GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

William Huang: I think — hey, Jonathan, this is William. I think, in China, yeah, we just mentioned, this year is a transition for China whole business. But based on — in last couple of weeks, I came back to China and visited lot of governments and our customers as well. I think, I am quite encouraged by our customers, especially the large Internet and cloud service providers. Based on our current pipeline, I think the demand we can see the leading indication is pipeline. I think it’s very strong. But for the cloud, the — when I visited cloud service provider, they are very ambitious still. And I think they recover maybe slightly a little bit later than other Internet company and financial institution. If you come to China, I think I see, in first two week — first two months, the leading, I mean, data which are — I mean, the consumer data rebound very fast.

This is a leading indication, the order supply chain industry will catch up with the recovery, but it still need time. I think from another — so in terms of the current Tier 1 market order resource, I think we’re very confident. We have just very limited inventory, right? So, I think this is variable aspect, I believe and very confident we will sell them easily in this year. So, this is the question, right?

Jonathan Atkin: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We’ll now take the next question. Please standby. This is from the line of Yang Liu from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Yang Liu: Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. I have two questions here. The first one is regarding demand. I think we believe one of the reason to see very divergent demand from cloud and Internet companies that lot of big Internet companies are moving away from public cloud. So, if we combine the cloud and Internet together, when do you expect to see that the overall demand recovery, has — or put another way, in term of GDS’ full year guidance, what is the assumption of demand recovery behind it? And my second question is in terms of the competition. Are you seeing more competitive bidding or price from Chinese telcos in front of your big customer? Thank you.

William Huang: Okay, Yang Liu. This is William. I will answer your first question. I think the — yeah, in general, I think — we just mentioned, our structure of the new booking has changed if you look at the last year, last two years, right? We used to leading by the — or 90% — almost 85% or 90% incremental demand from the cloud service providers. This year, last year, almost zero from the cloud service providers. So, we still reached 70,000 square meters, right? This is all from the structurally changing to the Internet plus enterprise. So, we still maintain this assumption for our — this year’s new bookings. So, we just wait. If the cloud recovers, that’s all upside. So that’s the profile — assumption what we make.

Dan Newman: Yeah. You asked about what was the assumption in our guidance or in our business plan. The key driver of revenue and ultimately of EBITDA is the move-in. I mentioned that we are assuming — we’re expecting over the full year, the move-in to be about 50,000 square meters. So, we have some exceptional churn. I don’t keep talking about it, but if you add that back, you will see that the move-in this year will be over 60,000 square meters, which is around 15,000 square meters plus per quarter, which is a little higher than the last few quarters, but similar to what it’s been over the last six or eight quarters. So that doesn’t really imply much of a recovery. But one of the factors which is behind that number is that, we mentioned a few contracts, which start delivery in around September, October, November, December, have faster than typical move-in schedule.

Some of it could be quite front ended, which means that we may see quite a bit of move-in towards the end of the year. It’s not yet this year, January of next year. So that is the full year number without really boosting the revenue much this year. But it does set up, I think, for potentially a good rate of year-on-year growth in 2024.