Digital Realty Eyes Growth With Demand From Cloud Providers

Data Center REIT Digital Realty (NYSE:DLR) is anticipated to ride the growth curve backed by solid demand from cloud-service providers. In a recent video interview at REITworld 2017 with Nareit, the company’s CEO — William Stein — noted that the company’s growth, particularly for the short to medium term, will be fueled by these providers.

Stein also pointed out Digital Realty’s superior level of reliability. In fact, the company has achieved "five nines" of uptime — or 99.999% availability — for the past 10 years. This operational excellence has been achieved despite growth of the company’s portfolio over the years, and reflects its efficiency in developing and delivering data-center solutions that can be relied upon by customers.

Further, he noted that the company enjoys ownership of trophy assets in major metropolitan areas that have extremely dense network. Also, there are substantial portions of land on its data-center campuses for meeting customers’ future needs.

Digital Realty is a notable name in the date-center real estate market. The company offers data center, colocation and interconnection solutions for domestic and international tenants through its portfolio of data centers located throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Its clients range from financial services, cloud and information technology services, to manufacturing, energy, gaming, life sciences and consumer products.

The company has been recently selected by cloud-hosting provider — Hostway — as its data-center partner for global expansion. Moreover, Hostway will associate with the Digital Realty Service Exchange in order to offer its clients access to public cloud providers, including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Cloud Platform. Digital Realty’s superior customer service, greater reliability, as well as low latency connectivity are the reasons for being selected by Hostway. (Read more: Digital Realty Picked by Hostway for Global Expansion)

Hostway caters services to SaaS, healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, and Internet of Things (IoT) customers. Globally, the company has nine locations, of which the latest is situated in Digital Realty's Austin facility.

It should be noted that growth in cloud computing, IoT, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and autonomous driving will fuel growth of the data-center REIT market and benefit Digital Realty as well, going forward. In addition, accretive acquisitions, development efforts, strong demand and a solid balance sheet augur well for the company’s long-term growth. However, intense competition in the industry and interest-rate hike remain concerns.

Shares of Digital Realty have outperformed the industry it belongs to, in the year so far. This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company’s shares have rallied 16.8%, while the industry recorded growth of 4.5% during the same time period. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Better-ranked stocks in the REIT space include Franklin Street Properties (NYSE:FSP) , Columbia Property Trust (NYSE:CXP) and MedEquities Realty Trust (NYSE:MRT) . All three carry a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy).

Franklin Street Properties’ Zacks Consensus Estimates for 2017 FFO per share remained unchanged at $1.05 over the past month. Its share price has ascended 8.3% in three months’ time.

Columbia Property Trust’s FFO per share estimates for the current year have moved up 2.7% to $1.15 in a month’s time. Its shares have gained 5.0% over the past three months.

MedEquities Realty’s FFO per share estimates for 2017 inched up 1.8% to $1.12 over the past two months. Its shares have gained 0.8% during the past month.

Note: All EPS numbers presented in this report represent funds from operations (FFO) per share. FFO, a widely used metric to gauge the performance of REITs, is obtained after adding depreciation and amortization and other non-cash expenses to net income.

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