Chindata Group Holdings Limited (CD) on Q1 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
Operator: Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you and welcome to Chindata Group Holdings Limited First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. We will be hosting our question-and-answer session after management's prepared remarks. Please note today's event is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the first speaker today, Ms. Joy Zhang, Investor Relations Director of Chindata Group. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Joy Zhang: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Chindata's 2021 first quarter earnings conference call. I'm Joy. With us today are Mr. Alex Ju, our CEO; Mr. Nick Wang, our CFO; and Ms. Zoe Zhuang, our Finance Vice President.
Dongning Wang: Thank you, Joy. Hello, everyone. Now let's first take a look at some highlights for the first quarter of 2021 on page 4 of the slide. We delivered solid results once again in the period as we continue to increase capacity, grow revenue, control cost effectively and build our capacity capability. In terms of our capacity, the number of our in-service data center reached 14 by quarter-end compared with 13 by end of 2020. We grew our total IT capacity in service to 337 megawatts compared with 291 megawatts by end of 2020. For under construction capacity, we have a total of seven data centers under construction throughout China, India and Malaysia, with a total IT capacity of 154 megawatts compared with 198 megawatts by the end of 2020. On power utilization and efficiency, we continue to maintain our energy efficiency performance in a business of efficiently converting electric power into computing power. Our total power consumption in the first quarter was 348 million kilowatt hour and our year-to-date average PUE by end of the first quarter was 1.19 compared to 1.22 in full-year 2020. The number of our approved and pending patent by quarter-end reached 231 compared with 216 by end of 2020. We continue our effort in capacity build-out and additional patents in the quarter cover initiatives for operation and construction efficiency improvements, such as cooling technology, construction module, and data center equipment, et cetera.
Zoe Zhuang : Now, turning to slide 11. In Q1, our total revenue grew by 16.3% quarter-over-quarter to RMB 643.4 million from RMB 553 million in Q4 of last year, a year-over-year increase of 63.9%. The strong revenue growth was in line with our ramp up in capacity as utilized capacity increased to 238 megawatts at the end of Q1 from 221 megawatts at the end of Q4 last year. This includes organic growth of around 15 megawatts from previous in-service data centers and organic growth of around 2 megawatts from new in-service data centers.
Operator: . Your first question comes from Yang Liu.
Yang Liu: I will do the translation briefly. The first question is regarding the competitive dynamics. We would like to hear management comment on the dynamics in the key domestic market, especially Hubei and the Jiangsu Province.
Dongning Wang: For the question about the intensified competition, the company also noticed there was some level of intensified competition in some regional market recently, especially in the Jiangsu Province. We think that it would have a negative impact to those IDC operators who cannot provide the true value to their customers because of their limited in-house capabilities, limited scope of service and the relative rigid cost structure makes them very sensitive and vulnerable to the competition. But for Chindata, first of all, we don't see that intensified competition in the region we operate. So, the impact on us is very limited. But most importantly, we believe the hyperscale sector we are in is quite immune to this kind of competition. For this point, I want to take a little bit more time to explain. As you know, probably everybody knows that the Chindata has a very, very unique and highly differentiated hyperscale full stack model from the primary development to operation. And our capital and cost efficiency is much higher than the other sector, which is based on the traditional wholesale and retail models. So, this definitely have a three unique characteristic. On the investment side, under Chindata model, our per unit CapEx spending based on cost is much lower than the CapEx spending under merger acquisition model based on trading market value. Therefore, our total CapEx spending for the same level of IT capacity is much less. Second point is actually that our capital to cash return cycle is shorter as we are capable of delivering project much faster, and our capacity ramp up rate is quicker. This actually enhances our capital turnover rate, reduces leverage ratio, and significantly increasing our return on invested capital. In addition, our prudent treasury policies, cash pooling and interest and foreign exchange hedging policy help reduce the fluctuation of our cash on hand. These business model and operation model and capability model advantages of Chindata result in Chindata's great financial performance so far. I want to repeat some of the number we just introduced in our official ER releasing presentations. So, on the profit and loss side, relatively less per unit CapEx spending leads to less depreciation and amortization costs. And the low debt level and ever decreasing borrowing costs leads to low interest expenses, which can explain perfectly why our adjusted net income, which include depreciation and amortization and interest has remained positive for the consecutive quarters in the past. We think this metric should not be overlooked anymore. I suggest you take another look at our net income figures on page 13 on our earnings release presentation.
Zoe Zhuang: Regarding the second question, our company's unique operating model has great contribution and also enablement or empowerment advantages in the company's project locations in terms of fixed asset investment, foreign currency investment, local taxation, personnel and talent employment and also the regional industry upgrading. So, in one word, the tightening of the regulatory policies will have very limited impact on the company.
Operator: Next question comes from James Wang from UBS.
James Wang: James Wang from UBS. My first question is on just the overseas opportunities. So, Ali Cloud, in its recent announcement, indicated they've lost a large cloud customer in its international business. So just wondering whether that could be one of your key anchor tenants and whether this might accelerate your international expansion. The second question is on carbon neutrality. So, just wondering whether our customers, both existing and potential customers, whether renewable energy has become a new KPI for them and whether these customers are actively looking for IDC projects with renewable energy sourcing. And also, the peers are also trying to catch up on renewable energy and ESG. So, how do we keep ourselves ahead on this particular aspect? And the third question is on resource availability. So, it looks like the government is tightening energy quota handout. So, how our current land bank is looking, particularly given if we look at the projects under construction in the first quarter, that looks like it's down versus the fourth quarter of last year? Thank you.
Joy Zhang: For your first and second question. I'll invite our CEO Alex to give you an answer. And for the third question, we will invite Zoe to give you the answer.
Jing Ju: I'll give you a translation for Alex answer. For James' first question, as Alibaba is not one of our current anchor customer, so it does not really affect us that much. But as to the specific name of possible new or expanding customers, currently, we are not ready to disclose yet. For the second question, so on the ESG regard, our current customers are all making it very important issue and agenda in their own development. And they have keep on posting that as the continuous required for all of their suppliers. And for us as well. So far, with the key anchor customer that we have already developed our business relationship, all of them have already give very clear carbon neutrality goals and roadmap requests for us. Even for some of our existing work, potential clients does not really give a very visible hard request on the carbon neutrality. They are approaching us and express their appreciation of our company's exploration and attempt in the green development. We do think what we do with the ESG and sustainable development will definitely benefit us in the future expanded collaboration with all of our existing and potential customers under the new cooperation model. Also, for the second aspect, within our industry, we have always maintained our leadership in this aspect with substance and hard records. We have published our second ESG report on April 3, which is now available on our website. And also, our green effort is being constantly recognized by the society. And as a recent development, Greenpeace has published its Clean Cloud 2021 report and ranked Chindata as number one among all of the Internet cloud and data center companies second year in a row. We have topped the list and with a perfect 40 out of 40 score on renewable energy performance this year.
Zoe Zhuang: On the third question regarding , the company believes that there is no longer a distinction between the first tier city and the periphery areas at the business operational level for the customer key infrastructure for our target customers. Our company has already made a very early judgment on this trend a few years ago and prepared certain reserves such as the land and energy. So, from the current point of view, we have gained some first mover advantages already. Such kind of advantage will allow us to maintain a dominant position on the supply side. Thank you.
Dongning Wang: One more point. I think in the ER releasing presentation every quarter, there's only always categories, one is the assets in service, the other one assets under construction. So, the decreasing of under construction assets, the large part of reason is actually we moved – some of the project become in-service in the operation. So, that project going to move up to the assets in-service category. That's actually the major reason. And also, recently, we have made and we believe in the near and midterm we're going to achieve some – I think we're going to make some positive development with existing and potentially new customer on some pipeline project based on a strong supply we have in certain advantageous geographic location, as Zoe already mentioned to you just now. So, we're going to find out appropriate time to disclose this development through the assets under construction categories in the future.
Operator: Your next question comes from Arthur Lai from Citi.
Arthur Lai: My first question is regarding the gross profit line from the Shanxi new site. And the second one is can we expect the further cost-out from these new sites in terms of average megawatt perspective? Lastly, on the housekeeping question, why the megawatt cost increased over the quarter?
Jing Ju: For the logistic management, I don't think that we need to repeat the question in English. So, you only need to ask the questions in English to save time. We try to only answer it English. So, back to, Arthur, your first question about Shanxi, yes. Shanxi is definitely one of our geographical focus moving forward. There is certain advantages on the resource side, on the energy side, especially on the renewable energy side moving into the future. And like the company's operating plan, I think the mix of the asset, we're going to put hyperscale data center asset we're putting in Shanxi going to become a little bit higher moving into the future for advantages just mentioned. Your second question about our average utility cost increase in Q1, that's actually – yes, you already answered the question. It's actually due to the seasonality issues, especially in the winter seasons. But moving forward, in the mid to long run, we believe with more low costs, especially in low utility cost regions and our hyperscale data asset in those region come into service, our weighted average utility costs come down. And also, moving forward, with our renewable energy come into play, renewable energy strategy coming into play into the whole execution move with the addition of the, I would say, much favorable renewable energy cost in the regions, we believe in the long term our average utility cost is going to come down no matter what region it is.
Operator: . Your next question comes from Tina Hou from Goldman Sachs.
Tina Hou: First of all, congratulations on the very strong results. Obviously, the revenue growth as well as EBITDA growth is tracking way ahead of your full-year guidance. So, I have a few questions. The first one is regarding pricing. So, from the previous few quarters result, I have sort of calculated the effective pricing per megawatt and seems like it has come down from previously around RMB 1 million per month per megawatt to now close to RMB 920,000. So just wondering what has driven the pricing pressure recently. And then, the second question is regarding major customer demand. As we know that – from the prospectus, we know that your major tenant is a social content provider. And recently, there seems to be some usage slowdown with that customer. So wondering how do you think that's going to affect that customers demand with us? And then, the third question is regarding your longer-term EBITDA margin. We have seen, obviously, for this quarter, it has performed very well. So, going forward, what do you think will be a relatively stabilized margin level? And the last question is regarding your CapEx. I understand that, during the last quarter's earnings call, management provided this year's CapEx guidance about RMB 4 billion to RMB 5 billion. So if we take this into account, together with last year's CapEx around RMB 2 billion, the total CapEx per megawatts addition, when we calculate that is around $5 million per megawatt. I remember in the prospectus, we had around $3.6 million per megawatt. So, I was just wondering if I have missed something in the CapEx numbers there?
Dongning Wang: Just a sort of mathematical clarifications, I think our quarter-over-quarter MSR or average price, especially the Q1 2021 versus Q4 2020 actually doesn't decrease, essentially. So, what you saw is probably our Q4 220 versus Q3 numbers. So, I just want a little bit clarification on this. But, however, I'm explaining the driver for the MSR. So, our data center projects or assets are located in different regions and their contract price will be different by region. Because the development and operating costs varies from one region to the other. So, the theory is, the lower the cost for certain region, the lower price offering Chindata will make to our customers. But in each region, our contract price has been remaining very stable and not affected by the market competition at all. Okay, that's a further explanation. And looking forward. Obviously, the geographical mix of where our data centers are located are the major driver of our weighted average MSR. Again, the lower the cost for that region, the lower price offering Chindata will choose to offer to its customers. So, moving into the future, we expect to have slightly more data center assets get deployed into those low cost regions – as I answer the question for Arthur Lai that we're probably going to build more data assets in Shanxi where the renewable energy resource is abundant and the cost is relatively low. And that's actually going to give us a competitive advantage on the cost side. And therefore, translated into the market, the pricing side to our customers and compared to our peers. So, that's actually my answer to your first questions. Your second question about the customer demand. Actually, for our customer, first of all, we don't get any feeling that business slowing down for our customer, especially our most important anchor customers. On the contrary, we are seeing the demand for new data center project for their new business from our co-anchor customers in various regions remains actually quite strong. That's why when I answered a question for James, why there is some lower numbers this quarter compared to last quarter for assets under construction. You're going to see more numbers added into this category as we move on for the reason I just mentioned. And also because of the advantage we have on the supply side. We believe once this demand become materialized, we can swiftly respond and meet these strong demand based on our competitive advantage in terms of available resources, superior development and operational capability and, most importantly, the relationships and the good executional credentials we established through our partnership for our existing projects – both in service and under construction with our existing customers. So, that's my answer to your second question. And I'm going to refer your third and fourth question related to the long-term EBITDA margin and CapEx to my colleague, Zoe.
Zoe Zhuang: Tina, her third question, the company targets at the high 40s in the midterm for our EBITDA margin target. And for the last question, it's regarding CapEx. CapEx, especially for the construction expenditures, mainly include land share, civil construction, electrical, mechanical equipment and engineering and also the auxiliary infrastructures, such as the substations for this project. And this is from the scope. Secondly, for the project, it includes the under construction for their CapEx and also for the in-service data centers. Usually, after they're ready for service, they still will have final balance payment. And since we have very superior supply chain and vendor management, if we have these two add up together, it is our estimation and also a new confirmation that we'll have some additional pipeline and we will update you the information timely on each quarterly earning release.
Operator: Your next question comes from Chris Ko from DBS.
Chris Ko: Congratulations on the strong results. This is Chris Ko from DBS. I have two questions first. Could management share your view on the impact of the antitrust investigations against internet platforms on data center demand? And my second question is, could management share more color on the strategy and the progress of new customer acquisition slate, what sectors we're focusing on and where are the potential demand located?
Dongning Wang: As a participant in this industry, we're not in the position to comment on the direct impact of government's anti-monopoly or anti-trust attitude towards our downstream customers. But as far as I know, I think I just answered a question, when I answered the question for Liu Yang, I think for our customer, I don't think their business got affected. While on a day to day interaction with our customers, we still think that the potential of future collaboration on certain IDC – hyperscale IDC project is still ongoing and we're going to have quite positive development moving into the future in different regions. So, we don't know what kind of positive or negative impact on our anchor customers essentially. But for those customers that are yet to become on our customer list, there might be some impact to them. But we will closely watch the development of the situation and see how it's going to impact our process of acquiring this player to our potential customers. That's pretty much our comments on anti-trust issue. And also, in terms of the new customer development, the company is very affirmative to put new customer acquisition as our sure strategy in the future. And like we did in Q4 last year, we have acquired new customer and add their name with a significant capacity into our business line. And we also are making some positive progress with other potential customer not only in China, but also in the overseas market, not only limited to domestic Chinese customer, but also both international players, digital leadership companies in the overseas market as well. So, once we make some material progress on this, we will find the right time to disclose to the market.
Operator: Your next question comes from Hongjie Li from CICC.
Hongjie Li: I have one questions more related to whole industry. Like, some leading public cloud has announced its first quarter results, showing over 30% growth and a significant slowdown. So, how do you see this demand change? Is there any demand or supply dynamics change? From our perspective, do you see any opportunities to undertake part of the demand originally from the public cloud and now some customer shift its demand directly to the IDC players? So, how do we catch up this new trend? Thank you.
Dongning Wang: Again, I think like we explained just now, I think there might be some slowdown on overall public cloud business, but we haven't got a figure in the top of our mind. But for our customers, our big customers who actually are also significant Internet players and who may potentially also do something in the public cloud area, we don't see the business slowing down at all. We don't know whether it's a real slowdown or real accelerated, we don't know, but at least in our interaction with our anchor customers, our existing customers, we are seeing that the potential collaboration of two sides will be increased, I think, in the near and mid-term, essentially. So, having said that, I think that's probably addressed your second part of the question, if there's new players other than the existing public cloud players in the marketplace who are facing the anti-trust, anti-monopoly regulation from the government, I think there are going to be more opportunities for Chindata than risk because those company affected by this anti-monopoly, those companies affected by the slowdown in the public cloud business are not our customers. And our customers, a major anchor customer may have more chances to enter into those areas. And we will take some as well.
Operator: Your next question comes from Timothy Chau from Jefferies.
Timothy Chau: I'm Timothy from Jefferies. I have a couple of questions. The first one being, during the last analyst meeting, the company's announce about CN13 where there will be new customers, so I'd like to understand if you can disclose any progress or discussion with the customer or what can we – for example, what can we expect about the pricing compared with the company's current MSR? The second question is about the CapEx plans of the three new business units. I would like to understand if the management would like to talk something more about the three business units that was announced in last meeting. The last question is also about overseas expansion opportunities. I believe, last month, Microsoft has mentioned about a billion investment in Malaysia on IDC. So, I'd like to understand if the company would have any plans to further expand their Malaysia business. And in the long term, what will be your geographical revenue split be like?
Dongning Wang: Starting from your question number three. Yes, actually, we already have become the closely collaboration partner for Microsoft in Malaysia. And also, we are already a closer collaborator with Microsoft in China as well. So, that relationship is pretty close at the moment based on our successful execution of the past projects and also our capability the Chindata team has demonstrated through this collaboration. So, our strategy, one of our top strategy is always to expand our business cooperation with our existing customers and to make them – in other words, make them happier and happier. Hopefully, this cooperation can bring some significant wider scope, both in China and Asia's emerging market. We'll find a proper time to disclose the positive development to the public later on. So, that's the question number three. Question number one, regarding the CN13, that's the new customers we acquired in Q4. And I think if you check the schedule, from the time in Q4 we signed the commitment with our customer to the time we plan to deliver the product to them, we still have quite a long extended period to go essentially. At the moment, I think I can only say that everything is on schedule, and we're going to fulfill our promise to deliver the project on time with the right quality. And hopefully, we can even exceeding our customers' expectations a little bit. And your second question about CapEx plan on the new business, we're still writing out the concrete executable business plan – our execution plan for these three major subgroups. But the most likely scenario is that those three subgroups will serve our strategic objective. For example, with Chinpower, the primary mission of Chinpower, the subgroup of it, is try to make sure that, by 2030, all the major hyperscale data center for Chindata in China will be consuming 100% renewable energy. So, if you don't make more renewable energy generation investment and completely rely on the market purchase and market transactions, this objective is very hard to achieve. Having said that, we may have an investment plan to invest into this renewable energy in the geographic location where we're going to build the future hyperscale data center consuming renewable energy. But we will be smart and we will partner with external investors to co-invest into this sort of project and to make sure that the investment and CapEx spending from a Chindata side can be made on a share basis, can be minimized and output in terms of increased utilization of the renewable energy and potential improvement of the EBITDA margin by the relatively lower renewable energy costs and also by potentially realizing the external revenue by turning our role from green energy buyer to green energy seller can bring a huge commercial and financial benefit to the company.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect your line.
