ve accumulated here over the past several quarters, it’s quite amazing how many cloud deployments that we’ve had in the past that were not necessarily referred to as cloud but certainly today we’re accumulating at a pretty high pace, people that need infrastructure that don’t have the infrastructure internally to provide the cloud services. I think we’ll as we were for a lot of the peering networks, we’re going to be a home, kind of the on and off ramps to a lot of the cloud as it continues to be deployed.

Keith D. Taylor

Management

So Chris just on the first point that you had asked when you look at EBITDA from a margin perspective or if you look at it just on an absolute dollar basis quarter-over-quarter we’re relatively flat. There are two reasons for that, number one similar to what we’ve seen in all prior years, Q1 you have all the annual resets of all the employer taxes and of course we have a bigger employee base today than we’ve had before so we’re going to feel the impact of that in Q1, what we refer to as the FICA rates and Medicare, less Medicare but more FICA. The second piece is as Steve alluded to we have certainly a number of new employees with the company and a lot of those employees were hired during the second half of the year so you’re not going to feel the full annual impact of that in 2010. Of course, some of that you’re going to feel it immediately in sort of the Q1, for those that were hired in Q4, you’re going to feel the full quarterly impact of that. So for those two reasons, that’s why you’re effectively seeing flat quarter-over-quarter EBITDA despite the revenue growth. Then the other thing I would like to just say relative to the comments I made and Steve discussed as well, the company is investing very heavily in the initiatives that we talked about, sales and marketing and operations on new product innovation and so between those two, it’s $15 million in the SG&A line and roughly $15 million in the cost of revenue line. Between those two points you’re effectively impacting annual margins by roughly 2% to 2.5% from an EBITDA perspective. But, we absolutely think it is the right thing to do for the business.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Simon Flannery – Morgan Stanley. Simon Flannery – Morgan Stanley: You mentioned on the call about contract length extending out for some of your new business that you’re signing. Can you give us a little more color on that? Is that initiated by the customer or is that something you’re looking at? And, how do you think about the trade off getting your pricing flexibility every two or three years versus getting more revenue certainty? Then also if you could just review the comments around churn dipping down in Q4 but returning back to the sort of 2% level in Q1. What were the specifics around that delta?

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Simon on contract lengths we are incenting the sales force globally to look for with key customers longer term contracts. That’s not with any customer but generally for customers that are key parts of ecosystems or key magnetic type customers we have incented the sales force to look for long term contracts. Obviously, as you point out there is going to be a trade off so if you’re asking a customer for a longer term, they’re going to look for something in return so there is some of that that obviously goes on but for certain key customers we’re willing to make those bets. The sales force does a very good job with ceilings and floors and managing within that and as I’ve said in the past, Keith and I just do not have to look at very many deals out of the sales force that have to go outside of the boundaries that we hold them within. We’re managing that very well. We do want to look for more term in certain cases but in other cases we’ll have the one to two to three year contracts and they will provide us the opportunity to renegotiate and in some cases increase price where appropriate and in other cases not. So we’re going to see all flavors on the contract length but it’s working really well for us.

Keith D. Taylor

Management

On the churns, there’s two things, in Q4 we saw basically a reduction in MMR churn, part of that is just timing issues you can appreciate and so we ebb and flow in each quarter. What we wanted to do was recognize that we had lower churn in Q4 but as we plan and look forward we want to go back to sort of guiding yourselves so you and the rest of the people on the call so we think 2% is a reasonable churn and it’s for a couple of reasons. Predominately we don’t lose customers to our competitors, we typically lose customers to consolidation or to the end source they have financial difficulties and we just think that’s a reasonable level to expect for the business as we look forward. So we’ll continue to update you as we always do and if we see something on the horizon that would alter the decision either higher or lower than that we’ll guide you to that as well.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Srinivas Anantha – Oppenheimer & Co. Srinivas Anantha – Oppenheimer & Co.: Steve, in your prepared remarks you mentioned the bookings and the pipeline, I think in the past at least you quantified the percentage of bookings growth. Is that a metric that you can give this quarter? Then also, apart from financial which are the other verticals that you are experiencing strong demand?

Stephen M. Smith

Management

I’m not sure we’ve ever quantified the bookings growth. We tend to collar whether it’s a record booking. We’ve had some of that in the past. To be quite frank, the way to think about bookings right now is it’s remaining strong across all regions and primarily strong across financial and network. We’re seeing good uptick in enterprise as I mentioned. The one area that I would tell you in this last quarter if you were to look quarter-on-quarter where it fell down a little bit was in the digital media segment, not a surprise when you consider some of the players that are in that digital media segment but, not a big drop off but it really fluctuations quarter-to-quarter. So, pretty flat experience across the three verticals with as I mentioned in my remarks best growth in the financial services, a pickup in cloud and a good pickup in key enterprises as I think about the quarter. The pipeline still remains strong, it’s the highest pipeline we’ve ever had in the US and probably the key thing if you missed it in the remarks was that we’re doing lots of cross border deals so we have probably had the most cross region deals this quarter than we’ve had in the history of being global, in excess of 50 deals. We’ve been in the high 30s and low 40s in each quarter, deals that are deployed in multiple regions, it just continues to step up each quarter which is a great signal for us because it signals that we’re differentiating globally and customers are deploying with us in multiple metros on a deal. Srinivas Anantha – Oppenheimer & Co.: Keith one question, on ARPU you said the pricing was pretty firm, if I’m looking at the ARPU growth this quarter which his double digits at least in North America, how much of that is actually coming from customers moving to higher power density cabinets as opposed to folks just raising the underlying cabinets pricing?

Keith D. Taylor

Management

We haven’t really been raising the underlying cabinet pricing. Clearly, our sales organization negotiates with every single customer on every contract and pricing has remained firm when you look at it on service offering perspective. So a lot of the growth is really coming from the fact that we are selling , we had a very strong quarter from the interconnection perspective so certainly that interconnection unit is not attached to a specific cabinet per say so that certainly helped number one. Then number two, as you’ve aptly pointed out the asset that we sell today, we have an expectation, they are four and five KW per cabinet asset and so we expect pricing to be in the $1,800 to $2,200 price range and so it only makes sense as you add more and more revenue and opportunity that you’re going to start trending towards that expectation. So it is customers buying more product and services per average unit of measure.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

I just want to point out that in the US we’re actually in the middle of that range today in the fourth quarter so I think the range we’ve been bracketing that about, that Keith and I have been talking about we’re right in the sweet spot today of the US market.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Jonathan Schildkraut – Jefferies & Company. Jonathan Schildkraut – Jefferies & Company: A couple of questions, first in terms of the sales force expansion and the headcount that you’re going to add, is this going to come along maybe with a little bit of restructuring around the sales effort? Are these people going to be vertically focused, geographically focused? And, how might you alter your sales effort? Is this about again expanding your reach? Secondly, it seems like you might have changed the accounting for your recurring revenues? As I looked through the historical numbers I wonder if we might get a little more color there?

Stephen M. Smith

Management

On the sales force side you’re exactly right. Let me give you a little bit of color so people have perspective on this. We’ve got to be one of the unique companies that are approaching a billion in revenue with somewhere sub 75 around the world of sales people. So as we put together a three year operating plan with the board and our management team and we looked at the scale of this business and how much gross bookings we need to do Jonathan as we think about the next three years, we need more feet on the street. So we made a conscious decision to add and I’m going to directionally color it somewhere just under 40 heads around the world as part of this 2010 plan. They will be vertically focused. We have been vertically focused for most of 2009. I think if you caught the theme of the message today we’re getting very, very ecosystem/vertically focused in terms of how we’re going to market so we’re going to be paying a lot of attention to targets, key next prospects in an ecosystem. We know who we have, we know who we still want to get and the marketing organization under Jarrett’s direction has gotten very granular to get very targeted and prospected so we’re going to go after a lot more new logos this year. We know who adds density to these ecosystems and that’s the primary focus so you hit the nail on the head.

Keith D. Taylor

Management

Jonathan on the second question that you had, we have gone through in Q4 a reclassification effort between non-recurring revenue and recurring revenue. This is ultimately what happened, so we have changed just so you know what is being reported this quarter and any of the other reporting metrics in our public disclosure you will see that we’ve now restated it to reflect this change in classification and you’ll also see in our 10K which we’ll file over the next coming weeks. But ultimately what we did is we have a sales allowance we’ve basically said that we reserve against the customer and [inaudible] was a perfect example of that last year where we actually took a full provision against revenue. When we put that reserve we put it up on the balance sheet, any changes to that reserve we were applying to the non-recurring revenue because it was sort of ebbing and flowing with the decisions we made. In consultation with PWC it was better suited to actually marry it up against the revenue in the recurring section so net revenue didn’t change, all we did was take that reserve now and we’re now allocating it in to the recurring section of the income statement versus the non-recurring. So we’ve gone back and effectively reclassified it for all of the prior periods to reflect that change in classification. Jonathan Schildkraut – Jefferies & Company: Not to throw any more work on Jason’s desk but is it possible that we might get four quarters of historical data put up on the website?

Keith D. Taylor

Management

We’ll put something up on the website for everybody. We actually have something that will highlight it all and it’s very synched and we’ll put that up in the coming days.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Michael Rollins – Citigroup. Michael Rollins – Citigroup: Just a couple of questions, the first is if you can talk, I think Keith you started to talk about this at the beginning of the Q and A period about the pickup in the ongoing cap ex and if you can break that down I think you were going to give some segments of maintenance versus other pieces. Then, how should we think about this number going forward in terms of what a good maintenance cap ex or ongoing cap ex is for Equinix? Then just the other question just thinking conceptually about SG&A, if I look at it annualized the first quarter it’s like $184 million, if you look at the guidance for the year of $200 to $220 it’s kind of suggesting like a $16 to $32 million pickup over the course of the year depending on what you pay these 40 people it’s a piece of it. Can we talk a little bit more about how to think about this incremental investments in other buckets of where it goes and what kind of revenue augmentation can you get for that over time? What do you think the pay back is for this investment?

Keith D. Taylor

Management

Let me deal with cap ex first and then Steve and I will tag team the second question. First, on ongoing cap ex, realistically we expect it over the longer period of time to be 5% of revenues, that’s what we think. That 5% typically relates to both success based cap ex and then sort of very specific cap ex. So what we’ve done this year is we’ve made some very substantial – we’re highlighting what we think are going to be some very substantial investments. First and foremost we said we think roughly $15 million of cap ex out of this $100 million will be in true maintenance cap ex so we’re doing something to the IBX to deal with a maintenance issue. Then we’ve said $40 million will be success based, that’s basically customer installations and the customers pay us for that as you know so a we book more we expect that number will continue to grow. But ultimately as I said, that’s a net neutral cash flow item because the customer do pay us for it and we recognize it ratably over a deferred installation period. The bigger piece that we’ve highlighted this time that we haven’t highlighted before was really what we call single points of failure, IT systems and new product innovation. So that’s a $45 million bucket and if I could break that down for you we’re going to spend roughly $10 million on our EPR solutions. It’s basically going to single global instance, it’s developing global customer portal and doing a lot of things like that around our IT platforms and that’s where Brian will be working with Jarrett to make sure we have a good robust system to deal with the product side of the equation, the customer side of the…

Jarrett Appleby

Analyst · winning or losing business

In terms of some of the key opportunities that Keith mentioned Ethernet, switch fabric, it’s deploying much like we did on the peering community seven or eight years ago. It’s deploying out on a global basis. We announced starting in four markets with the partners and we’re going to go deeper with a second quarter launch and the associated portal and tools associated with that so you’re going to see investments like that. Those tools will be used by network folks, financial services company and the cloud providers. Again, it’s building out the product platform and scaling that on a global basis over the course of the year. Those are the key investments that I think we’re talking about here.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

I think on the last question just to size it for you Michael, we told you that we hired right around 200 people last year. In the plan this year call it in the order of magnitude of 250 to 260. We’ll manage that through the year and so in that there’s as we’ve mentioned here a couple of times, sales and marketing operational people. Just on the sales thing, I think your question was have you guys figured out the return on investment on the sales people. As you know, it will take months to hire these people. Let’s just take the US for example, I think we’re hiring 16 or 17 more in the US. It’s to get better coverage, to get more prospects covered, to get more targeted in these key ecosystems. Depending on when they’re hired, when they get on board, the productivity of these guys can take anywhere from six to nine months. Is there a model built that shows the productivity of this thing? You bet, it’s all built in to the numbers we’ve given you today. But, I don’t know if I can crisply net out by region or by headcount what that productivity is going to look like. We know based on the number of feet on the street we have today we’re not covering the market for the number of opportunities that are passing around the market. We’re missing lots of stuff. So just in order to hit the gross bookings target that we built in to the three year plan, we know we need more feet on the street just based on baking in to quota percentages and productivity of the current sales force. It’s a pretty safe bet that you can feel comfortable that we know what the heck we’re doing in terms of how many to hire, when to hire them and when they’re going to start returning benefit to the company.

Keith D. Taylor

Management

Mike, if I could just say one other thing to what Steve said, certainly at the CITI conference one of the questions you asked or you pointed out, you suggested that the 2010 plan looked more like back ended plan if you were looking at the plan in the S4 that we had filed on the Switch and Data transaction. So a lot of what you’ve heard Steve talk about and he also mentioned it in his script is basically it’s a three year rolling plan and we do expect to increase the amount of activity that goes through the systems and the productivity of the team and how much activity is in the business. Because of that, you need a larger sales organization and for all of those reasons that’s why you’re seeing us make the investment today. It is a sizeable investment and again, just to clarify for everybody on the phone, we’re looking at roughly $15 million in the cost of revenue line and roughly $15 million on the SG&A line that’s incremental to our standard growth year-over-year, that’s discreet to these four initiatives that we’ve really talked about.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Mike, the only thing that I would add that I probably should have stated and it was kind of teased out by Jonathan in the previous question is we will be hiring these sales executives as subject matter experts by vertical. So we expect the productivity of these folks to be quicker than just hiring a generic sales person. So I think we’re going to see good return pretty quickly on these folks. Michael Rollins – Citigroup: If I could just throw in one other follow up which his were there any one time benefits or transitory items in the pickup in non-recurring revenue during the quarter?

Keith D. Taylor

Management

It was relatively flat quarter-over-quarter Mike. So there was nothing that was out of the ordinary. We didn’t have any equipment sales or things like that in the quarter of any size anyway.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Jonathan Atkin – RBC Capital Markets. Jonathan Atkin – RBC Capital Markets: Two quick questions, one I’m curious Keith mentioned seeing signs of improving economy, I’m wondering if that’s manifesting itself in any notable trend in terms of the book to install intervals? Then on international the Shanghai project, I’m wondering if that might be a model for how you would consider entering other international markets?

Stephen M. Smith

Management

On the improving economy I would tell you quarter-to-quarter I would tell you the book-to-build interval is pretty flat. We are tracking that as one of our key indicators. No meaningful change quarter-on-quarter so I would tell you we’re managing ramps and free months and all the rest of the stuff pretty tightly and we’ve seen that really start to tail off here as we’ve gotten through the year so we’re pretty comfortable with where we are in book-to-build interval and again we’re checking it pretty closely. On the Shanghai, certainly in emerging markets it’s a great model. We’ve been studying the Shanghai market for some time now. We know the size of the market, we know how many datacenters are there, we know the utilization of the current datacenters, we’ve combed through a couple of key players, we’ve spent time with the partner that we’ve selected. They’ve visited us here, Keith and I and other several executives have visited them there, we’ve done due diligence. It’s a great market as you guys know to get started. There’s really only three primarily telcos in that market. China Telecom alone is roughly 74% to 75% of the market, China Unicom and China Mobile, they’re all connected in to this datacenter that we’re going to be dealing with. A very large market, lack of carrier neutral suppliers in this market, not a lot of high quality datacenters in this market, not a lot of expertise in this business so we’ll partner with these guys. We’ll bring our brand, we’ll bring our customers, we’ll bring our expertise to the market. We’ll start small, we’ll fill that cabinet capacity up and we’ll grab another chunk. Ultimately this could lead to a larger relationship. So certainly in an emerging market this is probably the model we will follow. Jonathan Atkin – RBC Capital Markets: The margin profile, how might that look?

Stephen M. Smith

Management

I would tell you it is going to be very similar to what we experience in the Singapore market today.

Operator

Operator

Your last question comes from Colby Synesael – Kaufman Brothers. Colby Synesael – Kaufman Brothers: Just one real quick question, you mentioned I think in your prepared remarks that you had some revenue come from delayed billings during the quarter. Basically I think things that you delayed from the first half of the year. I’m wondering if you could break that out and whether or not that’s non-recurring. Then second, I was wondering if you could talk about the competitive landscape, particularly as you look at regional providers whether or not you’re seeing new competitor or new facilities and whether or not you’ve seen an impact from them in terms of winning or losing business?

Keith D. Taylor

Management

I’ll take the first one and then I’ll push the second one to Steve. What I refer to at least in my prepared comments, what I was referring to was that in the beginning part of the year, the first half of the year, we were using all sorts of selling techniques to bring in business and in some cases we had delayed billing and/or what we call ramps which basically the customer gets a ramp in to their commitment over a period of time. We had alluded to the fact that by Q4 all that we had negotiated would actually start billing in the quarter and all I was trying to do was allude to the fact that we’ve now got the benefit of some of these items billing. So it’s not a one off it’s a recurring bill, it’s sitting in our recurring revenue and it’s something that you’ll see going forward and as Steve said we’re certainly monitoring our additional or our future ramps and delayed bills but as a practical matter it’s not going to be as significant as we’ve seen in the past I believe anyway.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Colby I would tell you on the competitive front, no meaningful change from what we’ve been reporting in the past. There certainly is a pickup in point solutions in certain markets where our datacenter in a market or two whether it’s privately backed or whatever the source is, we are starting to see more builds. The wholesalers still continue to build so the REITs are continuing to make decisions but in general we’re not seeing any new competitive threats in any particular metro or even certainly no pan European, pan Asian or across US markets that is different than anything we’ve faced the last several quarters. It has picked up there is no question about it but again it’s in point solutions, small, very small builds that we’ve watched. Colby Synesael – Kaufman Brothers: If I could just add a quick follow up to that, some of these providers I understand actually build fiber based connections from their facilities to your facilities and their marketing pitch is that they can get the same access to the inter connects in your facility and give that to their customers at a cheaper price. Is that a long term risk to you guys or do you find that as something you’d like to continue to do.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

Well, we’ve enabled it in some cases historically and it’s really only in a couple of markets where that type of situation exists in any meaningful way. So is it a long term threat to us? No, I think the way we contract and the way we build our relationships with the folks that are capable of doing that, we know what’s going on and I think part of it is it’s part of the ecosystem so as long as you’re going to be in these ecosystems some of that stuff is going to take place and it’s all part of the larger landscape. Jarrett I don’t know if you’d have anything to add to that?

Jarrett Appleby

Analyst · winning or losing business

It happens to be larger footprint deals that wanted to have their [inaudible] to systems and some of it we enable because they want either a larger footprint but still need our capability so no long term threat. In some ways we embrace it.

Stephen M. Smith

Management

This concludes our conference call today. Thank you for joining us.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for everyone’s participation. You may disconnect at this time.