GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jonathan Atkin: Thank you. So I have a financial question, and that is just anything to call out in terms of one-time impacts through the rest of the year you had kind of the early termination that we talked about in the script. But anything else that, yes, maybe you could elaborate on between now and year-end, that would affect 3Q, 4Q, or even next year? And then secondly, related to your Southeast Asia footprint. I wonder if you could maybe provide us an update on the demand trends that you’re seeing in Hong Kong. And then in Johor, are you seeing continued potential for upsizing of your footprint based on the existing customer relationship? Or could the demand there potentially diversify? Thank you.

Dan Newman: Thank you, Jon. I’ll start with the financial questions. We don’t expect more one-time items like the experience in the second quarter in the second half of this year or beyond, so far as we can foresee. If these one-time items are material, we will disclose them to try to establish a normalized number, so that we can continue to track the quarter-on-quarter trend as we have done ever since we went public 2016. William, do you like to talk about demand in Hong Kong and the next wave in Johor?

William Huang: Yes. I think the demand in Hong Kong is still maintained the normal, right? I think the – every year’s growth is around 70 megawatts. This demand is from the different region, like from China, also from U.S., from the other domestic customer as well. So this is nothing changed so far. So we are still on track. The market demand supply also no significant change. So still in terms of supply, also very balanced. So I think the Hong Kong market is to stay on the very stable growth period. In Johor, if we talk about Johor, what we see is that, Johor now is more hot for all the data center player, also for all the customers. What we can see is a lot of the international player – international cloud player, also Internet giants, they all show more high increased level into Johor.

So this has changed a lot, very encouraging us. So our target is definitely not just to follow up our customer – existing customer. We’re definitely very interested to get some new customer name from the different region to diversify our portfolio as – just like what we did in China, diversification is very important for us, and we are good at that.

Jonathan Atkin: And then lastly, on Singapore, given the tightness of supply and the fact that you were one of only a small number of companies to get the permission to proceed with new data center development, do you think that you’re inclined to do more of a kind of a wholesale hyper scale approach with a smaller number of tenants in order to stabilize the asset quickly once it’s developed? Or would you pursue more of a kind of a retail-oriented approach? Do you have any thoughts on that?

William Huang: Yes. So far, we are – I think there’s two type of customers that we are interested. One is, who will deploy their IT in three region. That including Batam, Singapore, and Johor. This is our first priority to support – which remain support our strategy, right, which I think we already showed this plan to some of our customers, they are very interested. So the second – priority, definitely in Singapore is a financial center, which is our – we are very familiar with the financial institutions demand and a requirement. So we also aim to sell some to retail customers for example, like the financial institution, right, we can get a more high margin and a very stable commitment, that’s our go-to-market strategy.

Jonathan Atkin: Thank you.

Operator: We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Frank Louthan from Raymond James. Please ask your question.