PLDT to finalize data center biz sale in July
PLDT Inc. is looking at finalizing the sale of its data center business to a foreign buyer by next month, which is estimated to reach over $1 billion in valuation.
Manuel Pangilinan, president and chair of the telecom giant, said on Thursday they were still ironing out some details of the transaction but the deal is nearing conclusion.
“We’re talking to the final bidder at this stage. We’ve agreed the valuation with them,” he told the reporters at the sidelines of the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting in Taguig.
Pangilinan said they were aiming to finalize the binding sheet agreement by next month.
He noted PLDT would keep 51-percent ownership post-transaction, proceeds of which are allocated for debt payments.
Asked to confirm who the buyer was, Pangilinan declined to disclose for now but he said it was “somebody you know.”
Reuters recently reported that PLDT was discussing with Japanese telecommunication company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. for the purchase of a 49-percent stake in ePLDT, the telco giant’s data center arm.
Initial plan
With this development, PLDT abandoned its initial plan of possibly raising funds through a real estate investment trust (REIT) offering.
A REIT is an entity that owns income-generating real estate. Investors betting on REITs earn through regular dividend payouts.
The PLDT unit currently has 10 data centers with a total capacity of 50 megawatts.
By July, the company is set to open its 11th data hub in Laguna. Three more data centers are undergoing the design phase.
Data centers are facilities housing critical servers and networks. Demand for these hubs is on the rise due to the growing needs of hyperscalers, or entities that provide cloud, networking and internet services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Alibaba AliCloud, IBM and Oracle.
Along with this, the telco giant also has over 1.1 million kilometers of fiber cable network here and abroad.
PLDT activated in 2022 the US-Transpacific Jupiter cable system, a 14,000-km submarine cable network linking Daet, Camarines Norte and Japan. It is also set to complete by next year the 12,000-km Apricot cable system, which provides connections to Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan and Guam.
The company is set to spend P75 billion to P78 billion this year for capital outlays for cell site upgrades, deployment of home broadband ports and data center and submarine cable investments.
