Equinix's revenue results unmarred by supply chain shortages in Q3

News Analysis Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Editor 11/4/2021

Equinix's revenue in the third quarter reached $1.7 billion, up 8% on a normalized and constant currency basis. The data center company's operating income also hit $282 million, a 1% increase over Q2.

"The pandemic has triggered and accelerated the need to digitize business models in virtually every segment of the economy," said Charles Meyers, president and CEO of Equinix during a financial call with analysts. "Our strong results reflect its increasing demand for digital infrastructure and Equinix remains uniquely positioned to help customers as they shift towards distributed, hybrid and multi-cloud as clear architecture of choice."

The data center company is marking its 75^th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, which it claims is the longest consecutive quarterly growth for any S&P500 company – Equinix achieved Fortune 500 status in Q2. Channel sales brought in more than 35% of the bookings for the quarter, about 50% of enterprise bookings and over 60% of new logos in Q3.

Equinix also increased data center interconnections in Q3 to over 414,000 and entered the market in India by finalizing the GPX India acquisition in September, which provided an incremental $5 million in revenue. This acquisition extends Equinix's reach to 27 countries, 65 metros and over 235 data centers; 11 of Equinix's data centers are either new or have been expanded as of Q3 in the markets of Frankfurt, New York and Singapore.

In addition, Equinix experienced growth in its xScale program, which provides data centers for hyperscalers, by agreeing to form a $575 million joint venture with PGIM Real Estate to build two data centers in Sydney, Australia. Eight xScale builds are now under development with a planned opening in the first half of 2022. Equinix plans to invest more than $7.5 billion across 34 facilities globally for its xScale program, to deliver over 675 megawatts of power capacity.

"We've seen no major delays today with delivering new capacity despite general market concerns related to supply chain challenges," said Keith Taylor, CFO for Equinix.

Meyers echoed Taylor's sentiment that supply chain challenges impacting much of the telecom industry haven't had a major effect on Equinix's revenue last quarter: "I think our team has done a just an exceptional job navigating the current realities as it relates to supply chain around the world, and our bottom-line message has been and continues to be that we really aren't seeing any meaningful negative impacts to our business."

Looking ahead, Equinix expects another 1% increase in Q4, to reach a revenue around $1.7 billion, and an annual revenue of up to $6.6 billion, which would be about an 11% increase over 2020. Meyers predicts that rising power costs could have a "slight impact on our Q4 guide … I think there's more going to be the longer-term volatility into 2022 that we're really looking at."

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— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading