Iron Mountain Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
April 28, 2022

Key Takeaways

  • Record Q1 Results: Achieved highest-ever quarterly revenue of $1.25 billion (+10% organic growth) and all-time record EBITDA of $431 million, driven by strong pricing, volume gains in storage rental, and double-digit growth in digital offerings.
  • Asset Lifecycle Management Expansion: Leveraged the IT Renew acquisition to secure major contracts—expanding recycling and on-site media destruction services for a large financial institution and a U.S. customer with plans for global rollout.
  • Data Center Leasing Momentum: Signed 35 MW of new leases (including a 27 MW London deal) and a 72 MW near-build-to-suit lease in Northern Virginia, prompting a full-year leasing outlook raise to 130 MW and projected data center revenue growth of over 20%.
  • ESG Leadership: Iron Mountain’s Phoenix AZP2 data center earned BREEAM Excellent design certification—the first in North America—while securing long-term renewable power agreements offsetting 100% of its data center energy use.
  • Solid Financial Position & Guidance: Reiterated full-year 2022 revenue, EBITDA, and AFFO guidance—with Q2 revenue ~ $1.3 billion and EBITDA ~$450 million—maintained net lease adjusted leverage at 5.4× and raised 2022 CapEx to $950 million.
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Earnings Conference Call
Iron Mountain Q1 2022
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Iron Mountain Q1 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing Star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press Star then two. We will limit analysts to one question, and you can rejoin in the queue. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Gillian Tiltman, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations. Gillian, please go ahead.

Gillian Tiltman
Gillian Tiltman
SVP and Head of Investor Relations at Iron Mountain

Thank you, Brica. Good morning, and welcome to our Q1 2022 earnings conference call. On today's call, we will refer to materials available on our investor relations website. We are joined today by Bill Meaney, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Barry Hytinen, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After prepared remarks, we'll open up the lines for Q&A. Today's earnings materials contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our expectations. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to today's earnings materials, the Safe Harbor language on slide two, and our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for a discussion of the major risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements. In addition, we use several non-GAAP measures when presenting our financial results.

Gillian Tiltman
Gillian Tiltman
SVP and Head of Investor Relations at Iron Mountain

We have included the reconciliations to these measures in our supplemental financial information. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bill.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

Thank you, Gillian, and thank you all for taking the time to join us today. Our team delivered exceptional results for the Q1 of 2022, exceeding the expectations we provided on our last call. This record performance is reflective of our broad offerings, deep customer relationships, resilient business model, and dedicated team. While we are thrilled to report these results, it's important to take a moment to acknowledge the events happening in Ukraine and impacting the world at large. As we navigate this devastating conflict, we continue to prioritize our Mountaineers and their families. To that end, I am comforted to share that all 65 of our colleagues from Ukraine continue to check in with our global risk, safety, and security team on a daily basis, and all are safe.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

Some families have made the difficult decision to migrate to other countries, and I am proud of how our fellow Mountaineers in the region have offered assistance in providing comfort and resettlement. I continue to be both inspired by and grateful to all the teams in Ukraine and the surrounding countries who have united to support each other in this crisis. I have visited the region twice recently, and I remain humbled by the strength of our colleagues, and we remain committed to supporting our affected Mountaineers and continue to hope and pray for a rapid resolution of this war. Now, if I may, let me begin our discussion of our Q1 results, a record for the company.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

We achieved our highest-ever quarterly revenue of $1.25 billion, exceeding our expectations of $1.2 billion, yielding 10% total organic revenue growth and an all-time record EBITDA of $431 million. We continue to be encouraged by the increased demand of our services across key markets fueling these results. As pricing and positive volume trends continue to benefit us, we delivered organic storage rental revenue growth of 6.8% in the Q1. We drove double-digit growth in digital offerings, including data center, GDS digital transformation services, and ALM or Asset Lifecycle Management. As you know, we've been growing quickly, and over the past two years, we have been growing faster than even our expectations.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

I have shared with you previously how our continued build-out of new products and services, as well as growth in these underlying markets, has now taken our total addressable market to over $120 billion, accelerating us on our growth trajectory path. Turning to our ALM business, we achieved several solid wins that span industries, many of which were made possible through the strong combination of Iron Mountain and the recently acquired ITRenew, which has been performing even better than we had anticipated. An example of the power of this combination can be seen in our expansion on a customer win with a large financial institution that we were originally awarded in early 2021.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

With the additional expertise we acquired with ITRenew, we expanded our offerings to include market-leading recycling expertise as the whole world is focused on how to better embrace the concepts around a more circular economy and reduce our impact on the environment. Along with this added expertise, we now have a full set of capabilities which are truly differentiating in the eyes of not only this customer, but also most of our global customers. Another ALM win this quarter was for a task order for Iron Mountain to provide on-site media destruction and ALM services to 18 U.S. locations, including data centers and office locations, in which all IT asset types will be included as in scope. Several key factors in awarding us the RFP included secure logistics, global footprint, partner network, and existing trusted relationships.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

For this customer, we expect to expand services to multiple regions, including the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and Canada. These are just some of the wins this quarter, which demonstrate the strength of our expanded ALM platform, which will directly benefit from IRM's 225,000 loyal customer base, which includes 95% of the Fortune 1000. Our continued drive in building an extraordinary set of synergistic and customer-centric solutions, combined with our global reach and footprint, propels our growth forward. Now let me share a few examples of how we've been empowering our customers' success and growth through our diverse digital transformation solutions or GDS offerings, coupled with our customer focus. In the Q1, we received fully executed service orders for two large deals in the energy vertical for one of the world's largest oil and gas companies.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

Both projects will allow our customer to identify and access dark data to provide quicker decisions and to better manage their assets. The total value of these two deals represents more than $12 million. We are looking forward to replicating this success with other energy customers. Turning to the Asia-Pacific region, I would like to highlight a large win with an Asian full-service universal bank that I had the honor to visit in March. Iron Mountain will provide digitization service, services to assist our customers' local compliance requirements of DigiKur, which are anti-money laundering related requirements for a total contract value of $4 million. We are also thrilled to report a customer win that has resulted in a five-year, $8 million digital mailroom deal leveraging our content services platform, InSight.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

This Fortune 500 mutual insurance customer, after handling their own mail in-house for more than 100 years, came to us with this opportunity, which was both complex and emotional for the customer. Our success here is a direct result of our long-standing strategic partnership. We also continue to grow our business with Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC, which facilitates the arrival of immigrants, provides protection to refugees, and offers programming to help newcomers settle in Canada. In 2020, Iron Mountain began supporting IRCC with imaging a variety of application forms. There was an immediate need to process a backlog of applications with their staff working from home as a result of the pandemic. To date, we have processed approximately 115,000 applications representing over 14.7 million images.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

Building from this initial work in Toronto, we grew the project by securing an additional contract worth $2.9 million. In addition, we recently awarded a $1.3 million RFP to expand this image initiative to Atlantic and Western Canada. This would not have been possible without our work in supporting this customer from day one, positioning Iron Mountain as a critical business partner. In our Crozier business, we are pleased to highlight our installation of a piece of art entitled Just What Is Your Position by a distinguished L.A. artist at the new terminal at LAX. This installation highlights our team's expertise and precision with regard to complicated installation that will now be on display for millions of travelers. Last, but surely not least, turning to our data center business, you will recall that we initially expected to lease 50 MW this year.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

By the end of Q1, however, we had already signed a total of 35 MW, including a single tenant of 27 MW for our London Two location. We are excited about the continued demand we see across Europe as we bring on added capacity to the market in the coming months. Since March, we have sold an additional 72 MW lease on our Northern Virginia campus. This is a near build-to-suit type of agreement where we are responsible for leasing on a long-term basis the land, the shell, and a large portion of the installed MEP, or mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. Iron Mountain's data center solution met the security, scalability, and interconnection requirements of the customer in this critical global data center market. The lease is expected to commence and begin ramping mid-year 2024 and has a term of 15 years.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

Finally, I would like to share with you a joint ESG and data center win. As we have said before, ESG continues to be an important focus for us, shown through many years of producing annual corporate sustainability reports outlining our commitments and progress for nearly a decade. We recently announced a design certification of our Phoenix, Arizona AZP-2 data center, the first data center in North America to receive BREEAM certification. We are taking the lead on demonstrating the steps facility owners can take to ensure that their data centers are both efficient and resilient. Design for the facility has been certified under BREEAM's new construction standard, a globally recognized green building certification for new developments, and achieved the BREEAM excellent rating.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

This continued focus on building standards, together with already having long-term renewable power purchasing agreements, which offset more than 100% of our data center energy requirements, places us firmly on the path to reach our 2040 commitments to use 100% renewable energy 100% of the time. To conclude, we continue to build on our growth momentum and expand our portfolio to exceed our customers' evolving needs, as evidenced by our outstanding results this morning, including our highest-ever revenue and all-time record EBITDA. With our strong footprint, powerful portfolio, and deep customer relationships, we are confident that we will continue this momentum. The future is bright, and I can't wait to see all we can accomplish. With that, I'll turn the call over to Barry.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Thanks, Bill, and thank you all for joining us to discuss our results. In the Q1, our team delivered strong performance, exceeding the expectations we provided on our last call. On a reported basis, revenue of $1.25 billion grew 15% year-over-year with total organic revenue up 10%. Revenue was over $20 million ahead of the expectations we shared on our last call. To me, a key highlight in the quarter is our organic storage revenue, which grew 6.8% in the quarter, reflecting our strong pricing and data center commencements. Total service revenue increased 33% to $497 million, driven equally by the ITRenew acquisition and our core service offerings. In fact, organic service revenue increased $59 million or 16% driven by strong growth across our service lines, including digital solutions.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

As revenue associated with our traditional transportation services was still down 10% from pre-pandemic levels, we are even more pleased with this performance. Adjusted EBITDA was $431 million, up 13% on a reported basis and up 15% year-on-year on a constant currency basis. We had strong contributions from revenue growth driven by pricing and data center storage, along with ongoing productivity improvements resulting in EBITDA growth of $50 million. The higher level of EBITDA was despite the impact of the stronger US dollar and the disposition of the software escrow business last June. Combined, those two items are about $14 million of year-on-year headwind. Partially offsetting those is the recent ITRenew acquisition. With solid flow through, Q1 EBITDA exceeded the expectations we shared on our last call by $6 million.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Adjusted EBITDA margin was better than we projected. While it was lower year-on-year driven by the inclusion of ITRenew, our core Iron Mountain business continued to deliver improved profitability year-on-year, even with investments to fund further growth. AFFO was $264 million or $0.91 per share, up $29 million and $0.10, respectively, from the first quarter of last year. In both cases, we exceeded our expectations. Now let me spend a moment discussing the impact of the war in Ukraine. In late March, we determined it was appropriate to deconsolidate the majority of the OSG Records Management business, which is principally doing business in Russia. As a result, we wrote down our investments to a fair value of zero and accordingly recognized a charge through the other expense line.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Going forward, we will no longer be including these entities in our financial statements. Also in our other expense line this quarter, we have a gain on a MakeSpace and Clutter merger, as I mentioned on our last call. The deconsolidation does not impact our business in Ukraine, which continues to be included in our results. With reduced revenue and a conservative position on accounts receivable, we recognized a loss in our Ukrainian business during the Q1. I want to echo Bill's comments. We continue to keep all of our Mountaineers and their families in our thoughts during this ongoing human tragedy. Now turning to segment performance. In the Q1, our Global RIM business delivered revenue of $1.04 billion, an increase of $76 million from last year, or 8% on a reported basis. On a constant currency basis, revenue increased 10%.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Constant currency storage rental revenue growth of 6.4% or 4.6% on an organic basis reflects our focus on revenue management and solid volume trends, which exceeded our expectations for the quarter. I will note that in our supplemental financial information, we have shared a reconciliation of our volume with and without the deconsolidated entities to allow for comparability going forward. Global RIM Adjusted EBITDA was $451 million, an increase of $43 million year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin was up 100 basis points year-on-year, reflecting continued pricing strength and productivity. Turning to our Global Data Center business, we are very pleased with our results. On a revenue basis, we delivered 36% year-on-year growth or 33% organic growth.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

A particular highlight for me is the 26% organic storage revenue growth we delivered in the quarter. As Bill discussed, the team has done exceptionally well with new bookings, and with that, we are raising our full year outlook on new and expansion leasing to 130 MW, up from our prior expectation of 50 MW. Now, to provide some historical context to that, we leased 10 MW in 2018, 17 MW in 2019, 31 MW in 2020, excluding our joint venture in Frankfurt, and 49 MW last year. With the strength of our performance in the Q1, we now project full-year data center revenue growth of at least 20% year-on-year, with even higher rates of growth for storage. With our strong prior year bookings and recent commencements, we have very good visibility to revenue.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Turning to our corporate and other business, revenue increased 146% year-on-year, driven by the ITRenew acquisition and organic growth in our closure business. For modeling purposes, please note that our legacy IT asset disposal business continues to be presented in the Global RIM segment. Total capital expenditures were $150 million, of which $115 million was growth and $35 million was recurring. In 2022, we now expect total capital expenditures to be approximately $950 million, up $100 million from our prior expectations. This reflects an increase to our data center development CapEx plans given our strong leasing year to date and our very positive outlook. Turning to the balance sheet. With strong EBITDA performance, we ended the quarter with net lease adjusted leverage of 5.4 times.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

This is an improvement from last year and better than the projection we shared on our last call. As we have said before, we are committed to our long-term range of 4.5-5.5 times. We continue to expect to exit the year at levels within our target range. As you may have seen in March, aligned with our growth plans, our team successfully refinanced our credit agreement, which includes a $2.25 billion revolving credit facility and a $250 million term loan A facility. The amendment provides for nearly $550 million of additional borrowing, includes favorable terms and extends the maturity to March 2027. We want to thank our commercial lending group for their continued support.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

With our strong financial position, our board of directors declared our quarterly dividend of $0.62 per share to be paid in early July. On a trailing four quarter basis, our payout ratio is now 69%, approaching our long-term target range of low- to mid-60s%. Now turning to our outlook. We are pleased to reiterate our full year 2022 guidance. I should note that this is despite the impact of the deconsolidation and the stronger US dollar. With the closing of the ITRenew transaction, I thought it would be helpful to share our preliminary view on purchase accounting. We currently anticipate amortization of intangibles to be approximately $60 million annually, and with only two months of the rest of results in the Q1, we amortized $10 million. Naturally, these charges are included in our adjusted EPS and FFO.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Now let me share our expectations for the Q2. We expect total revenue to be approximately $1.3 billion. We estimate organic growth to be high single digits to approaching 10% in the Q2. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $450 million, and we expect AFFO to be approximately $260 million. The war in Ukraine and the deconsolidation is nearly $5 million headwind versus the Q2 of 2021 and sequentially versus the Q1 of 2022. In summary, our investments are accelerating our growth trajectory. Our customer relationships are strong. Our core is performing well, and we continue to realize incremental pricing opportunities across our business. Our focus on higher growth segments, including data center, asset lifecycle management, and digital solutions, are positioning us for continued success.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

I would like to thank our entire team for their strong contributions. We look forward to updating you on our progress following the Q2. With that operator, please open the line for Q&A.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star and two. We will limit analysts to one question, and then you can rejoin the queue. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question we have on the phone lines comes from Sheila McGrath of Evercore. Please go ahead. I have opened your line.

Sheila McGrath
Sheila McGrath
Senior Managing Director at Evercore ISI

Yes, good morning. You mentioned the addressable market for Iron Mountain expanding. I just wonder if you continue to look at M&A opportunities like ITRenew, and how would you look at financing those type of acquisitions? Would it be sale leaseback or non-core dispositions, or would you consider common equity as making sense given the share price gains?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Good morning, Sheila. Thank you for the question. I think the first is that we feel really good about the platform, not only the 120 billion total addressable market that we have, but the platform that we have in each of the parts of the portfolio that attack that, if you will, or address that. We don't see a need to do any, you know, large M&A type deals like the ITRenew, because I think we now have market-leading platforms pretty much in each of those areas that we're addressing. We don't really see that, and we still think that we have a long ways to run in our share price.

Sheila McGrath
Sheila McGrath
Senior Managing Director at Evercore ISI

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Kevin McVeigh from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Kevin McVeigh
Kevin McVeigh
Managing Director at Credit Suisse

Great. Thanks so much, and congratulations on the results. Hey, the storage growth was really impressive, the organic. Can you maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of what's kind of the pricing, the volume, and then how are you thinking about that, I guess organically for the balance of the year?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Thanks, Kevin. You know, we appreciate the comments, and we feel really good about how things have been trending. You know, if you look at our Global RIM storage rental revenue growth of 4.6% organic, the vast majority of that is price. As you can see, our organic volume is right in line with what we've been expecting. You know, it's been very good performance on pricing. Importantly, we continue to see more opportunity for pricing. That's the on that expectation, I would advise you to think about pricing continuing to be at this level or better for the remainder of the year. The other thing that really helped the total company storage growth is our data center.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

You would note that our data center storage revenue was up considerably in the quarter. There too, in light of both the team's phenomenal performance in terms of historic leasing as well as recent deals and commencements, we expect to see considerable growth on that data center storage line the entire year as we were talking about last quarter. We feel very well positioned, Kevin, and I appreciate the question.

Kevin McVeigh
Kevin McVeigh
Managing Director at Credit Suisse

Sure. Just Barry, real quick, it looks like you took up the CapEx guidance. What was the free cash flow in the Q1, and how should we think about that for the full year?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Yeah, Kevin, I would tell you that, thanks for the question on the CapEx. I'll draw people's attention to the fact that we did increase the CapEx guidance by about $100 million versus our prior expectation. That reflects the fact that our data center development CapEx is up about $100 million. I'm currently planning for $625 million or so of data center development CapEx for the full year, and that's reflecting the fact that the new leases that we've signed together with continuing to be opportunistic about building the platform. You know, as you've seen, we've had phenomenal new leasing, and so it's sort of a great situation to be able to continue to invest in that business where we're seeing very nice returns.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

When you think about the model, you know, I would say that you should be seeing a very considerable amount of free cash flow before discretionary when you work through our CAD, and we feel very good about how the business is performing.

Kevin McVeigh
Kevin McVeigh
Managing Director at Credit Suisse

Great. Just Barry, it was $525 before going up to $625 on the data center, right?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

That's correct, Kevin.

Kevin McVeigh
Kevin McVeigh
Managing Director at Credit Suisse

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. We now have the next question from Shlomo Rosenbaum from Stifel. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Shlomo Rosenbaum
Shlomo Rosenbaum
Managing Director at Stifel

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Hey, Bill, you'd miss me if I didn't ask you this, but the RIM sequential volumes seem to have gone down about 1.7 million from 4Q to 1Q. I know last quarter when I asked about it, there seemed to be a certain seasonality in terms of destructions and things like that from 3Q to 4Q. I'm just wondering if you could give us some more color on a 4Q to 1Q. I understand that the company has got very strong pricing and being able to offset that in that way. You know, the expectation was for the year to end the year flat to potentially up on the volumes.

Shlomo Rosenbaum
Shlomo Rosenbaum
Managing Director at Stifel

I want to get some more color on, you know, the reason for kind of sequential decline and whether you still expect volumes to be flat top.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

No, no, thanks. Thanks, Shlomo. Good morning. At least I know that you're on. No. Well, first of all, in terms of physical volume, we said it's flat to slightly up for the year, but that's looking at across our portfolio of everything that we put in our warehouses around the globe, right? In terms of managing the organic utilization of our facilities based on organic physical volume growth, we still expect that to be flat to slightly up. You know, in this quarter, it was up as you see. Looking within records management, we always kind of consider that to be more flat to slightly down.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

If you look at the trend even between Q4 and Q1, and as you've watched the business for a long time, you know that both Q4 and Q1 usually have a little bit of noise in them because people tend to do their destruction programs either at the end of the year or some of that goes into the beginning of the year. You'll always see a little bit noise. But I think if you look at the last, say, you know, four quarters, you'll see a very consistent trend on what's happening to our physical volume around the records management. So, you know, we feel really good where it's at. You know, it's kind of staying in that kind of flat to slightly down records management. Our other areas in terms of physical volume storage is growing quite nicely.

Bill Meaney
Bill Meaney
President and CEO at Iron Mountain

Overall, you know, we still remain kind of flat to up for the year in physical volume. Then of course, pricing takes it up really well. I mean, you know, we do have very strong pricing power. As we've always said that, you know, inflation, you know, while, you know, we feel for folks, I mean, inflation is really hurting all of us in many different ways. For the business, it's actually a net positive because we're able to price ahead of inflation, and we have a high gross margin business, so it naturally expands the margins of the business.

Operator

Thank you. We now have a question from Andrew Steinerman of JPMorgan. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Andrew Steinerman
Andrew Steinerman
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at JPMorgan

Hi, Barry. I just wanna check on, you know, how you think about implied EBITDA margin in the 2022 guide. You know, if I look at page eighth and I divide the low end of EBITDA by the low end of revenues and the high end of EBITDA by the high end of revenues, I get 35.1%, so above 35%. Then, you know, obviously we just did 34.5% and the implied, you know, same approach for the Q2 will be 34.6%. If you're looking for 35.1% for the year, and of course, I'm gonna ask you, is that the right way to think about it?

Andrew Steinerman
Andrew Steinerman
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at JPMorgan

You're talking about much higher than 35% EBITDA margins in the second half of the year to make 35.1%% for the full year. You can imagine, I'm gonna ask you know, why will the second half margins be notably higher than the first half this year?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Thanks, Andrew. You are thinking about that correctly. A couple things to think about. As we move through the year, we have improved mix coming through the business. We do naturally have, as you traditionally have seen in our business since you followed us for so long, a level of upfront first kind of quarter cost, which eases. We have a level of improved mix going forward. We get more price as we move through the year. We also see very good flow-through coming on the data center business. As I mentioned earlier, last quarter, we expect the data center margin to be slightly up year-over-year, and we see good flow-through coming through in the back half there as well.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Generally speaking, we will continue to comp with positive benefit from Project Summit and other ongoing productivity initiatives. You know, I would say, first off, I should remind folks that in the Q1, we did better on a margin basis than we anticipated. That's because the core Iron Mountain business performed very well in terms of productivity and pricing, and we see that trajectory continuing through the year. Sitting here, after one quarter, I feel quite good about where we are in the margin trajectory, Andrew.

Operator

Thank you. We now have a question on the line from Nate Crossett of Berenberg. Please go ahead when you're ready. Nate, your line is open.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Operator, maybe we can go to the next question.

Operator

The next question we have comes from Eric Luebchow from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Eric Luebchow
Eric Luebchow
Equity Analyst at Wells Fargo

Hi. Good morning, everyone. I was interested in the 72-MW data center, shell and land and MEP lease that you mentioned. I imagine that's a pretty capital-efficient lease structure given its size, but maybe you could kind of give us some color on the returns you'd underwrite to that type of structure, the capital intensity, and then whether you're seeing more of these shell-type deals versus a typical turnkey lease that you could do here in the future.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Hi, Nate. Thanks for the question. Yeah, as you say, we're very pleased to sign this deal for our data center campus in Northern Virginia. There's a couple bits. We'll go into more detail on the Q2 call, 'cause you can imagine that we just signed this to build further infrastructure on that site, bringing on a substation onto the campus, which is gonna drive benefits both in terms of upscaling the capacity, but also the cost to deliver on that campus. There's a number of different pieces that make this deal very attractive. We'll give you more information on the Q2 call.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Yeah, you're right to say that it's a very capital efficient structure and with a great tenant on the backside for 15 years. It allows us to finance it in a very efficient way.

Eric Luebchow
Eric Luebchow
Equity Analyst at Wells Fargo

Okay, great. That's helpful. Then one more for me. Barry, you mentioned service revenue associated with kind of the legacy transport business was down about 10% from the pre-pandemic level. I mean, have you seen any improvement in that over the last few quarters, and do you expect that to recover back to pre-pandemic levels at some point? If it does, kind of what will it take to get there? Is it more return to office or any other kind of macro related metrics we should be looking at?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Thanks for the question, Eric, and appreciate the continued interest, of course. We have seen that line continue to perform better over the last several quarters. Kind of consistently that's been trending better. I will say, you know, if you look at our service activities since the early days of the pandemic, we obviously were down a lot in the early days and then moved appreciably better sequentially quarter by quarter. We far in advance of return to office, and I would say we continue to outpace return to office. The way I think about it is, you know, it likely has a continued tailwind going forward. I don't think probably any of us expect office to be at the same level of occupancy going forward as it was pre-pandemic.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Even still, as the levels continue to rise over the coming quarters, I think that becomes a little bit of a tailwind for our service. The other thing I'll just point out is the new service offerings that we've been delivering to our customers, like in IT asset disposal and digital solutions. They have been doing phenomenally well, as Bill highlighted in his prepared remarks, and we see that trend continuing. I mean, it's really strength to strength in that line, Eric, and those are very good profitability for us as well. We feel quite well positioned on the service line. You will see additional service obviously coming through with our recent ITRenew acquisition as that business continues to build.

Operator

Thank you. We now have the next question on the line from Shlomo from Stifel. Please go ahead.

Shlomo Rosenbaum
Shlomo Rosenbaum
Managing Director at Stifel

Hi. Thank you for putting me back in. Just on the storage business, the storage rental gross profit section has facilities costs going up about $17 million or so sequentially. I don't know if there was a build and put in place that went in over there. Can you give us a little bit more color on that? Because storage gross rental margin went down 110 basis points. I just wanted to see if that's what's driving that?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Yeah. Thanks, Shlomo. It's a good question. Appreciate that one. The way to think about it is, we have both, for service growth, storage rental gross margin. There's a factor of both, sale-leaseback, but you were specifically asking about other facility costs. On that line, that's also where our power for data center pass-through goes through. That was actually naturally up both sequentially and year-on-year. Incidentally, just to give you a frame, if you normalize for sale-leaseback and exclude the power, we basically have storage rental gross margin up in both sequentially as well as year-on-year by about 40-50 basis points. We feel quite good about the way the business is trending.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

The other thing I'll say is our guidance naturally assumes a healthy amount of inflation, as I mentioned last quarter. We continue to track at levels that are below what we were projecting earlier in the year. Of course, the pricing is doing better. That's part of the reason why the profitability in the core business continues to outperform.

Operator

Again, if you have a question, please press star then one, and please limit to one question at a time. We now have George Tong of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

George Tong
George Tong
Senior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Hi. Thanks. Good morning. You talked about favorable traction in your ALM business. Can you elaborate on how ITRenew performed in the quarter on revenue and EBITDA relative to your initial expectations?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, George. It's Barry. It performed right in line with our expectations, maybe even a little touch better than the expectations we shared on the last call. Obviously that's just for the first two months of the acquisition. As we see it, and that's both on a revenue and an EBITDA basis. As we see it playing out for the year, I continue to project in our guidance the same level, call it around $450 million in that same profitability level that I mentioned. As we see the business being growing considerably over time, I will tell you that one of the nice things that we see in that business is the building level of backlog.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

As many of our upstream clients are building their backlog for decommissioning as we move into the later part of the year. In light of the fact that there's been some level of supply chain disruption for new gear, we do see their backlogs building. That is, I think, a favorable view for us going forward.

Operator

Thank you. We now have a question from Sheila McGrath of Evercore. Please go ahead. I have opened your line.

Sheila McGrath
Sheila McGrath
Senior Managing Director at Evercore ISI

Thank you. I was wondering if you could talk about rising interest rates and near-term impact to Iron Mountain. Where do you think you could raise debt capital for a 10-year bond now versus maybe Q4?

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

You know, Sheila. Hi, it's Barry. You know, the good news about our model in light of the fact that, as you saw in my guidance, we expect the leverage to be kind of inside our range and essentially flattest, maybe even slightly down by the end of the year from where we are now. And the fact that we have no near-term maturities, I really don't need any long term at this point. As you know, we did the bond in December for the ITRenew transaction, so I'm pleased with the timing of that in light of where we were able to price it.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

I feel very good about where we are with respect to the capital markets for, you know, debt and don't have any need at this point or for the next few years really.

Operator

Thank you. We have no further questions registered. As a reminder, it is star then one if you'd like to ask a question. We have had no questions registered. I'd like to hand it back to the management team.

Barry Hytinen
Barry Hytinen
EVP and CFO at Iron Mountain

Thank you for joining us today. You can all disconnect.

Operator

You have been removed from the call. Goodbye.

Operator

This does conclude today's call. Thank you again for joining. You may now disconnect your line. Thank you for attending today's presentation.

Executives
    • Gillian Tiltman
      Gillian Tiltman
      SVP and Head of Investor Relations
    • Bill Meaney
      Bill Meaney
      President and CEO
    • Barry Hytinen
      Barry Hytinen
      EVP and CFO
Analysts
    • Sheila McGrath
      Senior Managing Director at Evercore ISI
    • Kevin McVeigh
      Managing Director at Credit Suisse
    • Shlomo Rosenbaum
      Managing Director at Stifel
    • Andrew Steinerman
      Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at JPMorgan
    • Eric Luebchow
      Equity Analyst at Wells Fargo
    • George Tong
      Senior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs
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