Digital Realty Trust, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Digital Realty fourth quarter 2020 earnings call. Please note this event is being recorded. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session and callers will be limited to one question plus a follow up. Due to time constraints, we will conclude promptly at the bottom of the hour. I would now like to turn the call over to John Stewart, Digital Realty's Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. John, please go ahead.

Thank you, Andrea. The speakers on today's call are CEO Bill Stein and CFO Andy Power. Chief Investment Officer Greg Wright, Chief Technology Officer Chris Sharp, and EVP of Sales and Marketing Corey Dyer are also on the call and will be available for Q&A. Management may make forward-looking statements, including guidance and their underlying assumptions. Forward-looking statements are based on expectations that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a further discussion of risks related to our business, see our 10-K and subsequent filings with the SEC. This call will contain non-GAAP financial information. Reconciliations to net income are included in the supplemental package furnished to the SEC and available on our website. Before I turn the call over to Bill, I'd like to hit the tops of the waves on our fourth quarter results. We delivered high-quality quarterly bookings in terms of total volume as well as the product mix, geographic split, and the number of new logos landing on platform digital. We extended our global platform, entering Greece with the acquisition of the leading co-location interconnection provider in southeastern Europe and securing customer growth in existing markets around the world with key land purchases and new builds. We delivered solid financial results with core FFO per share eight cents ahead of consensus driven by operational outperformance. Finally, we further strengthened the balance sheet, lowering our weighted average cost of debt with the redemption of high coupon debt and preferred equity, while extending our weighted average duration with the issuance of attractively priced long-term capital. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Bill.

Thanks, John. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us. The fourth quarter capped off a transformational year for digital realty. We acquired several highly connected assets, including the Westin Building in North America and interaction in EMEA, along with the leading co-location and interconnection providers in Southeastern Europe, significantly expanding our platform in EMEA while trimming non-core assets in North America. We delivered record bookings for the full year, an extraordinary performance under any set of circumstances, but particularly amid the headwinds of a global pandemic. Our business is increasingly global. In 2020, we nearly doubled the number of countries where digital reality has a presence. And EMEA accounted for more than half our fourth quarter bookings. The first time ever, a majority of our bookings has been outside the Americas. We more than doubled our cross-connect count in 2020, reflecting the growing concentration of network dense, highly connected assets on platform digital. We landed a record number of new logos in 2020, more than twice as many as our previous record. In fact, driving consistent growth in our enterprise co-location and interconnection business. The vibrant communities on our campus environments are attracting a growing set of new customers, diversifying and solidifying our revenue streams. Service providers and enterprises alike are strengthening their partnership with a select number of trusted global data center partners to help meet their growing needs around the world. And Digital Reality is uniquely well-positioned to serve as their partner of choice. Let's turn to our sustainable growth initiatives here on page three. In October, we formally committed to reducing direct and indirect emissions by 68%, and indirect emissions in our value chain by area by 24%, by 2030, in line with a 1.5 degree climate change scenario. We set our target with science-based targets initiative, along with over 1,000 organizations that are committed to reduce emissions. And we also signed the UN Global Compact's business ambition for 1.5 degrees C, joining leading companies who have committed to ambitious carbon reduction targets. In early December, we announced that our operations in France were on target to achieve a carbon-neutral footprint by the end of the year and are expected to remain carbon-neutral through 2030 for both existing facilities and future expansion based on Scope 1 and 2 emissions. In mid-December, we were honored to receive NAREIT's Leader in the Light Award for data center sustainability for the fourth consecutive year. In early January, we issued our fifth green bond, extending our lead as the largest U.S. issuer of bonds committed to sustainable investments. Our green bond framework is aligned with leading global best practices, including Gresby's Green Bond Principles, as well as the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, and Sustainalytics has provided an independent, second-party opinion, concluding that our green bond program is considered robust, credible, and transparent. We are committed to minimizing our impact on the environment while simultaneously meeting the needs of our customers, our investors, our employees, and the broader society. In terms of our social efforts, we recently selected diversity, equity, and inclusion as one of four company-wide philanthropic areas of focus in addition to sustainability, disaster relief, and STEM education. As you may be aware, NAE recently instituted a Dividends Through Diversity and Inclusion program, which I am honored to be co-chairing along with Tom Baltimore of Park Hotels and Debbie Cafaro of Ventos. Dividends Through Diversity will promote the recruitment, inclusion, and advancement of women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups in REITs, in the broader commercial real estate industry. We have also joined leaders across 85 industries in signing the CEO Pledge on CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion, an initiative that aims to rally the business community to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace and to cultivate a trusting environment where employees feel empowered to have discussions on these topics. Participating in these programs and others like them is critical to our industry's future because it is the right thing to do and because we serve a broad, diverse community, and we believe that to help our customers prepare for the future, we need industry professionals whose insights and perspectives reflect the communities we serve. We are doing our best to play a constructive, proactive role and advancing our broader goal of delivering sustainable growth for all our stakeholders, investors, customers, employees, and the communities we serve around the world. Let's turn now to our investment activity on page four. We continue to expand our global platform with the acquisition of the leading co-location and interconnection provider in southeastern Europe, groundbreakings in existing markets across EMEA, and strategic land purchase on the continent and in Asia Pacific. In early November, we acquired Lambda Helix, the largest carrier-neutral co-location and interconnection provider in Greece, led by an accomplished management team who will continue to manage the business. As leading service providers continue to expand their footprint, We expect Greece and other parts of Southeastern Europe will be major beneficiaries. We are well positioned to capture the key cloud and connectivity deployments that will accelerate the region's digital transformation. In Denmark, we began construction on our third data center, adjacent to the two existing facilities on our Copenhagen campus, and offering direct access to leading global cloud providers, numerous networks, internet exchanges, and a transatlantic subsea cable system. We also broke ground on a new data center in Zurich where we've seen robust demand from leading global service providers. The expansion of our Zurich campus will provide runway for customer growth at the leading cloud and interconnection hub in Switzerland. We also acquired a land parcel within one kilometer of our highly interconnected campus in Vienna and halfway around the globe in Sydney, we are under contract to acquire two parcels that will support the development of up to 250 megawatts. These strategic land holdings will provide additional capacity, enabling local and global service providers to seamlessly expand adjacent to their existing deployments. Let's turn to page five for an update on the interaction integration. The successful integration of InterAction was our top priority for 2020, and we made excellent progress despite the pandemic. We have built a solid foundation for the assimilation of our businesses, and we are well on our way to achieving the objectives and synergies we outlined when we first announced the transaction. I'm proud of what we've accomplished to date and excited about our prospects as we move into the implementation phase in 2021. When we announced the transaction, we stated that the combined company would have enhanced capabilities to address and solve the public and hybrid cloud architecture requirements of our global customer base that would allow us to build upon each company's current relationships with leading global customers while also enabling us to effectively compete in the broader target markets. The early results are very promising. We've enjoyed excellent success with global platform providers, and early cross-selling wins have surpassed expectations with numerous referrals between the sales teams. The significant embedded growth potential was another key element of the interaction investment thesis. We believe the combined organization has already created significant long-term value by executing on the existing development pipeline, acquiring the freehold to the land under key positions in Frankfurt and Paris, and securing land in key markets to support future growth. Let's turn to demand drivers on page six. We continue to be fortunate to be operating in a business levered to secular demand drivers. As the leading global data center provider, we have a unique vantage point that enables us to detect secular trends as they emerge. We recently introduced the Data Gravity Index, which measures, quantifies, and forecasts the growing intensity of the enterprise data creation lifecycle and its gravitational impact on global IT infrastructure. This groundbreaking index is a byproduct of our market intelligence analysis, as well as our obsessive focus on understanding customers' deployments and supporting their evolving infrastructure needs. Recent third-party research continues to support the growing relevance of data gravity. According to the market intelligence firm IDC, 80% of the world's data will reside within enterprises by the year 2025. A 451 research global IT leader survey recently found that 87% of IT leaders will need to maintain local copies of critical data at global points of presence to meet regulatory requirements. We continue to see these indicators as enterprises expand their private data infrastructure deployments and integrate data exchange with adjacent business and service provider partners across our global platform. Digital Reality recently received Frost and Sullivan's APAC Data Center Strategy Innovator Award, recognizing Platform Digital for providing an innovative global platform enabling enterprises to scale digital transformation in a consistent modular fashion and addressing the unique infrastructure requirements for integrating private data flows across multiple public platforms. We are honored by the strong validation of our platform and our market leading innovation to meeting the needs of our global data center customer base. Given the resiliency of the demand drivers underpinning our business and the relevance of our platform in meeting these needs, we believe that we are well positioned to continue to deliver sustainable growth for customers, shareholders, and employees, whatever the macro environment may hold in store. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Andy to take you through our financial results.