DigitalBridge Group Inc (DBRG) 2021 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the DigitalBridge Group, Inc. Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. (Operator Instructions) And the conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions)

I would now like to turn the conference over to Severin White, Managing Director, Head of Public Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DigitalBridge's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Marc Ganzi, our President and CEO; and Jacky Wu, our CFO.

Before I turn the call over to them, I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance, including the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on those areas, may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. All information discussed on this call is as of today, August 5, 2021, and DigitalBridge does not intend and undertakes no duty to update it for future events or circumstances. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-K filed with the SEC and in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Marc Ganzi, our President and CEO. Marc?

Thanks, Severin. First, I'd like to start by thanking everyone for their interest and attention today, especially new investors that are just learning about DigitalBridge for the first time.

Typically, in our quarterly conference calls, we cover 3 primary topics. But before we get into the quarterly highlights, I'd like to do a quick overview for investors that are new to DigitalBridge, especially since we unveiled our new branding at our first Investor Day earlier this summer. After that, I will cover the 2Q highlights and then turn it over to Jacky who will walk you through our financial results. And then finally, in this quarter's Executing the Digital Playbook section, I'm going to talk about our unique ability to both buy and build. It's a topic that's especially relevant in today's market. So let's get started.

Next page, please. It's been exactly a year since my first earnings call as your CEO. And what I laid out last August was a vision and a commitment to you, our shareholders, first that we could and would execute on a profound transformation, moving from complicated and diversified to focused in digital. I committed to you that I would change our management, our business profile, rotate our assets and really change the entire trajectory of the firm.

A year later, I could not be prouder of what we've accomplished together. We are a business transformed. What you see here is what we've become and what we're about. Today, DigitalBridge is the leading global digital infrastructure REIT. We're the only dedicated global-scale digital infrastructure firm investing across the entire ecosystem: in towers, in data centers, small cells, fiber and the emerging edge infrastructure vertical. Today, we manage over $35 billion in digital assets focused exclusively on this opportunity. That's up over 70% from last year. This is really fantastic growth by our team.

I want to talk about our team next who've been doing this over 25 years with deep industry relationships that drive access to proprietary investments and position us to continue to be a market leader in converged digital infrastructure.

Make no mistake, as I've told you all before, networks are changing. Consumer and enterprise expectations around connectivity are always increasing. Our entire organization is dedicated to investing, operating and building these mission-critical networks.

Next page, please. Our capability to invest, operate and build digital infrastructure is very unique. It is the DigitalBridge difference that you see here today. First, we've got the investment experience as an asset manager where we deploy capital on behalf of and in partnership with some of the world's largest institutional investors that are attracted to the growing but resilient profile of digital infrastructure assets. That's a business with terrific returns on capital that drive our earnings and increase our firepower in the marketplace to do large-scale transactions.

At the same time, we have a rich and long heritage of building and operating digital infrastructure. We've talked about this being active infrastructure, knowing how to run these businesses matter. Management matters. Customers want to know who's managing their mission-critical data, and we've got that expertise in-house as we've served these logos for over 3 decades.

Finally, as you can see from the logos at the bottom of the page, we invest across the entire digital landscape today, 22 companies operating globally. We think this is becoming increasingly important as networks converge and customers want a single source for their digital infrastructure needs.

Next page, please. So look, I want to take a step back and briefly give you a sense for the macro environment that we're exposed to today at DigitalBridge. Digital infrastructure is an asset class benefiting from very strong secular tailwinds, as we've discussed in the past. This is really around connectivity and the increased importance of access to data in all of its forms: from consumers to enterprises to devices to artificial intelligence.

Let me give you some context on that. Over the next 5 years, you're going to see 5x growth in global network traffic, from 50 exabytes per month to over 250 exabytes per month. It's rather dizzying. And so at the end of the day, we step back and we say how does that demand get satisfied. Over $1 trillion worldwide in mobile CapEx. We've got 80% of that going into 5G build-outs over the next 5 years. Another market you're seeing the need for a massive build-out is around global data center capacity. This is another $1 trillion-plus opportunity as our cloud customers and enterprises continue to migrate towards these web-scale opportunities and significant opportunities to manage their workloads. These are big numbers. It's a huge market opportunity for us and, most importantly, for you, our investors.

Next page, please. From my chair, it's always interesting to see the big picture and put the opportunity in perspective. But really, what's happening on the ground? How are these things shaping up in a post-COVID environment? How is the demand for connectivity manifesting itself at the logos we serve? In other words, was the pandemic a blip? Or was this a step-function increase in our usage in digital platforms?

Let me give you some data points pulled from this earnings season just over the past 2 weeks. The takeaway is growth continues unabated. iPhones are soaring in terms of new sales. Revenues at Google and YouTube and Facebook continue to grow rapidly on a base that was already tens of billions of dollars a quarter. Microsoft, one of our most important customers, who is focused on serving enterprise demand and cloud adaptation, is growing rapidly in their cloud services with their Azure platform. Their revenues were up 51% from last year. This is an astounding figure. But this is all part of a broader migration as our personnel and professional lives transition to digital platforms. It's the change that's gaining steam as far as we can see.

Next page. So where do we fit into this and how are we participating? As you can see, we've been incredibly active over this past year, continuing to build a portfolio of high-quality businesses that we manage and are leveraged across these powerful thematics. As I mentioned earlier, we've grown our digital asset base over 70% in the last year. We've increased our assets under management to over $35 billion as of this last quarter. And to be clear, we're not done yet. We've got an incredibly robust pipeline of deals, and we continue to evaluate new opportunities across the entire digital ecosystem.

Just in Fund II alone, we've added some fantastic new relationships in logos, Vantage Towers in Europe; Boingo, one of the leading indoor providers of DAS and WiFi solutions in the United States; AtlasEdge, the largest edge computing business in Europe; PCCW, a key Asian-based interconnectivity data center business; EdgePoint Infrastructure, one of the largest tower businesses in Southeast Asia today; and Agile Data Centers, one of the largest hyperscale data center developers. I couldn't be more excited about what we've done so far this year, and there's more to come.

Next page. Finally, I'll finish up this overview with some perspective about what we've built so far as we invest on a global basis, as I mentioned earlier, 22 companies across the major digital infrastructure verticals. We're extending our playbook into Asia, which we'll talk about in a moment. Bottom line, we're incredibly enthusiastic about the companies we manage and the position that puts us in as the fastest-growing global digital infrastructure REIT. With that backdrop, I'll turn the section and cover some of the highlights from our second quarter.

Next page, please. I want to start by highlighting something that's really an important perspective around where we've been active on the investment management side over the past quarter. The key here, from my perspective, is when we map to you a strategic vision, we execute against that plan. This is absolutely central to the way I run this business. We are an execution business.

When it comes to investing in the next-generation networks that we described as being so critical to achieving next-level network performance, we closed on 2 investments in the last quarter. First, the Boingo take-private in May; and second, the AtlasEdge launch in partnership with Liberty Global, unveiling a new edge infrastructure platform in Europe. The key to both of these investments is they're built for 5 years down the road, not just tomorrow. They've got great management teams, like all of the companies we invest in, and they're focused on positioning themselves for where data traffic is migrating to and where the edge and mobility and compute connect to improve user experiences.

The other area where we've advanced our strategic vision is Asia. We have formally announced 2 platforms in Asia and developing a third. First, the EdgePoint Tower platform. We've already closed 5 acquisitions, and we signed multiple build-to-suit contracts with some of our largest customers. This takes us up over 10,000 towers now as the leading private tower operator in Southeast Asia.

Next up, we've got 2 data center platforms: first, Agile, focused on developing greenfield hyperscale data centers throughout Asia Pac; second, PCCW, which is focused on highly interconnected edge facilities that serve our global web-scale customers. That's a great combo from my perspective: first, a business with existing assets, revenues and customers; and then, secondly, a platform where shovels are in the ground building out mission-critical megawatts that serve key cloud customers in this fast-growing region. When we raised Digital Colony Partners II, new areas of focus were centered around Asia expansion and serving edge workloads. This quarter demonstrated our ability again to execute on our promises.

Next page, please. Next, I'd like to discuss capital formation, which is an incredibly important part of our business plan at DigitalBridge. The update, I'm pleased to report, is very positive. We had an incredibly strong second quarter of progress in DCP II. In the past month, we broke through our target of $6 billion on DCP II's target, and we are currently sitting at about $6.6 billion in total commitments. In fact, I'm also pleased to report just earlier this week, we closed over $200 million, so it's really a great progress of the capital formation team at DigitalBridge. DCP II is now 50% bigger than our inaugural fund that we raised just 2 years ago, and we're on track to complete a final close prior to the end of this year, ahead of schedule. So that's really big news. And I think it's indicative of the interest in digital infrastructure and LPs' desire to partner with DigitalBridge to capitalize on this great opportunity.

Next page. So this slide just puts into perspective where we are at midyear. And I've told you, our guidance this year was to go from $13 billion to over $17 billion in FEEUM. Well, look, we're on track to meet and exceed our 2021 fundraising targets, similar to what we did in 2020. The funds business, as many of you know, generates long-term contracted fee streams that generate steady returns over time, which is one of the reasons we're able to complete the corporate securitization Jacky is going to talk with you about a little bit later. So from our digital IM franchise, I couldn't be happier. We're in a great place, we're raising capital and we believe that we're on target to exceed our goals for 2021, which is an important part of our guidance for this year.

Next page. A quick corporate update for you. Well, look, we're ahead of schedule in terms of finishing the mission, which is the mantra that we set out earlier this year. Today, we're 85% rotated to digital, with our Wellness business being the only material legacy assets left to monetize. But as Jacky will explain, we've even transitioned that business to discontinued operations on our financial statements since we believe there's line of sight on divesting that business over the next 12 months.

Obviously, the OE&D sale was big, was a really big deal for us earlier this quarter, generating gross proceeds of $535 million and over 50 investments that were really quite complicated. Fortress is the perfect buyer of these assets, and we believe they'll be well managed by that team, and we still expect the deal to close by the end of this year. When we laid out our goals a year ago, people were asking us if we meant the beginning or the end of 2023 as the target date for completion of our digital transformation. So we think the progress here has been significant. And what's great is not only the capital we're generating but it is also for us to focus even more on our time to growing the digital business.

Next page. In fact, that rotation, getting over 70% earlier this year and now 85% in this quarter, puts us in a great position to do something we've been looking forward to for over a year. This is the rebrand back to DigitalBridge, to reflect a business that's totally transformed and focused on digital infrastructure, a business with really unique characteristics in the digital REIT space: first, deep operating experience; second, access to significant pools of institutional capital; and third, leveraging the powerful secular tailwinds that we've discussed.

In conjunction with my team, we've developed a new fresh logo and a new ticker, DBRG. Our goal is quite simple, we want to establish DigitalBridge as the reference name in digital infrastructure investing, and have positioned ourselves as the fastest-growing digital infrastructure REIT in the community today. In connection with the change, we held our first Investor Day in June. If you haven't already seen that Investor Day, check out the micro site through the Shareholders section of digitalbridge.com. I think you'll get a great flavor for the team we've got executing on a very exciting opportunity. I couldn't be more proud of our partners and the team that is leading this company going forward.

Next page. Finally, on the corporate side, I wanted to highlight the release of our 2020 ESG report later this quarter. You could track the full report down on the Corporate Responsibility section of digitalbridge.com. Look, it's been an immense amount of work but highly rewarding. It's taken some time for our teams to get their arms around this, but it's really about how we operate at DigitalBridge. It's the work that we do not only on a corporate basis but our portfolio companies who are all at different stages on their ESG journey but all focused with one mission to get there. Getting everyone on the same page and working towards that same goal has been a big lift, and we're looking forward to reporting the tangible results we expect in this program over the coming years. It's a big commitment, it's an important commitment from my desk to every one of our employees and to all of our stakeholders.

With that, I'll turn it over to my partner, Jacky Wu, our CFO, to walk you through the financial results in the second quarter of this year. Jacky?

Thank you, Marc, and good morning, everyone. As a reminder, in addition to the release of our second quarter earnings, we filed a supplemental financial report this morning, which is available within the Shareholders section of our website.

Starting with our second quarter results on Page 19. The company has continued to make steady progress in its digital transformation. Digital AUM increased to 72% of total AUM at the end of the second quarter and is 85% of total AUM on a pro forma basis, including the announced other equity and debt portfolio sale. Digital AUM will represent 99% of total AUM upon the closing of additional assets held for sale that are now classified as discontinued operations, including the Wellness Infrastructure business.

For the second quarter, reported total consolidated revenues were $237 million, which represents a 249% increase from the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $15 million on a pro rata basis, which have continued to improve over the last year as a result of the company's scaling our core digital segments, which can be seen at the bottom of the page.

GAAP net loss attributable to common stockholders was $141 million or $0.29 per share. This net loss was primarily due to losses in our legacy non-digital businesses that we now classify as discontinued operations. Total company core FFO was a $5 million loss, which is an improvement from prior periods, driven by accelerated growth within our digital segment and lower corporate expenses. Note that nearly all of our legacy assets, including Wellness Infrastructure, are now classified as discontinued operations and no longer contributing to core FFO. Existing liquidity and anticipated legacy monetizations represent over $2 billion of untapped earnings power that will contribute to core FFO as capital is redeployed in the near future.

During the second quarter, we returned net equity proceeds of $231 million from legacy asset monetizations and $327 million year-to-date, including transactions that closed after the end of the quarter. These legacy monetizations included $104 million from the sale of Dublin office properties, $102 million from the internalization of the Bright Spire management contract and $67 million from the sale of the hospitality portfolio. This is more than halfway towards our 2021 full year guidance of $400 million to $600 million, which we expect to well exceed as a result of the OED portfolio sale, which is anticipated to close by year-end.

Moving to the next page. Consolidated digital revenues increased to $236 million, a 7% increase from last quarter, driven by new fees resulting from additional DCP II commitments. Looking at the right side of the page, consolidated digital fee-related earnings and adjusted EBITDA increased to $108 million during the second quarter, which is a 7% increase sequentially.

Turning to Page 21. As part of the digital transformation, the company has completed strategic divestitures and undergone cost rationalization efforts during the first half of 2021 to operate more efficiently, and that have significantly reduced G&A. Annualized non-digital G&A has decreased from $169 million at the beginning of the year to only $70 million as of the second quarter through various initiatives, including the reduction of more than half of the company's non-digital workforce and reducing the company's office footprint from 16 offices at the beginning of the year to only 8 offices today.

The G&A savings related to the legacy non-digital business was partially offset by additional investments into our digital platform in order to support the significant growth that we are expecting in the near and long term. We continue to expect total company cash G&A of $100 million to $120 million after the digital transformation is complete. And through the second quarter, we are ahead of that plan at approximately $135 million of cash G&A from continuing operations, which is more than $15 million below what we had previously targeted by the end of 2021. All the while, the company has continued to outperform our digital revenues and earnings. While margins will continue to improve, we anticipate modest growth in G&A as our digital revenues scale.

Turning to Page 22. We have seen continued growth in Investment Management and Operating segments during the first half of 2021. Our annualized digital fee revenues increased from $100 million to $137 million, and digital FRE has increased from $41 million to $70 million over the last 2 quarters driven by strong capital raising, including DCP II and co-investments. The strong growth in Digital Operating segment revenues and earnings are the result of our continued rotation of the company's balance sheet with Vantage Stabilized Data Centers in July 2020 and zColo in December 2020. We will continue to grow digital revenues and earnings through our rotation of the company's balance sheet into high-quality digital assets.

Moving to Slide 23. The company is in a strong position to meet or exceed our current 2021 guidance and long-term earnings framework that we provided as part of our inaugural Investor Day in June. We are maintaining our digital management fee revenues target range of $145 million to $155 million in 2021 and digital fee-related earnings target range of $90 million to $95 million. We had another strong quarter, with DCP II reaching $6.6 billion in commitments, inclusive of capital raised subsequent to quarter end.

For our Digital Operating segment, we are maintaining our target range of $130 million to $140 million in revenues and $55 million to $60 million of EBITDA in 2021. In addition to our 2021 guidance, we are reiterating our 2023 digital targets and 2025 framework or key driver metrics that we recently discussed at our Investor Day.

Turning to Slide 24. The company successfully issued $500 million of notes securitized by Investment Management fee earnings with a BBB investment-grade rating in July. This was a first-of-its-kind fund fee securitization that includes $300 million of term notes at a 3.9% interest rate and $200 million of variable funding notes at 3-month LIBOR plus 3% that replace our revolver and extended maturities from early 2022 to late 2026. An early use of the proceeds was redeeming $86 million of 7.5% preferred equity, effectively lowering our incremental cost of capital by over 350 basis points. The company's M&A pipeline remains active, and we plan to reserve the remaining cash to either deploy towards these opportunities or continue to optimize our cost of capital.

DigitalBridge has been a pioneer in the digital infrastructure financings, having completed 16 securitizations totaling over $7 billion of proceeds. These securitizations have added significant value for our portfolio companies, including exceptional financing executions, following our recent investments in Vantage Stabilized Data Centers and DataBank.

And with that, I'd like to turn it back to Marc where he will lay out further details on our digital playbook.

Thanks, Jacky. Today, in our Executing the Digital Playbook section, I want to cover a topic we hear a lot from investors today, which is the decision between buying and building digital infrastructure. In today's market where people appreciate just how attractive digital infrastructure is, what we have found is that multiples have increased in turn, the popularity of our sector and our space has never been greater.

The other reason we wanted to highlight this is while our press releases make it easy to understand where we're buying globally, it's much harder to see how active we are as builders on a global basis. Hopefully, today, we can help you understand that better.

So first, I'll start with some context around the fact that our 27-plus year track record as builders and buyers of digital infrastructure is absolutely mission critical to our success. It's helped us navigate a variety of market cycles, and it's really a distinct advantage, especially relative to the newcomers in the space who really only bring the capital side to the equation. Another important point is our flexible approach, when we take, to allocating capital. So look, we can do both. That's the key. It allows us to optimize each scenario and generating better returns for you, our investors, over time. Interestingly, we found most of our investments end up benefiting from our expertise in both of these capabilities to buy and to build over the life cycle of an investment.

So on the right-hand side of the slide here today, I want to highlight a really important framework we use to look at these decisions. Today, trading multiples against replacement costs. This is a metric that I've often highlighted at many investor conferences and with some of you in our one-on-one discussions. When M&A multiples move higher, the relative attractiveness of building increases and we begin to allocate more of our resources and capital towards building. This dynamic is present today in 2021, with more of our capital being allocated to greenfield development backed by great customer relationships and signing new long-term leases compared to M&A acquisitions.

Next page. Let's talk about M&A for a second. M&A is a core capability at DigitalBridge. So before I discuss the business of new greenfield construction, let's first understand our investment framework of deal-making. Well-executed M&A enables us to accelerate our value creation by investing in best-in-class platforms. And I want to emphasize that word, platforms, where we acquire a unique business that we use as a base to build a much larger company around bolt-on smaller M&A deals that allow us to scale rapidly. Buying is often the most efficient way to enter a new geographic region or access a new customer base through new industry verticals.

Another compelling buy factor is that given our reputation and relationships in the industry, we have access to a lot of proprietary deal flow. Most of our acquisitions are proprietary, and those often occur at off-market prices. So for example, let's take a look at Digital Colony Partners II. 7 of the 8 new deals we've announced in the last 12 months are proprietary. That's greater than 80% of our deal flow. This was the same in DCP I where 8 out of our 10 platforms were proprietary deals. So if you think about that for a second, out of the last 18 platform transactions we've done, 15 have been proprietary. This is an incredible metric. Lastly, our capital markets expertise and our ability to form capital quickly makes us a really interesting value-add partner to our portfolio companies.

Next page, please. So building, the other side of the coin. So this is what we really want to focus on today, is talking about how we build and how we develop digital infrastructure. Building is absolutely seminal to our ability to generate strong returns and to bring our visions to reality. DigitalBridge companies are always building. In fact, that's our pedigree. That's our background. And what we found is that this is where we generate superior economics as well. The true value of building for our customers is what cements our relationships. Customers who know you can deliver on time, on their specifications, are loyal. And that ultimately leads to more business, more growth and better returns.

On top of the trust that we've built with customers over the last 3 decades, the returns on building are generally superior the longer time to market and especially when markets are elevated with M&A multiples like they are today. When we build, you've heard me say this before, we follow the logos. That means talking to our customers about where, when and what they need. This is a 24/7, 365-day a year job. We're constantly talking to customers. Our greenfield investments are backed by customer commitments to take space or lease access to our facilities that substantially lowers project risk and improves customer satisfaction at the end of the day.

Look, another important aspect of the build equation is the experience of our management teams. As I said earlier, we are builders. That is our pedigree. That is where we got started. I can't think of a factor more correlated to success than the competence of our management teams, and all of them have a build capability that is part of their critical toolkit.

Next page. So why is buildings so critical today? I talked about it earlier. Two things. One, the multiples are high. Everyone knows that. It's sort of the elephant in the room, so to speak. The chart I showed you earlier comparing market price replacement costs is towards the high end today, maybe the highest I've ever seen. So you can see, on the left, market multiples for our digital peers have risen steadily over the past few years from below 20x to over 25x today, and private market multiples are even higher than this, which is astounding in my 27 years of doing this. Recent transactions from many assets have been even higher than that, trading at many, many multiples of replacement costs.

So at the same time demand continues, and this is really growing rapidly. Just look at the year-over-year growth in CapEx by our hyperscale customers, it's really significant. So the conditions that exist today are high market prices but continued strong demand. That's making building more compelling than ever. This is the setup.

Next page. So where are we building? The short answer is simply everywhere and everything. As you can see on this map, almost all of our portfolio companies are actively building on a global basis. In fact, it's interesting to visually track where all of our portfolio companies are busy at work, executing for our value-added customers, from Latin America with MTP and ATP and Scala and Highline where we're building mission-critical infrastructure across data centers, fiber towers and small cells.

Our home market right here in the United States and Canada, DataBank, Vantage, Zayo, Vertical Bridge, ExteNet and Beanfield, all actively building for customers across the entire ecosystem. And in Europe today, Vantage Europe, building hyperscale campuses all across Europe; Vantage Towers, new build-to-suit towers fulfilling our customer needs; Zayo, building mission-critical fiber ops; AtlasEdge, edge compute workloads; in addition to that, also Digita; and last, but not least, Wildstone. And then Asia, our most important and new growth market, Agile, EdgePoint and PCCW, all actively with shovels in the ground, executing for our customers.

This is a business like no other business in the world today. There's not another digital infrastructure REIT on the planet that is actively building across 4 continents like we are today. This is really where we're creating significant value for shareholders.

Next slide. Well, look, here's a great case study today at DataBank, one of our balance sheet assets. I want to do the same macro-micro dynamic I've outlined earlier when we're looking at a very specific market opportunity. In this case, the micro case study I want to walk you through is the ground-level economics at our new Salt Lake City campus for DataBank. DataBank entered Salt Lake City in 2017, and we acquired 3 data centers and a campus with significant growth capacity.

Look, at the end of the day, it's been a terrific market for us. It's been driven by the emergence of Salt Lake as a cloud-centric market that's competitive with many larger, more expensive markets. The build case here, as with others before, was driven by customer demand. They needed more space. And our ability to stand up new capacity every year has led to a growing relationship with multiple cloud-scale customers. It's also been a great economic trade for us with a build multiple on stabilized EBITDA of less than 10x compared to that other precedent and more recent market multiples in the mid- to high-20s for other comparable businesses.

And it just doesn't end in Salt Lake. DataBank is busy, as I've highlighted to in other quarters, building in Minneapolis, Atlanta and other markets where we're building and investing in capital projects that are massively accretive to you, our shareholders. This is just one example tick from around the world where we're building value for our customers and for you, our shareholders. Next page -- so that's pretty amazing economics in Salt Lake, but it's just a great example of how we're building value.

I want to conclude today's presentation with a round of highlighting some of the amazing progress we've made this summer, especially against some of our most important long-term goals.

First, as we move into the second half of this year, DCP II has hit and exceeded its fundraising target of $6.6 billion, and we're on track to meet and exceed our broader fundraising goals, pushing through $17 billion of FEEUM.

Second, we've continued to be active in deploying that capital into high-quality digital platforms that are aligned with our vision for next-generation networks.

Third, on the corporate side, we're way ahead of schedule on finishing the mission, 2 down, 1 to go in Wellness.

Four, ESG. I've highlighted this to you in the previous quarter. It's super important to me. It's super important to our partners, our employees and all of our stakeholders. We believe we're making great progress here. And in fact, we believe today, as a global digital REIT, our program is best-in-class.

Finally, our financial section. Jacky did a great job of walking you through this today. It speaks for itself in many ways. We're growing. We're growing fast. And we're just at the front end of this all-digital profile that will really be a catalyst, we think, for us over the next few years as our IM business continues to grow and exceed our targeted projections and we add high-quality investments to our balance sheet in an extremely disciplined way.

So that's our progress for the quarter. I want to thank you for your time and attention today, and I want to continue to thank you for your support in DigitalBridge. We look forward to talking to all of you soon. Thank you. Have a great day.

With that, I'd like to turn it back over to the operator for Q&A.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Ric Prentiss of Raymond James.

Marc, I think, clearly you pointed out on the slide multiples are up in digital infrastructure. One of the things that's got to be driving that is the low interest rate environment. Talk to us a little bit about what you all view on interest rates are and also the flip side, what that might mean on refi opportunities for you.

So the current firm view in this quarter is neutral on interest rates. And let me give you sort of our thinking from a framework perspective. One, we see central banks today being highly coordinated, and that really keeps base rates stable, to the lowest we've ever seen them. But at the same time, while central banks are coordinated and those base rates remain low, we do see some volatility in spreads. And we think, in general, investors are definitely being more selective, Ric, around risk. And I think you're going to see perhaps more volatility in spreads over base rates over time. And certain credits have better quality attributes than others.

And I think once again, from a firm view, we've been very busy refinancing a lot of our businesses over the last year in anticipation, coming out of COVID, that we might have an extended period of inflation. And once inflation hits different companies, costs go up. And in turn, we think borrowing costs marginally will go up over time. It's just natural. And that's not a function of the central bank's base rates but really a function of people rerating risk. And I think that's going to be a topic, Ric, that we'll be talking about for the next 18 months, is how investors rerate risk, particularly in digital infrastructure.

And so businesses that are of quality and have long-term contracts and have greater than 60% exposure to investment-grade counter-party risk, those are the things that rating agencies are going to look for. So for example, as Jacky said, we just completed a very successful securitization of our IM business. And that was a really successful trade for us. And the reason it was so successful, Ric, is because the rating agencies really appreciated the quality of our cash flows. And most importantly, they really like the quality and duration of our investment management products, which are typically 10 to 13 years in duration.

So our management fees, unlike a typical private equity fund, we typically are getting 10 to 11 years of tenor on those cash flows against an anticipated repayment date of 5 years. So the ability to take out the preferred at a high 7% coupon and replace something that's sub-4% is a great trade for us. So I think we'll continue to have high-quality cash flows, and we'll continue to invest in high-quality businesses. You've seen some of the securitizations we've done, for example, at Vertical Bridge, at Vantage and DataBank. All of those securitizations were 7 to 8x oversubscribed and very well received by investors and rating agencies. But I think we generally are more concerned about inflation than we are interest rates, to be honest.

Fair point. One of the other big debates this quarter, you mentioned watching everybody's earnings seasons play through, the small cell pacing in the U.S. We've seen a tick-up in -- a nice tick-up in service business activity levels at the macro tower but small cells may be taking a backseat. Talk to us a little bit about what you see with the portfolio company ExteNet. And how do you view what's happening in the U.S. as far as small cell pacing? You talked about some building.

So look, the small cell sector really has 3 tremendous opportunities in front of it today, Ric. One is indoor, which really will revolve around indoor CBRS spectrum and enterprise 5G. We think that's a game that sort of plays out in 2022 and beyond, and we're pretty bullish about that. Today, a lot of our indoor activity is just upgrading of 4G networks to 5G networks in a lot of our stadiums, the venues and airports.

The second opportunity is outdoor. And outdoor has been a little less busy than it's historically been but it's picking up. I would say our backlog in the last quarter has begun to pick up with all 3 major logos. We don't anticipate DISH being a significant small cell player probably for another 18 months. We do have some work happening with DISH, but it's very limited to 2 geographies where zoning is really tough. And I would say the backlog for outdoor demand right now is still strong. I think we're going to post somewhere between 5% and 7% organic growth in our domestic U.S. small cell business, and we're forecasting 20% to 30% EBITDA growth in our U.K. small cell business, which is FreshWave. So our small cell businesses are going well.

New node activations through the second quarter here in the U.S. were up over last year, up over 12%. So Rich Coyle and the team in ExteNet are busy deploying infrastructure. And I think in the summer conference series at Cowen and at your conference next week, there's going to be a lot of discussion about that, and I think we'll obviously -- Rich has the capability of sharing his thoughts on that directly, but I remain incredibly bullish on outdoor.

And the last thing is C-RAN. So we're incredibly active on the C-RAN front. That continues to be a product set that ExteNet has that others don't have. And we've built over 850 C-RANs over the last 3 years, C-RAN hubs. And we anticipate particularly, Ric, in a virtualized radio access network environment, that building those RAN hubs is going to be incredibly important, once again, moving out beyond 2022 and well through 2025. So I really think the best days for small cells are sort of ahead. And we love both of our small cell businesses that we own, and we're going to continue to invest in them heavily. Very bullish on small cells.

It sounds like having the Boingo platform gives you a nice ability to put some capital to work as we look out there.

Yes. No, Boingo's been incredibly active as well. They obviously had a very successful contract execution between the MTA in New York City and Verizon. So we're excited about that deployment. That's a great win for Boingo. There's a lot of buzz and discussion around WiFi 6, and Boingo obviously has unique relationships with U.S. military bases that are proprietary. So a lot of ability and capability, Ric, to deploy enterprise 5G solutions on the Boingo platform.

We're really excited about that. And I think WiFi 6 is a significant step-function change in technology. And we think carriers are going to continue to need -- we don't think we know carriers will continue to use our WiFi off-load capabilities, which are really unique and highly differentiated against other players in the space. But I think that's where Boingo really sees its future, is in WiFi offload and, of course, deploying enterprise-grade 5G networks, private 5G networks, Ric, on the CBRS bands.

Our next question comes from Jade Rahmani of KBW.

Do you have a number in mind for pro forma liquidity post the OED sale, also inclusive of [proceeds] on Wellness Infrastructure? Would it be something north of $2 billion? And what is your list of priorities in terms of deploying that capital?

Yes, sure, Jade. Consistent with what we released last quarter as well but our views on that hasn't changed. So if you look at the proceeds associated with Fortress, the OED sales, that's north of $500 million. And then as we've said, between Wellness as well as our BRSP share position, they have not changed in value other than the runoff in BRSP shares. So that $2 billion number is, if you do the math, gets you in that range.

And then the second part of the question, Jade, thank you, this is Ganzi. So the way we're thinking about deploying that capital is the same framework that we shared with you a year ago when Jacky and I got in the chair, which is we've got a lot of different levers that we can pull on. My first priority will be to continue to support the existing digital operating businesses around balance sheet today. We're seeing tremendous opportunity there.

So Vantage YieldCo has the opportunity to acquire other facilities. We're going to do that. The relationship there with Vantage has been fantastic. Their capabilities of leasing in the web-scale community is second to none. And we're really excited about adding more high-quality, long-term contracted hyperscale data center campuses onto our balance sheet. So we're sort of telegraphing you a little bit where we're going. But we have a forward contract to acquire another facility, and we'll go forward and we'll execute that. And then Sureel and his team continue to build great high-quality web-scale campuses. We'll look at that and use our balance sheet prudently along with third-party capital, which we think is the best way to do this.

Second, we talked about the development activities in DataBank. That's going to require more capital as well. If you look at the unit-level economics of what we've done in Salt Lake City and Atlanta and other places, you can't beat that, right? So instead of going out and buying a data center business at 26 or 28x, I'd much rather build at 10x, like we showed you today. So we're going to continue to support DataBank. We're going to continue to put capital to work there. And we think there's some tremendous opportunities ahead for DataBank, once again, telegraphing where we're going with our balance sheet.

I think also as we have the capability to grow our Investment Management platform, I really want to thank Jacky and Brian Lee for their hard work on the securitization. We think we can accordion -- well, we don't think. We know we can accordion that securitization. So as we continue to grow our FEEUM and grow our investment franchise, we can tap our securitization and create more liquidity there for the company, which gives us the ability to redeploy that capital into paying down our preferreds, which is a real important thing that we want to get done.

That, Jade, is so obvious, right? You're exchanging high-7s, pay current against something that has less than a 4 handle. We think we can really return a lot more liquidity, increase our AFFO by taking advantage of that type of financing. And that was a pioneering financing. I mean we created the cell tower securitization. We created the small cell securitization. We created hyperscale data center securitization. And now we figured out how to securitize investment management businesses. I'm pretty sure the likes of Blackstone, EQT, Stonepeak , KKR, they're all pretty happy about this and are actively on the phone with our bankers trying to finance their businesses long term the same way we have. So this is a real watershed moment for us as a business. There's a huge value unlock in getting rating agencies, Jade, comfortable with our model.

Now another use of the balance sheet will be to support our IM business. The Investment Management business has been a very good place for us to park capital. The returns in Fund I have been great. The early returns in Fund II are great, and we think the balance sheet will be used to continue to support new Investment management ideas as we continue to expand our IM ecosystem, which is an obvious growth opportunity for us in adjacencies.

So support Vantage, support DataBank, continue to work on securitizations, continue to support new Investment Management products and then last, but not least, deploy the balance sheet into a new digital infrastructure vertical, which we've been looking at now for the better part of 2 years. If we continue to find something interesting in towers, great; we find something in fiber, great. But right now, the knitting is so good in hyperscale and edge compute between DataBank and Vantage. Our intention and our capital right now from the balance sheet is going there. That's where we see the best returns and the best yields for our investors. We're very excited about that.

Our next question comes from Eric Luebchow of Wells Fargo.

Perhaps you could talk about organic growth expectations. You were just talking about Vantage SDC and DataBank, whether you have actually outperformed kind of that mid-single-digit range that you talked about and what levers you could pull there. And then as well on DataBank, I was curious the DataBank growth rate and how the zColo integration has contributed or detracted from kind of the growth in that portfolio and how we should think about that over time.

Yes. So thanks, Eric. Good to hear from you. Thanks for spending some time with us. So look, on Vantage Data Center YieldCo for the year, we're at about 6.3% organic growth. That was really facilitated by some great leasing in Santa Clara. And we're continuing to see incredible leasing across the entire Vantage portfolio. We telegraphed that to you in the first quarter. Second quarter, that hasn't abated. Sureel and his team continue to out-lease their peer group in Europe and North America. And so we're pretty excited about that.

I would say on the DataBank side, on the core portfolio, really strong organic growth across our core markets. The zColo integration, we said, would take a year. We're ahead on that integration. We underwrote the first year that there would continue to be some churn and some negative earnings as we stabilize that portfolio, which it needed CapEx, it needed care, it needed attention. Raul and Kevin have done an amazing job integrating those assets. And I would say we'll probably end up being a quarter ahead in terms of full integration.

So that business year-to-date has had about 2.5% organic growth. But once we get zColo fully integrated, we anticipate that business will grow, on an organic basis, somewhere between 6% and 9%. That's obviously where we've historically grown that asset. So integration on plan, leasing is strong. Both pipelines of Vantage and DataBank are the strongest we've ever seen them, at historic highs in terms of total pipeline. In fact, Vantage globally has over 400 megawatts in their pipeline today. So we're really bullish. As I said earlier with Jade, we're super bullish about where we're going on edge and on hyperscale.

Okay. Great. And just one follow-up for me. There's been some debate over the last year or so whether it makes sense for you to retain your REIT status or converting to a C-corp might give you more flexibility to pursue growth in some of the non-REIT-able business lines. So maybe you could just update us your latest thinking on that front.

Yes, yes. Thanks, Eric. No change really. We're very comfortable in the REIT structure. We continue to believe, on a long-term basis, there will be good advantages for our shareholders. What we've always been pretty consistent with shareholders is we'll update you every quarter, if that thinking changes or if it should change. But right now, we're well within our bands of compliance as it relates to our REIT test and our tax REIT subsidiaries. We don't anticipate that changing in this quarter or the next quarter or even until the end of the year.

So we've got a lot of runway there. We're going to continue to put good REIT-eligible assets on our balance sheet as we've telegraphed to the entire investor community. We're going to continue to build our digital operating side of the business with, once again, REIT-eligible, good income assets. And the runway for us to do that, as you can see, across our ecosystem of 23 companies globally, there's a lot of really good assets we can add to our balance sheet over time.

Yes, Eric. As you can see in this quarter alone, we did go ahead and relaxed expectation to convert DataBank into the REIT -- qualified REIT subsidiary status, so that was reflected this quarter. We anticipate all the work that's been done at DataBank to realize them to full REIT certification by end of this year.

Our next question comes from Daniel Day of B. Riley Securities.

Just a couple on the IM segment. Great job in the quarter on fundraising. Just can you talk about what's driving the really strong fundraising environment just from a high level, first? And then maybe as you rose funds for DCP I compared to DCP II, are you noticing an increase in the number of PE funds out there with sort of the specific digital infrastructure mandate? And then obviously, that has indications for multiples, which you've talked about. Is there any implications maybe to think about sort of fee compression in the future for sort of digital infrastructure private equity funds, if there's a lot of focus on this from maybe the bigger private equity players?

Well, look, it's certainly becoming a more crowded space from an M&A perspective. Certainly, we've got a ton of respect for our friends at Blackstone and KKR and Macquarie and Brookfield. I mean these are folks that we see in auction situations day in and day out. I've always told investors, look, we don't perform particularly well in auctions. Auctions are engineered to destabilize the opportunity for the buyer and create a great window for the seller. And that's why sophisticated sellers of assets hire bankers, and you see the prices that are being paid today because there's a lot of capital chasing a lot of assets.

What we've tried to do, particularly here in Fund II, is we've stuck to what we do best, which is proprietary deals. The first 7 deals out of Fund II, no bankers, all proprietary. That's what we like to do. So we welcome the competition. And certainly, these are capable organizations, but we've got a global team of 98 professionals in our Investment Management platform. They wake up every day and they only think about one thing, which is digital infrastructure whereas most of these other shops, they have 2 or 3 folks that do it on a global basis. So we have a lot more folks out there hunting and executing, and we believe that's what gives DigitalBridge comparative advantage in the long run.

Let's talk about fundraising for a second. Your questions were -- there were a couple of layers to your questions. One, why do I think the environment is so good today. I think it's good for us because DigitalBridge has a 27-year track record of investing in the sector. We are a trusted set of hands. We are an industry specialist. The depth of our team and the depth of our operations and expertise is second to none globally. And so investors, I think, appreciate that. They appreciate that attention to detail. They appreciate the track record.

They also really appreciate that, as Severin has said many times over, we're builders. We're operators. That's a really big distinction. When you see that map of our 23 companies globally with shovels in the ground building, that's a pivot and a lever that we have that other folks don't have. So our ability to work with customers and to execute on their behalf is a bit unusual in that infrastructure/PE world where the likes of, once again, Brookfield, KKR, Blackstone, those guys are not builders by pedigree. They're investors. We are, on the other hand, builders by pedigree, and we have that capability in-house. That really gives us, once again, comparative advantage.

So I think investors today, I've spent the last -- even during the pandemic, I've been traveling a lot talking to investors in Asia, in Europe, in the U.S. And look, they all are looking for differentiation. People want to invest with specialists, people that understand their street corner at a level that others don't. And that's why we've been successful in fundraising. People acknowledge our track record, they acknowledge the depth of this team and digital infrastructure. And I think that's really what set us apart.

So fundraising in the first fund was good. We got to a little over $4 billion. That took us just about a year to do that. DigitalBridge II, I would say, $6.6 billion today. We've got a hard cap of $7.8 billion. Clearly, investor commitments continue to come in. We had a great closing this week. We'll have more closings coming up. And so that environment for what we do as a digital infrastructure specialist, I think we'll continue to have a lot of success in fundraising.

We've also got a lot of co-investments that we're doing right now in terms of putting new capital to work in existing platforms. That's also going incredibly well. New commitments in EdgePoint, new commitments in Scala, Highline, Vantage Europe, these are great companies. Investors want more direct exposure to those types of opportunities. And what's great about our platform is we're able to give it to them. And so in the first fund, we delivered over $5.3 billion of co-invest against a $4 billion fund. Investors like that. They want to know that they can look at new opportunities. And if there's a specific opportunity, in any of our funds where we can offer co-investment, it really gives investors a chance to go deeper on that opportunity. That's super differentiated as well. There's a lot of nuances to our programs that are differentiated and nuanced and investors like that.

So we're trying to be good listeners. We've spent the last 1.5 years during the pandemic being good listeners and listening to what our LPs want. And what we found is they really like the program. So we're going to keep fundraising. As I said earlier, I'm very optimistic about our 2021 objectives. We had a great second quarter. Third quarter is shaping up really well, and we think the future is quite bright for us in fundraising today.

Awesome. That's really comprehensive. Just a quick follow-up. You talked about, I think, a credit fund in the past. Just any update on when we might see -- start to see some capital formation around that product?

Yes. So look, we're not at liberty to talk about the new products. But what I would tell you is we are having success with that team. We've made numerous loans that we think are very attractive. We think investors are excited about the opportunity to invest with us in digital credit. And we've got a great team that's out there executing and originating loans today that we put on the balance sheet and has a warehouse capability. So there'll be more information, I think, in our third quarter report around credit. This quarter was really about DCP II. And I think in the next couple of quarters, we'll give you a little more information around -- we're excited about it. It's going quite well.

Our next question comes from Colby Synesael of Cowen.

Just wanted to follow up on the IM business for a moment. So I've never covered a private equity fund before so I don't know what's appropriate to disclose versus not, but I'll ask it anyways. But can you give us some sense how much of your IM comes from sovereign wealth funds versus private institutions and whether there's any trends there worth flagging? And then maybe even by geography, how much typically comes from North America versus Europe, Asia, Middle East, et cetera, and whether or not any events of late may have changed how you think about that opportunity going forward?

And then secondly, as it relates to Wellness, you mentioned that you moved that to discontinued operations. You cited that you intend to sell that, I guess, within the next 12 months. I think that the previous messaging had been you thought you'd be able to monetize that before year-end. Just curious if that's changed. And then lastly, at the end of the day, the focus is ultimately going to shift to FFO per share growth. I think in the past, Marc, you've talked about being in a position to sustain plus 10% type year-over-year growth. When do you think we're going to be in a position to start talking about FFO more specifically in valuing the company more on that growth?

So Colby, thanks. Three really good questions. Let me go in reverse order. We've made enormous progress on our AFFO growth. And Jacky and I have made it a high priority to return the company to positive AFFO territory. And as you can see in this quarter, we've continued to make great momentum on that. How do you get there? You get there by growing your top line, which we're doing a great job of. Great core revenue growth this year, particularly in our IM business. And as we've telegraphed to the street, we're going to continue to grow our IM business, and we're going to continue to grow our on-balance sheet digital assets, which have great organic growth and great M&A opportunities and great build-to-suit opportunities. So we're clicking on all cylinders on IM. We're clicking on all cylinders on the balance sheet.

And then we move to cost. We talked about the most important thing is reducing our cost of debt. This was a great start, what we did in this quarter, with the securitization. And ultimately, August 16, when we retire the first tranche of our preferreds, that's a positive step towards getting us towards AFFO positive and creating that great AFFO organic growth that we believe this firm is capable of. Not a lot of attention has been put on cost. When Jacky and I inherited this company, we had over $300 million of run rate G&A. It was a pretty big stack of G&A. And we've done an amazing job being responsible stewards of the balance sheet and of the P&L. And so in that context, we took it from $300 million down below $200 million to $150 million and now down to a run rate of about $135 million. So we're making incredible strides on cost. We think we can even drive cost down further.

And so what this all means is, as you can imagine, revenues are growing, costs are down, borrowing costs are down, and you can just track our AFFO over the last 4 quarters and you can see where we're going. We believe next year, we will be absolutely AFFO positive. You can just look at it. You can see where we're going. You can see the trend. And then once we are AFFO positive, how do we continue to grow that, as you said, Colby, on a 10% CAGR basis per annum. That's a reasonable goal for us if you think about where the balance sheet assets are growing and what we're doing from the Investment Management business. So we're on track. I'd actually tell you, we're probably a little ahead of track in terms of where we are. I'm really pleased with our financial performance this quarter. I don't know of another digital REIT out there that has 7% sequential EBITDA growth quarter-over-quarter, but we did. We grew EBITDA by 7% from Q1 to Q2. So we're doing all the right things, and I think we're in a very, very good spot.

Look, on Wellness, what I can tell you today is everything that we've told you previously holds true. Discontinued ops, as you know, is an accounting treatment, and it's a necessary accounting treatment when you are in the process of moving away from a business line. We have a lot of conviction around our dialogue, around the ultimate strategic outcome of a process that we've been running with Barclays. And so we think it will be successful. We wish we had some news for you today, but what I would tell you is stay tuned. And what we've told you previously is going to hold. We're incredibly bullish about our ability to get the right price for that asset and ultimately find the right home for it. So that is on track.

Fundraising, what can we say and what we can't say. There's actually very specific SEC rules about fundraising. What I can talk to you about is just generally the environment and, ultimately, what we do and what our peers do. So we have a global fundraising apparatus. Since the foundation and founding of DigitalBridge in 2013, we've been incredibly good at fundraising on a global basis. Ben Jenkins and I have a multi-decade reputation of fundraising in all parts of the world. So our ability to fundraise back in 2013 has only been magnified here in 2021 as we've grown our platform and as we've grown our investments at DigitalBridge.

I would say in this fund currently, we're taking capital from all parts of the world. Our home market is obviously our most important market, here in North America, where we have great relationships with pension funds, insurance companies, endowments. And that won't change. I think that's where we really have always had a great reputation and a great track record. That being said, whether you're us or whether you're KKR or Blackstone or Carlyle, all of us fundraise on a global basis. And we've had success in all 4 key markets. So for us, the key markets, of course, are Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America. And in this particular fund, we've got commitments from all over the globe. But as you can imagine, the dominant area of capital formation for us is here in North America at DigitalBridge, always has been, always will be going forward.

And then just generally speaking, the environment is strong. There's a lot of appreciation for what we're doing, Colby. Like I said before in the previous question, our specialist approach, our track record, our ability to buy and build is highly differentiated. There's not another investment manager in the world that can do what we do. And we've just got to keep our heads down and we've got to keep doing what we're doing because it's working. Our ability to buy great platforms and then build on top of that is really a point of differentiation for us. So I think generally speaking, no real change in our approach or our strategy. It's the same approach I've taken for 3 decades in fundraising. We'll continue to take capital from all parts around the world. Thank you.

Yes. And Colby, one other thing I'd just add on the core FFO, you'll see our inflection points coming soon, right, as Marc kind of reflected. What we've guided to you guys that has not changed, is that our cash G&A on a go-forward basis will be $100 million, $120 million. So sitting here today in the first half, our run rate, as we've disclosed, is $135 million, so just getting to that sustainable rate. You'll see that immediately flip our core FFO positive right off the bat so that's fully within our control. And certainly, as we continue to fund raise, as Marc talked about, that will be a sustainable continued growth rate from there. So we're excited about it, and there's more great things to come.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Ganzi for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you. It's been a great, great quarter, and I really want to thank our team in my closing remarks. We've got an incredibly talented and dedicated group of professionals that put this work out quarter-over-quarter. From our Investment Management side to our finance team to our Investor Relations team and to our global fundraising team, it's been an incredible year. I spent a lot this week with Jacky talking about the year that it's been. And we had a lot of fun this week with Severin in putting together this presentation. And I just would close in saying I'm really proud. I'm really proud of my first year as the CEO of this organization. I'm proud of my partners, particularly Jacky Wu and his team, who have done an incredible job transforming this company.

And where we stand today is we sit on the precipice of an incredible opportunity at DigitalBridge. We have the best team, we have the best platforms and we have the absolute best secular opportunity of any REIT in the world today. So look, I want to thank all of you for tuning in today. I want to thank you for your support. And look, it's going to be a great year going forward. We're going to have a strong finish to the end of the year. And we look forward to connecting with all of you in the summer conference series wherever your coverage may be. We're going to be in a lot of different places over the next 7 to 10 days. So hopefully, we'll get to connect with all of you face to face. And we hope this call finds all of you well.

Take care, and have a great rest of your week. Bye-bye.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.