Digital Realty Trust, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Digital Realty First Quarter 2021 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. 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 Jon Stewart, Digital Realty's Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. John, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. 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 Chief Revenue Officer Corey Dyer are also on the call and will be available for Q&A. Management may make forward-looking statements, including guidance and 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 first quarter results. First, we demonstrated our commitment to delivering sustainable growth for all stakeholders with efficient and socially responsible capital raises and corporate governance enhancements. We continued to enhance the value of our global platform, extending connectivity offerings globally, recycling capital, and investing to fuel high-quality organic growth. We delivered solid financial results, with core FFO per share up 9% year-over-year and 9 cents ahead of consensus. Finally, we continued to strengthen our 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. Our formula for long-term value creation is a global, connected, sustainable framework, and our first quarter results demonstrate the strength of this framework. Our business is increasingly global, with first quarter bookings very evenly balanced across regions. We continue to align platform digital with our customers' digital transformation initiatives by expanding our unique interconnection capabilities, focusing on connecting centers of data across our robust, reliable global platform. Last but not least, we continue to advance our initiatives to deliver sustainable growth for all stakeholders. Let's turn to our sustainable growth initiatives here on page three. We were recently honored to be named EPA Energy Star Partner of the Year for Energy Management for the second year in a row. We were also recently honored to receive the 2020 Largest Financial Corporate Green Bond Award from Climate Bonds Initiative. We expect to publish our third annual ESG report during the second quarter, providing transparency on our ESG performance for 2020, as well as a comprehensive overview of our clean energy commitment, resource conservation, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other sustainable business practices. 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 joined leaders across 85 industries in signing the CEO Pledge on CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion, an initiative to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Our board of directors also amended our corporate governance guidelines to clarify that director candidate pools must include candidates with diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender. Finally, in February, our board of directors amended our nominating and corporate governance committee charter to formalize oversight of our ESG programs, including sustainability, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are doing our best to play a constructive, proactive role in 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 to our investment activity on page four. We continue to invest in our global platform with 44 projects underway around the world, totaling more than 300 megawatts of incremental capacity scheduled for delivery over the next 18 months. Half of this expansion is underway in EMEA, while the balance is split roughly evenly between the Americas and APEC. In EMEA, we continued our extension of the highly connected Legacy Interaction Campus in Frankfort and began construction on the Neckermann Expansion Campus. During the first quarter, we broke ground on the first 26 megawatts on the expansion campus, which are scheduled for delivery next year. Demand in Frankfurt remains strong, and our campus, with access to over 700 carriers and ISPs, continues to attract customers from around the world. In France, we are adding capacity in Marseille as well as Paris. Demand in Marseille is largely driven by the 14 subsea cables that terminate in our facilities, where we are transforming a former abandoned World War II U-boat bunker into a modern and vital communications hub for over half of the world's population. In Paris, we continue to develop interactions Paris Digital Park, while the Dunant subsea cable that links Paris to Virginia Beach was connected in our Paris campus during the quarter. We are also expanding our highly connected Brussels campus and breaking ground on another facility in Madrid to serve the broadening needs of service providers as well as enterprises. In APAC, we recently announced the grand opening of our third data center in Singapore. We were particularly pleased to be recognized by Singapore's Desmond Lee, Minister of National Development, highlighting the sustainable design of our most energy-efficient data center in the region. Despite some COVID-related construction challenges last year, we were gratified to be able to deliver this highly connected and sustainably designed facility to meet customer needs in our tightest market. Finally, in mid-March, we closed on the sale of a portfolio of 11 assets in Europe for approximately $680 million, executing on our strategy of recycling capital from stabilized assets, reinvesting proceeds into higher growth opportunities, while prioritizing long-term value creation over near-term earnings growth. Let's turn to demand drivers on page five. We are fortunate to be operating in a business levered to secular demand drivers. Our leadership position provides us with a unique vantage point that enables us to detect secular trends as they emerge globally on platform digital. In the second half of last year, we introduced to our customers the Data Gravity Index, our market intelligence tool that projects the growing intensity of the enterprise data creation lifecycle and its gravitational impact on global IT infrastructure. In the first quarter of this year, we took the next step and published an industry manifesto, enabling connected data communities to guide cross-industry collaboration for our customers as they tackle data gravity head-on and unlock a new era of growth opportunity. Recent third-party research continues to support the growing relevance of data gravity. Market intelligence firm Gardner recently hosted an executive retreat and surveyed over 400 chief data and analytic officers, with 83% of CEOs expecting to increase investments in digital business, with a large percentage of these firms prioritizing digital data products to drive growth. With this transition to data-driven businesses, Gardner predicts that by 2024, More than 75% of companies will have deployed multiple data hubs to drive mission-critical data analytics, sharing, and governance. We are seeing growing momentum across our enterprise and service provider customers deploying their own data hubs and analytics environments in multiple metros on platform digital. As I mentioned earlier, Digital Realty was recently named Energy Star Partner of the Year by the United States Environmental Protection Agency for the second consecutive year This award reflects our sharpened focus on driving sustainable design and operations on platform digital underpinned by ambitious science-based targets to significantly reduce our carbon footprint by 2030. We are honored by the strong validation of our platform and our market-leading innovation to capture the growing global data center demand opportunity from data-driven businesses. Given the resiliency of the demand drivers underpinning our business, and the relevance of our platform to 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. Thank you, Bill.