DigitalBridge Group, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the Digital Bridge Group, Inc. fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. And please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Severin White. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DigitalBridge's fourth quarter and year-end 2021 earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Mark Gamzee, our president and CEO, and Jackie Wu, our CFO. I'll quickly cover the safe harbor, and then we can get started. 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 today is as of February 24, 2022, 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 Form 10-K to be filed with the SEC for the year ending December 31, 2021. Great. So we're going to cover our standard annual agenda. Mark will start with our 2021 year in review. Jackie will cover our quarterly and annual financial results, as well as update our forward guidance. And then Mark will look forward to the year ahead in 2022 before wrapping up with some key takeaways, followed by Q&A. We finished the quarter with some of our strongest results to date, and we're incredibly excited about what lays ahead in 2022. So let's get started. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark Gansey, our president and CEO. Mark?

Thanks, Severin. I'd like to start by thanking everyone for their continued interest and attention today, especially new investors that are just learning about DigitalRidge for the first time. I'll get into more detail later on these three key areas, how we finished the mission in our rotation to digital. how DigitalRidge has emerged as the partner choice to institutional capital, and how we've continued to invest in high-quality digital assets in 2021. The key on the right-hand of the slide is how we've successfully checked all the boxes on our key goals for 2021. Just like in 2020, we've delivered on our commitments to you, our investors. And that's the key, continuing to deliver on promises for you. This is essential and critical as we continue to build trust and, most importantly, as we accelerate into the next phase of our business plan. Next slide, please. As we look back at 2021, I think the biggest takeaway for us is we really did finish the mission, rotating over $78 billion in assets under management in under three years. We call this our diversified to digital rotation. And we did it ahead of schedule by over a year and on budget, once again, delivering for you, our investors. Not only did we rotate assets, we recast our corporate balance sheet, substantially reducing our corporate liabilities, as well as rotating our governance with a new board that's diverse and steeped in digital expertise. We relaunched mid-year as DigitalBridge, returning back to our heritage as the leading global digital infrastructure firm. And as we enter 2022, we're now able to focus 100% of our energy on digital, where we have long had a history of operating and investing successfully for over 25 years, building great digital infrastructure assets and platforms. It's a really exciting place for us to be now. I want to thank my entire global team again for their incredible execution. I'm humbled at their efforts. And most importantly, I'm pretty sure no one has pulled off such a complete and and wholesale transformation in such little time. These efforts have set us up for success in 2022 and beyond, and I'm excited to share our business plan for you for the coming years. Next slide, please. So before we get to the business plan going forward, let's quickly summarize where we are in legacy assets. The key focus here has been to harvest capital to fuel the next phase of our strategic roadmap. Here, we've summarized the four major legacy businesses we've divested over the past year. Our OE&D sale to Fortress generating over $650 million. We closed the previously announced hospitality portfolio early in 2021. We sold our management contract back to Bright Stire, and wellness infrastructure will generate consideration of over $300 million when it closes later this quarter. Once again, we've successfully executed this monetization program faster than we forecasted, generating the capital we originally forecasted, and it's all been completed during an unprecedented pandemic. In 2021, we generated over $1.2 billion in net proceeds from legacy monetizations against a budget of $900 million. This brings total legacy sales to over $1.9 billion in net proceeds, a major accomplishment. Next slide, please. Next, I want to talk about fundraising at Digital Bridge Partners II, our second flagship fund. We closed out fundraising at $8.3 billion in the fourth quarter after having blown through our original target of $6 billion by over 38%. We raised the hard cap along the way to accommodate strong investor interest as we brought the fundraising to a close. Let me put this in context. We were the third largest infrastructure fund in the world raised globally in 2021, and that includes all of the generalist infrastructure funds. In digital infrastructure, it wasn't even close. We were multiples ahead of anybody else that's investing in digital infrastructure. It's also worth noting that we completed this fundraise in under 18 months from start to finish. That's an incredibly fast timeframe, and it's testament to DigitalBridge's position as being the partner of choice to institutional capital looking to build exposure to this resilient and growing asset class. Next slide, please. Not only were we busy raising capital in 2021, we were just as active deploying it. Last year, we increased our asset base to $45 billion in AUM. The key factor here is our investor-operator model that allows us to quickly transform and scale our portfolio companies. If you look at what we did in Vantage Asia, Atlas Edge and Edgepoint in particular, all of these platforms are benefiting from DigitalBridge's value add that accrues to our limited partners and to you, our shareholders. Our acquisition of PCCW in Hong Kong, alongside of the hyperscale assets that we have created at Agile, were combined to form the base for Vantage to expand into the Asia market, leveraging our global hyperscale relationships in a new territory for us. Second, Atlas Edge completed its first strategic acquisition less than six months after launching, extending our reach into 11 European markets through a key digital relationship with Colt. Lastly, EdgePoint has already hit its five-year business plan in the second year of full operations. As we support its growing Southeast Asia tower strategy, eclipsing over 14,000 towers, making it the largest private tower co in Southeast Asia, once again, demonstrating our ability to scale quickly. At Digital Operating, we continue to invest and grow both of our balance sheet platforms, adding another valuable hyperscale data center campus at Vantage SDC in the very, very difficult to build market of Santa Clara. And then anchoring databanks acquisition of the Houston area data centers from Cyrus One, which brings its edge data center platform to its 27th market with a total of 70 edge data centers on that platform. Next slide, please. The last thing I want to touch on as I look back on 2021 is our team. Investing in our organization is probably the most important thing we do. I've long said people create alpha. So this is completely seminal to our success. In 2021, we made investments in our team, and you'll hear about that later as we position ourselves to take advantage of the big opportunities we see ahead in 22 and beyond. New digital board members, new senior executives with industry-leading experience, new operating partners and advisors that lead new investments for us. This is our operational CapEx. It's our investment in the future. We continue to expand our presence in Europe and Asia. All told, we added 22 new digital infrastructure professionals to the firm, bringing our team to over 100 people strongly dedicated solely to this asset class, digital infrastructure. This in-house expertise is what truly sets us apart. It gives us our edge as we invest in the future of digital infrastructure. With that, I'll hand it over to one of our key team members and my partner, Jackie Wu, to walk you through our financial performance in Q4 and update our near and medium-term guidance. Thank you, Jackie.