Equinix, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Equinix Fourth Quarter Warnings Conference Call. All lines will be in a listen-only mode until we open for questions. Also, today's conference is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to your host, Ms. Katrina Reimel, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, and welcome to today's conference call. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that some of the statements we'll be making today are forward-looking in nature and involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary significantly from those statements and may be affected by the risks identified in today's press release and those identified in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K, filed on February 26, 2018, and 10-Q, filed on November 2, 2018. Equinix assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or comment on forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition, In light of regulation fair disclosure, it is Equinix's policy not to comment on its financial guidance during the quarter unless it is done through an explicit public disclosure. In addition, we will provide non-GAAP measures on today's conference call. We provide a reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a list of the reasons why the company uses these measures in today's press release on the Equinix IR page at www.equinix.com. We have made available on the IR page of our website a presentation designed to accompany this discussion, along with certain supplemental financial information and other data. We'd also like to remind you that we post important information about Equinix on the IR page from time to time and encourage you to check our website regularly for the most current available information. With us today are Charles Myers, Equinix's CEO and President, and Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we'll be taking questions from sell-side analysts. In the interest of wrapping this call up an hour, we'd like to ask these analysts to limit any following questions to just one. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Charles. Thanks, Kat.

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. We had a great end of the year, delivering our 64th consecutive quarter of revenue growth and eclipsing a key milestone with over $5 billion in revenue for the year. The opportunity for Equinix is as compelling as ever, as digital transformation is reshaping virtually every industry across the globe. Digital and the infrastructure that fuels it have emerged as board-level issues, and this digital imperative is transcending the macroeconomic volatility we see in the market. Customers are thinking differently about how they interact with their customers and every element of their supply chain. And the major tech trends, whether it be AI, IoT, big data, or 5G, are all amplifying this digital tailwind. In the wake of this digital transformation wave, a clear architecture of choice has emerged for our customers. That architecture is global, highly distributed, hybrid, and multi-cloud. And for a variety of reasons, customers are increasingly looking to locate this infrastructure at Equinix, leveraging our interconnected digital edge to achieve performance, security, compliance, flexibility, and total cost of ownership benefits that can only be supported by the physics of proximity and the economics of aggregation. These compelling advantages are translating into strong performance in the business, and give us solid momentum as we enter 2019 and beyond. To build on this momentum, we're investing to expand our unmatched global reach with 36 projects across 25 markets, adding new markets such as Hamburg, Muscat, and Seoul. We are committed to designing, building, and operating our data centers with high energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. In 2018, we sourced clean and renewable energy across 90% of our global platform. and we remain committed to our long-term goal of achieving 100%. We're extending our portfolio of interconnection offerings while building on our traditional interconnection portfolio with our market-leading ECX fabric, and we've developed a roadmap for a number of compelling new services for the year ahead. We're continuing to cultivate high-value ecosystems and will scale well past the 10,000 participants currently on our platform, and we're standing behind those ecosystems with our 20-year track record of service excellence. We remain focused on the six priorities I outlined last quarter, including expanding our go-to-market engine, evolving our portfolio of partners and products, and delivering on our hit strategy, all while remaining steadfast in our commitment to deliver against the revenue, margin expansion, and AFFO per share targets laid out at our last analyst day. We ended the year with a very strong fourth quarter, delivering record growth in net bookings, which sets us up nicely for a good start to 2019. As depicted on slide three, revenues for the full year were $5.1 billion, up 9% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA was up 7% year-over-year, and AFFO was meaningfully ahead of our expectations. These growth rates are all on a normalized and constant currency basis. Interconnection revenues continue to outpace co-location, growing 12% year-over-year, and multi-deployment metrics increased across the board, with robust cross-border bookings driven by continued strength in both cloud and enterprise. Today, over 60 percent of our recurring revenues comes from customers deployed across all three regions, and 86 percent from customers deployed across multiple metros. Our hyperscale initiative continues to enjoy significant momentum and will allow us to capture strategic large footprint deployments from select customers while mitigating strain on our balance sheet by employing off-balance sheet structures. We're seeing strong success with the initial capacity we've brought to market, and our customer pipeline is robust. Our Paris 8 asset is more than 60% pre-leased, and with our London 10 facility, we have pre-sold 20 megawatts of capacity to key Hyperscale customers, with an average contract tenure of greater than 11 years. We also have several other projects in development, including Tokyo 12, our first dedicated Hyperscale project in APAC, and have secured land across a number of other high-demand metros, including Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Our discussions with financing partners are progressing well. and we expect to have our first JV executed in the coming months with a compelling collection of assets. We expect the JV structure to have minimal impact on our P&L and other core metrics in 2019 as we continue to ramp up the initiative. We look forward to providing additional details when we announce the transaction. Shifting to interconnection, we have the most comprehensive global interconnection platform, now comprising over 333,000 physical and virtual interconnections. over four times more than any competitor. In Q4, we added an incremental 8,800 interconnections, including 1,800 virtual connections, and are adding more per quarter than other providers do annually. Software-defined networking is acting as a technology catalyst for our interconnection value prop, reducing the friction for buyers and creating a thriving environment that is driving demand across all our interconnection offerings. Customers using virtual connections are also our highest users of physical connections, showcasing the complimentary nature of our portfolio. For our internet exchange platform, revenues, ports, and traffic were all up due to strong global demand and new market growth in EMEA and Brazil. IX peak traffic surpassed 10 terabits per second for the first time and was up 8% quarter over quarter. Now let me cover some highlights from our verticals. Our network vertical had its second highest bookings led by EMEA and fueled in part by continuous strength and NSP resale to enterprise customers. With our leading network density and over half our sites along coastal locations, we also continue to win new sub-sea cable opportunities and have been selected in more than 25 sub-sea cable projects over the last few years. Wins this quarter included the Curie sub-sea cable landing station in LA-4, Google's first private sub-sea cable connecting Los Angeles and Chile, as well as Cross Lake Fiber, connecting the major financial metros of Toronto and New York under Lake Ontario. Our financial services vertical also saw its second highest bookings, led by insurance and banking, as well as strong new logo performance as firms embraced digital transformation. Expansions included a top 10 global asset manager re-architecting their network and securely connecting across seven metros, as well as a top 15 multinational insurance company leveraging hybrid multi-cloud and distributed data in Singapore and Hong Kong. In content and digital media, we saw record bookings, led by EMEA, and strength in the publishing and gaming subsegments. Customer expansions included Roblox, Tencent, Thompson, as well as Fastly, a global cloud edge platform that has been upgrading to 100 gig to support continued demand of mobile users across 23 IBXs. Our cloud and IT vertical also delivered record bookings, led by the software subsegment, as the cloud continues to diversify. Expansions included StackPath, a leading provider of edge cloud services, deploying infrastructure across 21 metros, as well as British ERP SaaS provider, expanding to support customer demand for cloud services at the edge. The enterprise vertical, which drove a full one-third of total bookings in 2018, continues to be our fastest-growing vertical, with bookings in Q4 led by the energy, healthcare, and retail subsegments. New wins included a global grocer transforming their network for a cloud-first strategy, a Fortune 100 global chemical company re-architecting their network to transform IT delivery, and a top automotive parts manufacturer leveraging ecosystem partners via ECX. Channel sales continue to represent a critical lever for expanding our market reach, delivering our third consecutive quarter with over 20% of bookings and accounting for half of our new logos, driven by solid performance across all partner types. We are very pleased with our channel progress and continue to build predictable and repeatable deal flow. In 2018, the channel drove over 4,000 deals, a great indication of the significant velocity of our retail selling engine. New channel wins this quarter included a joint win with Verizon for a high-performance semiconductor manufacturer, launching new dev test infrastructure to support the engineering community, as well as a partner win with CBRE for a U.S. regional bank, using Platform Equinix to lower their total cost of ownership and improve user experience across their 1,700 branches. Now, let me turn the call over to Keith to cover the results for the quarter. Great.