Vocus buys ASG's Bentley datacentre for $11.7 million
Vocus Communications has acquired ASG Group's Perth datacentre for AU$11.7 million.
The Bentley datacentre is located on the fringes of the Perth CBD in the Bentley Technology Park and is approximately 4 kilometres from Vocus' existing Perth datacentre. Since it opened in 2011, the Bentley datacentre is known to be serving some of Australia's largest mining and utilities companies under long term contracts.
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ASG is also a tenant of the datacentre providing hosting services to their managed services clients. As part of the acquisition, Vocus will become preferred supplier to ASG for all telecommunications services both locally in Perth and across Australia.
Vocus CEO James Spenceley said the acquisition will provide Vocus with additional cross-selling opportunities and further redundancy for existing operations.
"Vocus has a three core products: We sell internet access where we own a proportion of sea cable that goes from Perth to Asia and portion of the Southern Cross cable that goes to the US; datacentres; and fibre networks which we sell to corporates.
"The crossover is we buy datacentres, but we also like to sell fibre and internet into those customers within the datacentre, so we're going to go back through those now-only datacentre customers, and develop a relationship with them and sell them services. It's an exciting opportunity for us.
"In terms of redundancy, we would have our own customers from our Perth datacentre who might want to continue to expand and they can put a rack in this Bentley and then we can sell fibre to them."
With this acquisition, Vocus now owns and runs eight datacentre facilities, including two in Perth, two in Newcastle, one in Sydney, two in Melbourne, and one in Auckland.
Most recently, Vocus snapped up fibre company FX Networks for AU$107.7 million as part of its expansion into New Zealand, where it had previously bought out New Zealand datacentre provider Maxnet in 2012.
Spenceley said the company's trail of acquisitions is a strategy that has been working well for the company.
"I think we've done really well at buying businesses and fixing what's wrong with them — either because they don't have enough capital or because of a shareholder dispute — and we've combine that with our brand that is synonymous with our leading customer service and high reliability in the telco industry ... so I think that combination works really well for us," he said.
The buyout will be funded from existing cash resources, and is forecasted to generate annualised EBITDA of approximately AU$2 million for Vocus, and to be EPS accretive in the first year.