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Equinix, Inc. (EQIX)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 18, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to the Equinix Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines will be able to listen-only until we open for questions. Also, today's conference is being recorded. If anyone has objections, please disconnect at this time. I'd now like to turn the call over to Katrina Rymill, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you and you may begin.

Katrina Rymill - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Good afternoon and welcome to today's conference call. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that some of the statements 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 most recent Form 10-Q filed on October 30, 2015. 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's Equinix's policy not to comment on its financial guidance during the quarter, unless it is done through an explicit public disclosure. In addition, we'll provide non-GAAP measures on today's conference call. We'll 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's Investor Relations page at www.equinix.com. We would also like to remind you that we post important information about Equinix on the IR 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 CEO and President; Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer; and Charles Meyers, Chief Operating Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we'll be taking questions from sell-side analysts. In the interest of wrapping this call within an hour, we'd 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 - Chief Executive Officer & President: Okay. Thank you, Katrina. Good afternoon and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. 2015 was a…

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thanks, Steve, and good afternoon to everyone on the call. Let me start by saying from so many points of view, Q4 was the best quarter we have experienced to date. The momentum in our organic business combined with Telecity and Bit-isle sets us up nicely for 2016, as well as our initial look-through into 2017. And with my prepared remarks I'll first review our full year 2015 results. Then I'll provide some commentary on key metrics for 2016 which have a number of moving parts. Finally I'll wrap up with some high level comments on the fourth quarter. So, starting with revenues. We reported revenues of over $2.72 billion for 2015, a 16% year-over-year normalized and constant currency growth rate. A clear demonstration of our ability to drive outsized growth as we benefit from the scale of our global platform, as well as enjoy record non-recurring revenue activity. And we believe this momentum will continue into 2016. We expect to deliver normalized and constant currency growth of greater than 13% for our organic business and over $540 million of revenues from Telecity and Bit-isle at current exchange rates. We believe the Telecity business, net of the expected divestitures, will grow revenues between 8% and 9% in 2016, while Bit-isle's revenues will remain essentially flat year-over-year consistent with our expectations while we look to optimize this business over the next 24 months. In 2015, we improved our organic adjusted EBITDA margin by over 100 basis points to 46.7%. And as we continue to scale the business, we expect to deliver another 100 basis points of improvement on the organic business in 2016 as we maintain discipline and focus on our spending initiatives. Another key driver to our continued margin improvement is the healthy price yield derived from a disciplined pricing…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question is from Jonathan Schildkraut with Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.

Jonathan Schildkraut - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Thank you for all the additional detail and taking the questions. I guess, Steve, if I could, I'd love to review a couple of the sort of big ticket items that you guys brought to the conversation last quarter, and see if we can get an update on them. And I guess the three things that really stand out are; last quarter you talked about a second consecutive quarter of positive pricing actions; you talked about an accelerating TAM; and you talked about the beginning of the emergence of cloud-driven enterprise demand. And while you highlighted enterprise amongst the verticals that were strong, I'd certainly love to hear anything explicit as it applies to sort of, again, cloud-driven enterprise demand. So just if you could sort of review us on those three points. Thanks. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: Sure. Why don't I just start with a couple of comments, and Charles and Keith can chime in here. Those are three good questions, Jonathan. The pricing actions continue to be favorable to us as we renew and move forward with existing customers that are extending in multiple markets with us. So we're staying very disciplined with our activities and our actions and our deal reviews with our customers as they continue to grow into the global platform. And so that's showing up every quarter, and I would just tell you that's tied to the discipline of our deal reviews and how we manage that, and Charles can talk about that in a second because he sits on top of those. The accelerating TAM, generally, is because we're prosecuting a dozen-plus other industry verticals that we refer to as the enterprise outside of our core five industry verticals that we've been focused on. And it goes to this hundreds of thousands of customers, prospects, I should say, that we are knocking on their door now via the channel or via the direct sales engine to talk to them about helping them enable them to get to the multi-cloud and get to the Hybrid Cloud environment. So the cloud enterprise, the simple answer, the reason why we're a cloud enabling these data centers, is to replicate the network density that we achieved the first 16 years, 17 years of this company to make it easy for any CIO of an enterprise, to look inside these facilities and see that they can publically, privately move their traffic, certain applications that are mission critical, revenue facing, customer-focused applications that they can get them to the multi-cloud and get them to take advantage of the performance, the costs, and the IT transformation that's taking place. So we're seeing uplift across all three of these things generally because of the uptake in cloud. And cloud is driving most of this. Charles, why don't you add a little bit of color here?

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Yeah. Again, all three of these things continue – we continue positive pricing actions. And as Steve said that's showing up in our yield continuing to be very firm across the board in terms of MRR per cab. The accelerating TAM is really absolutely linked to this enterprise phenomenon, and the building and the scaling of the cloud ecosystem both the cloud density, CSP side of that ecosystem, as well as the enterprise, and I think we've had – continue to have a number of big lighthouse wins. And what I would tell you is that I think this is probably the eighth consecutive quarter that both cloud and enterprise has over indexed on a bookings basis relatively to their installed base. Meaning, that those who were continuing to see an evolution of the business, not because our mature ecosystems are waning, but rather because we're seeing an acceleration in the cloud ecosystem. And this big addressable is really an artifact of people migrating to the cloud, adopting public cloud, using Equinix as a private access option to the public cloud, and really enabling – really selecting multi-cloud, Hybrid Cloud as the IT architecture of choice. And I think if you look at our core metrics, the business is really hitting on all cylinders against all three of those factors.

Jonathan Schildkraut - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Great. I'll circle back.

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Thanks, Jonathan.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And out next question is from Paul Morgan with Canaccord. Your line is now open.

Paul B. Morgan - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

Hi. Good afternoon. Can you maybe just talk a little bit about the external growth opportunity that you're seeing? Obviously, there's a lot of chatter about the telco data center divestures out there. And how you see your appetite for acquisitions, and whether you would consider different structures such as JVs and the like if the opportunity arises, and kind of how you might see that play out in 2016? Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: Guys, do you want me to start or do you want me...

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Yeah. Go ahead. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: Paul, this is Steve. Why don't I take that and let Keith and Charles add to what thoughts they may have here. So, mostly all of you should be aware that publicly there are a couple of big telcos that are interested and trying to divest some assets, and these are both the big telcos that acquired cloud companies three years, four years, five years ago, and it includes those cloud data centers. It's public, they're positioning them, they're talking to several people. We are one of them. And our position is there are certain assets in those portfolios that we would be interested in, obviously, where there's cloud network density and the power and location, but there's many of those assets that wouldn't make any sense for us. So we're in the early stages, exploratory stages talking to these companies. Those are the two that are public. There's other conversations going on. There's plenty of companies that are interested in getting out of the data center business. So it's a very active market on top of the divestiture that Keith mentioned that we're doing in Europe. So there's a lot of activity, mostly pressured and driven by the big infrastructure-as-of-service companies who are going as fast as they are, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, and they're putting a lot of pressure on companies that decided to get into the infrastructure-as-of-service business, and now they're deciding to get out of it, and their data centers are going with it. The telco is probably aimed – most of the cash that we collect on these will be aimed at, as you all know, aimed at spectrum and aimed at their mobile initiatives, and so it makes sense why they're looking at these. But as I said, there are specific assets that would make sense to us, but it's very early days in the dialog. Charles, I don't know what else you'd add, you're in the middle of...

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Well, I guess, I think you covered most of it. The only one point you've talked about in there, Paul, that might be worth touching on is whether we would consider JVs or other creative commercial structures. I would say that, I think to the extent that there were structures that would allow us to potentially gain access to the assets that we see as most accretive to our strategy, and on point from a capital allocation standpoint for us, we would entertain those. But I think there are only a very select set of assets that really support our interconnection-rich ecosystem-based strategy, and so we would be focused on those, most likely. And I think that to the extent we could be – there are other creative ways to get that to happen, we would consider those. But we also have a lot to say grace over right now in terms of getting the integrations done, and so we want to remain very focused on executing the business. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: The only thing I'd add, Paul – this is Steve, just one last comment is, we'll remain proactive but highly selective in any potential M&A for this type of discussion. And as Charles said, it would have to pass through the filters. It would extend our global platform. It would help enhance our interconnection or our network density. It would help us capture the cloud enterprise discussion that we're having. If it passes those filters, we're going to take a close look at it.

Paul B. Morgan - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

Great. I mean, in Telecity's case, obviously, there's some non-core assets that you're planning to divest. But I guess, in this case would it be fair to say that just because of the scale of what you would classify as non-core, that taking on major portfolios where a majority or a big chunk of the assets are, have to be pegged for sale is not kind of what you're looking for?

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Paul, what I'd like to first say is that, unfortunately, the assets that we're selling they're not non-core. They're effectively mandated through our work with the European regulatory authority. Clearly, to us, we would love to keep all of the assets in our portfolio. But that all said, it goes back to what Charles and Steve alluded to. To the extent that we can acquire assets that are accretive to our overall strategy and they create value for our shareholders, those acquisitions or joint ventures, we absolutely will pursue them. But we are very much focused on, as Steve alluded to, driving investment decisions that support our cloud-enabled strategy, extend our global reach, and enhance our interconnection activities.

Paul B. Morgan - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Michael Rollins with Citi Investment Research. Your line is now open.

Michael I. Rollins - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks. Just wondering if you'd give us a bit more of a look into the integration process for the two acquisitions that you've completed, and what are the major milestones that investors should be watching over. Thanks.

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

I think we're going to have, Michael, Charles and I will take this one. Let me first start with Bit-isle because I think that's an important one, then Charles perhaps, you can take the Telecity one. I think what's really important to understand about Bit-isle, as we said in our prepared remarks, revenues are essentially flat quarter-over-quarter. And I want certain investors to realize, certainly from a margin perspective, Bit-isle is dilutive to our margins today. It is very clear to us given the inventory capacity they have in the Tokyo market specifically. This was an asset that we bought for sub-10 multiple to EBITDA. We believe upon filling up our assets, we're going to be able to enjoy the ability to fill up their assets over a period of time, while at the same time assessing, if you will, the strategic landscape of the number of operating units that Bit-isle had. And so as a company, we fully intend over a reasonable period of time, it will not be over an 18-month or 24-month period. But probably over the next three years to four years that we would be able to capture all the value associated with the Bit-isle acquisition, fill up their assets and get their margins up to, basically, where our Asia Pacific business is running today, which is in the 45% to 50% EBITDA margin basis. But we're being very disciplined about this acquisition. Culturally, it's a meaningful acquisition for us, and we're very sensitive to the environment that we're operating in. But we recognize in the investment decision, that over the short-term we weren't going to see any meaningful uplift in the business model and all this will be accretive from day one because we use debt to buy the asset. We're going to be very methodical about how we drive value into that acquisition. Charles, you want to...?

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Yeah. In terms of process, Mike, I guess I'd make a couple of comments. I think that these are obviously both somewhat localized assets with Telecity being a strictly European platform and Bit-isle really being contained to Japan. So our local teams, both in EMEA region and in Japan, have primary responsibility for driving the integration efforts. That said, we did take an individual from my team who really has been my right hand for quite a while when I ran the Americas business and into my role as the COO who really understands our business deeply, has a deep network across the company. We've actually exported him to – and he's living in Amsterdam now with his family and is leading the integration effort for Telecity and sort of providing overall oversight to our integration activities in terms of aligning them, keeping them consistent in approach, identifying and applying best practices, et cetera. So that's kind of how we're going about it. In terms of the metrics, I think, to watch, we're obviously watching them very closely and we will update you as appropriate on these, but I think they are; number one, how are we doing on integrating the sales teams and driving the upsell and the cross-sell activities. And that's one we're probably not going to give a ton of granular insight into publicly, but it's not something that we obviously are watching very, very closely and feel very optimistic about. Secondly, the synergy capture. We talked about what we expect in terms of synergies and we're driving the teams to those expectations to meet or exceed our synergy estimates from an expense synergy standpoint. And then we're aligning our capital planning processes to make sure that we are gaining the CapEx synergies where we can and ensuring that we continue to have the capacity to respond to the fill rates in high demand markets. And then lastly, I think, probably keeping an eye on our progress on the divestiture and again we'll report our progress to you on that as we have it.

Michael I. Rollins - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question is from David Barton with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

David William Barden - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess I have to ask kind of banal financial question. I guess, Keith, I think the market expectation was for AFFO number becoming probably $50 million or $60 million north of the $1.078 billion you kind of called out here. I feel like that probably had a lot to do with people not expecting a lot of the assets just being moved into discontinued ops right away. Could you put a AFFO number alongside the $77 million EBITDA number that you pulled out of the guidance for those divested assets so we could kind of look at a pro forma more normalized number? And any other moving parts in that would be great. And then second, again, along the same lines just to make sure so we're all on the same page. In terms of the share count we want to be using now, so we're looking at an AFFO per share. I think that there's a lot of numbers on, I think, slide 38 in terms of the share count. And if you could kind of tell us – or page 35 – which one of these is the one we're supposed to be using to look at valuation? Thanks.

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Okay certainly, David. I think first and foremost, I think the page 35 clearly depicts the share count activity that you should be expecting both as we sit here at the end of 12/31/2015 and then certainly what you should expect on a go-forward basis, and so the numbers that I shared with you, roughly 6.9 million shares will be issued to the Telecity shareholders and then 1.96 million shares issued to convertible debt holders. That all said, I think there's somewhat of – there appears to be some clarity over what piece the denominator is, which is the share count. And so a lot of the discussion then really has to go into what's sitting up in the numerator. I think the most important thing as you've said I've alluded to David, the divestiture is certainly, it's a meaningful divestiture. There's eight assets as you can see. As reflected in our bridge, you can see there's roughly $70 million of revenue that's been taken out – sorry, probably $70 million of EBITDA that has been taken out of the analysis and that's on slide 14 for those who are following along. A lot of that value recognizing, that's coming right out of the AFFO base. There's nothing that that gets dragged along with that recognizing that, of course, there'll be some movement in maybe how we recognize the revenue or the deferred installation, but overall, that's almost a complete drop-through to the AFFO line. And as a result, when we step back and look at how was the business performing relative to our expectations, I think it's really important to note two things. Number one is Equinix proper is driving more margin into the business. Not only did we do it this year, but we're setting ourselves up to…

David William Barden - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Great. Okay. Thanks, Keith.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Jonathan Atkin with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Jonathan Atkin - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst

Thanks. A couple of quick ones, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the churn expectations. You gave it on a company-wide basis and if there's any regional variation to keep in mind. And then on the interconnects, I just wondered if you could discuss, in a little bit more detail, the growth in interconnect and how much of that is coming from Cloud Exchange versus the conventional cross connect? And then Steve, in response to Jonathan's questions you alluded to the indirect channel and then maybe your or Charles can maybe comment on the portion of new bookings that you had ascribed to are indirect which is a relatively recent initiative of yours? Thanks. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: You want to start with churn, Keith?

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

So why don't I take churn and then I'll past it on to Charles and Steve. I think one thing about churn, let me break down between the organic business or Equinix proper. I would tell you our churn levels are at or near their best in a long, long time. That holds true also for 2016. As I mentioned, churn in Q4 was 2.3%. We telegraphed that it would be slightly higher, it was attributed to a single customer in our UK business that we knew that would be relocating to their own specialty-built data center. That said, as we look forward we see churn to be, again, at one of its lowest levels, I think, we've ever experienced as a company organically. As you then go into the two other assets, the Telecity asset and the Bit-isle asset, Telecity is going to be really no different than what you see at the Equinix level. Where you're going to see slightly increased churn is really in Bit-isle. And a lot of reasons for – when you look at how Bit-isle did in 2014 relative to 2015 and what we're guiding to 2016, there's a number of factors. Number one, they've got non-recurring activities that will not repeat themselves. They have an operating unit that has – where they build solar plants, and they've sold off some of those assets. That was sitting in their 2014 results. It's not in 2015. Equally so, they've suffered some substantial churn. They have done exactly what we choose not to do, which is effectively fill up a large portion of their inventory with some large customers. And when those customers run into trouble, as you can appreciate, then there's a fairly meaningful churn event. That's what Bit-isle is suffering through not only in 2015, and that's why their value is so low, but also we're still going to feel some of that in 2016. And so from my perspective, churn will be, I think, at a very strong level looking into 2016.

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Yeah. And I'll hit the other parts. I'll put a point on the churn and just say that, again, what we continue to see is just the discipline in the business and this commitment to the right customers, right applications, right assets continues to manifest itself, both in terms of the positive price actions, and correspondingly to the moderated churn levels. So I think it's absolutely a reflection of the strategy working as we would expect. The other two topics were interconnection. I would say that interconnection obviously an incredibly strong quarter with 7,500 cross connection aggregate. We track that at a very detailed level vertical, essentially on the from and to by every vertical. And every sell in that matrix is growing. The fastest growing are the cloud-related, sort of the cloud ecosystem on a percentage basis, but the most – in absolute terms, the biggest contributor continues to be our mature network ecosystem. And the financial services ecosystem continues to contribute significantly, but on a percentage basis, cloud is over-indexing dramatically like 5X probably its installed base, and that's just a reflection of the early days of that and really starting to sort of take shape and scale as enterprises are adapting Hybrid Cloud. I would also say a part of the driver in the network as on cross connect is these 300 customers that have adapted Performance Hub, many of whom are using that for WAN optimization strategies and therefore are driving significant cross connects to network providers. So that's a snapshot on interconnection. And then lastly on channel, what I would tell you is that we, over the last couple of quarters, have seen a number of our lighthouse marquee deals in the enterprise come through partners. And I think that's a reflection of that many of those customers are finding that they need some combination of the infrastructure value delivered by Platform Equinix but desire a managed service element of that implementation and our partners are doing that very effectively. And so, we won some very big deals as we referenced in the script from true partners with our enterprise lighthouse wins. And we are seeing in terms of allocation of the percentage of bookings coming through indirect, continue to grow steadily and we're really focusing on a set of high impact partners that we think will help us continue to drive that through 2016.

Jonathan Atkin - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst

Thanks very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Simon Flannery with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Great. Thanks very much. You've talked a lot about the various regions and you really haven't brought up macro at all. We look at the market performance, we look at the headlines, and it really doesn't seem like – it's pretty tough out there particularly in some of the international markets. So, are you seeing anything from your customers or are the secular trends still very healthy at this point? And perhaps you could just give us a little bit more color on the sale process. I think you had said mid-year, what gives you confidence that it'll all be wrapped up by then. And are you likely to do one transaction or might this be multiple transactions? Thanks. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: Hey, Simon, this is Steve. I'll start out and then we'll triple team it here. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Okay. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: In terms of the market's macro trends, I think we all saw IDC or Gartner tell us that the IT spend globally was slowing down at the end of last year. I think this goes back to what Charles said. Because we're so focused on the type of application workload with our client base that is not considered discretionary and it's more mission-critical, even in volatile times, as Keith alluded to, we tend to perform better than the market because we are dealing with revenue, customer-facing, globally deployed type application workloads that are critical to run these businesses. So, because of our discipline and executing in that part of the application workload of our customer base, and that part of the – that's non-back office, non-server farm type workload, we tend to push right through this. And the demand that we see from our customer base today is high, trying to figure out how to take advantage of the cloud computing model. And so our pipeline, if you were able to see into our pipeline, which you guys can't, you would see very good coverage ratios and you would see the strongest pipeline in the history of the company. So the signals for us across all the regions emanate themselves in our pipeline and emanate themselves in our coverage ratios, and all I can tell you at this point is they are strong as they've ever been. And Charles I don't know what you would add to that.

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Yeah. I guess just countering the macro IT spending environment, which is – I mean that environment is being impacted heavily by public cloud adoption and adoption of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud as the architecture of choice. And so if you really look at the portion that we tend to play in and around, if you look at the growth of AWS, look at Microsoft's Azure revenues and their cloud participation, look at what Oracle is doing in terms of retooling their business into the cloud, those are all significant customers of ours. They're all scaling globally with us. And then we are really leveraging that cloud density with that sort of core group, as well as a very long tail of SaaS to really attract the enterprise customer and seeing some momentum there. And it is an environment. Although there's market volatility and pressure, I think, on CIOs to manage spending and reduce expense, et cetera, they're often coming to us as a way to achieve those means. And whether that's reducing network cost, adopting public cloud at an accelerated rate or implementing hybrid cloud and moving it out of their basement and avoiding spending that capital. Those are all things that they can really use us for. So we feel well-positioned even though there's some choppiness in the overall macro environment. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: That makes sense.

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

So, concluding your final question, Simon, was really about the timing of the asset divestiture in Europe. Clearly, there's an expectation as we worked alongside the EU regulators and Telecity, that we'd sell the assets over a certain period of time. That timeframe would be in or around the midyear 2016. As Steve alluded to, we're very – well down the process, if you will, at selling the assets. We have a number of interested buyers. And I think you just have to stay tuned, but we're very active and deep in the process right now and we're confident that we will conclude it before or near midyear. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you.

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Mike McCormack with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Mike L. McCormack - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Hi, guys. Thanks. Steve, maybe just a follow-up on the undersea piece, sounds like you guys are pretty excited about it. With respect to the sort of types of traffic and the government regulation, are you guys set up better to address that marketplace based upon the geographic locations of your data centers? And then just secondly, maybe one for Keith, you identified some cost savings that are organic. Just trying to get a sense for a little more detail around where you're finding that. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: Sure. Let me take the first piece, Mike. There are a lot of new projects, mostly driven by the requirements to help support all this global cloud deployment that's going on around the world in the growth of international traffic. So there really hasn't been any new Transatlantic capacity been added in the last probably dozen years until one of the announcements that came late last year or middle of last year, Hibernia Express which went live at Equinix. So there's a lot of focus out there, some private investment, partially funded by some of the big global – the global cloud providers. It's definitely being driven by cloud. We're involved in many more conversations than we ever have in the future – or in the past, I should say. And the advancements in technology today is allowing these operators to bypass the traditional shore-based lending facilities and go all the way to terminating at a data center like Equinix. So we're capturing that volume now. And there's been four to five public announcements that we've made of ones that we've participated in. There's been a couple that had connected U.S., Japan, New York, London and so there's a whole bunch growing on now. We're probably involved in a dozen more projects today that are at different stages of assessment, development and construction. So it is very active. It is driven by the cloud and by the bandwidth, amount of traffic around the world, and they can terminate these cables today very easily into data centers. And so we're front and center on this topic.

Mike L. McCormack - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Steve, how's the contract working. Are you directly dealing with undersea folks or is it the end user customers? Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: I think it's the undersea folks. Isn't it, Charles?

Charles J. Meyers - Chief Operating Officer

Analyst

Yeah. Typically, the providers or a consortium of folks that are involved. Stephen M. Smith - Chief Executive Officer & President: For the consortium, yeah.

Mike L. McCormack - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Okay.

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

And then as it relates to basically the question of cost savings, I think what's most important to note Mike is, we're going in and cutting costs. What we're doing today is we're operating more efficiently. And it's important to recognize over the last three to four years, we've made heavy investments across a number of different functional groups to scale the organization to be global, and one of the biggest investments we've made has been in our IT systems and platforms and the people that really continue to work very hard to make them run as efficiently as possible and then we build our processes and structures around them. That said, we've made those initial investments. We've been investing in sale and sort of in customer-facing initiatives which, I would argue, is driving a lot of the value that we see today. We're also finding ways to reallocate our costs. And part of our efforts today, not only as it related to 2015, but also as we look to 2016 is how do we run more efficiently and take resources that we're spending money in, run them more efficiently so we can put it back into the business differently. And in fact, there's roughly $24 million of costs that we reallocated in our organization to support our investments in 2016. And so we feel very comfortable about that. But quite frankly, it's a work in progress. We have to continue to lever off our systems, our processes and our people and that's something that you'll see in 2016, but you're also going to see us globalize as we bring in Telecity and we bring in Bit-isle over the next – through 2017, 2018 and 2019. We'll continue to make these investments that I would argue that can drive more value into the business.

Mike L. McCormack - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Great. Thanks guys.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our last question is from Colby Synesael with Cowen & Company. Your line is now open. Colby Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: Great. I guess at the risk of Katrina not letting me back on the call again, I'm going to have three questions, but they're all modeling so hopefully you guys can bang out them pretty quickly. The first one is on Telecity. I was curious what tax rate we should be thinking about for 2016? My understanding is that they're still under the UK tax jurisdiction which is different than how you guys treat your European assets. And when is it that we might actually see Telecity shift from its current tax structure to that of the overall Equinix business? The second one is on 2017. You mentioned that you thought that Telecity will be accretive to 2017 after integration cost. You mentioned integration cost I think in 2017 will be $20 million. Will it be accretive even including those integration cost? And then the third question is on Telecity and your FX hedge. I think you mentioned that you've hedged about 80% of your core business in Europe. Do you plan on hedging any of the Telecity revenues at some point this year and perhaps how much would those be? Thanks.

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Okay. Great questions, Colby. I think first and foremost as it relates to the tax rate, probably a little bit premature for us to tell you what that's going to be, because part of the reason we're making such a substantial investment in integration cost in 2016 is to change the organizational structure to meet not only our REIT requirements but our commissionary requirements. And so suffice it to say, we feel that overall our global tax rate will continue to be in the 10% to 15% on a cash rate basis. We as a company and certainly our European business pre-organically has a lower tax rate than that of our competitors and so we think we can benefit from that. So, stay tuned on that one. Let us come back but there's a lot of work to deal with there. As it relates to Telecity on the FX side, I think it's important to note we have hedged 85% of the organic business. We have yet to take a position on the Telecity business in Europe, primarily because their functional currency is not U.S. dollar. Our functional currency in Europe is U.S. dollar. And so the hedging strategies we would deploy are going to be different today, at least, for Equinix proper versus the Telecity assets. But suffice it to say, we're going to be looking very closely and trying not to destroy value with currency movement. So again, stay tuned on that one and I'm sure I have numbers. The third one was... Colby Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: Just 2017 accretion.

Keith D. Taylor - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Yes. Pardon me. The 2017 – yeah we – the combined business including integration is going to be accretive in 2017 relative to I'm not doing these transactions, so we're very – again we want you to look through 2016 to 2017. With those $20 million of costs, we will be accretive in 2017 on, if you want, a combined basis with their assets. The one thing I certainly want to make – I'll leave you with is you have to recognize, by the time we start to go through the year and integrate these assets, as Charles alluded to, the assets are going to become fungible. And so whether we sell into a Telecity asset or a Bit-isle asset or an Equinix organic asset and how we move our people around, that's what we said. We've got to look at it holistically in 2017, recognize there're going to be a lot of moving parts, there's going to be synergies, there's going to be integration costs. So holistically, I want you to walk away 2017 is an accretive year for us and we're very excited to work through this year, and over the next 10 months to get to where we need to be. Colby Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you.

Katrina Rymill - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you. That concludes our Q4 call. Thank you for joining us.