Earnings Call Transcript - DBRG Q4 2021

Operator, Operator

Greetings. Welcome to today's DigitalBridge Group, Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. And please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Severin White. Thank you. You may begin.

Operator, Operator

Good morning, everyone. And welcome to DigitalBridge's fourth quarter and year-end 2021 earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Marc Ganzi, our President and CEO; and Jacky Wu, our CFO. I will quickly cover the Safe Harbor and then we can get started. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance, including the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on those areas may be considered forward-looking and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. All information discussed on this call is as of today, February 24, 2022, and DigitalBridge does not intend and undertakes no duty to update it for future events or circumstances. For more information, please refer to the Risk Factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-K to be filed with the SEC for the year ending December 31, 2021. Great. So we are going to cover our standard agenda; Marc will start with our 2021 year-end review. Jacky will cover our quarterly and annual financial results as well as update our forward guidance. And then Marc will look forward to the year ahead and 2022 before wrapping up with some key takeaways followed by Q&A. We’ve finished the quarter with some of our strongest results to date. And we’re incredibly excited about what lies ahead in 2022. So let’s get started. With that, I will turn the call over to Marc Ganzi, our President and CEO. Marc?

Marc Ganzi, CEO

Thanks, Severin. I’d like to start by thanking everyone for their continued interest and attention today, especially new investors who are learning about DigitalBridge for the first time. I’ll get into more detail later on the three key areas: how we finished the mission in our rotation to digital, how DigitalBridge has emerged as the partner of choice to institutional capital, and how we've continued to invest in high-quality digital assets in 2021. The key takeaway is how we've successfully checked all the boxes on our key goals for 2021. Just like in 2020, we've delivered on our commitments to you, our investors. And that's the key: continuing to deliver on promises for you. This is essential and critical as we continue to build trust as we accelerate into the next phase of our business plan. As we look back at 2021, the biggest takeaway is that we really did finish the mission, rotating over $78 billion in assets under management in under three years. We call this our diversified to digital rotation, and we did it ahead of schedule by over a year and on budget, once again, delivering for you, our investors. Not only did we rotate assets, we recast our corporate balance sheet, substantially reducing our corporate liabilities, as well as rotating our governance with a new Board that's diverse and steeped in digital expertise. We relaunched midyear as DigitalBridge, returning back to our heritage as the leading global digital infrastructure firm. As we enter 2022, we're now able to focus 100% of our energy on digital, where we have long had a history of operating and investing successfully for over 25 years, building great digital infrastructure, assets, and platforms. It's a really exciting place for us to be now. I want to thank my entire global team again for their incredible execution. I'm humbled by their efforts. Most importantly, I'm pretty sure no one has pulled off such a complete and wholesale transformation in such little time. These efforts have set us up for success in 2022 and beyond. Next, let's quickly summarize where we are in legacy assets. The key focus here has been to harvest capital to fuel the next phase of our strategic roadmap. Here, we've summarized the four major legacy businesses we've divested over the past year: our OE&D sale to Fortress, generating over $650 million; we closed the previously announced hospitality portfolio early in 2021; we sold our management contract back to Brightspire, and wellness infrastructure will generate consideration of over $300 million when it closes later this quarter. Once again, we've successfully executed this monetization program faster than we forecasted, generating the capital we originally forecasted, and it's all been completed during an unprecedented pandemic. In 2021, we generated over $1.2 billion in net proceeds from legacy monetization against a budget of $900 million. This brings total legacy sales to over $1.9 billion in net proceeds, a major accomplishment. Next, I want to talk about fundraising at DigitalBridge Partners II, our second flagship fund. We closed out fundraising at $8.3 billion in the fourth quarter, after having exceeded our original target of $6 billion by over 38%. We’ve raised the hard cap along the way to accommodate strong investor interest as we brought the fundraising to a close. Let me put this in context. We were the third-largest infrastructure fund in the world raised globally in 2021, including all of the generalist infrastructure funds. In digital infrastructure, we were multiple times ahead of anybody else investing in digital infrastructure. It's also worth noting that we completed this fundraise in under 18 months from start to finish. That's an incredibly fast timeframe, testament to DigitalBridge’s position as the partner of choice to institutional capital looking to build exposure to this resilient and growing asset class. Not only were we busy raising capital in 2021, we were just as active deploying it. Last year, we increased our asset base to $45 billion in AUM. The key factor here is our investor-operator model that allows us to quickly transform and scale our portfolio companies. If you look at what we did in Vantage Asia, Atlas Edge, and EdgePoint in particular, all of these platforms are benefiting from DigitalBridge’s value add that accrues to our limited partners and to your shareholders. Our acquisition of PCCW in Hong Kong, alongside the hyperscale assets that we've created at Agile, were combined to form the base for Vantage to expand into the Asia market, leveraging our global hyperscale relationships in a new territory for us. Second, Atlas Edge completed its first strategic acquisition less than six months after launching, extending our reach into 11 European markets through a key digital relationship with Colt. Lastly, EdgePoint already hit its five-year business plan in the second year of full operations, as we support its growing Southeast Asia tower strategy, eclipsing over 14,000 towers, making it the largest private TowerCo in Southeast Asia, once again, demonstrating our ability to scale quickly. At digital operating, we continue to invest and grow, adding another valuable hyperscale data center campus at Vantage SDC in the very difficult to build market of Santa Clara, and the anchoring DataBank's acquisition of the Houston area data centers from CyrusOne, which brings its edge data center platform to its 27th market with a total of 70 Edge data centers on that platform. The last thing I want to touch on, as I look back on 2021, is our team. Investing in our organization is probably the most important thing we do. I've long said people create alpha. This is essential to our success. In 2021, we made investments in our team and you'll hear about that later, as we position ourselves to take advantage of the big opportunities we see ahead in ’22 and beyond. New digital board members, senior executives with industry-leading experience, and new operating partners and advisors leading new investments for us. This is our operational CapEx—our investment in the future. We added 22 new digital infrastructure professionals to the firm, bringing our team to over 100 people strongly dedicated solely to this asset class, digital infrastructure. This in-house expertise sets us apart, giving us our edge as we invest in the future of digital infrastructure. With that, I'll hand it over to one of our key team members and my partner, Jacky Wu, to walk you through our financial performance in Q4 and update our near and medium-term guidance. Thank you, Jacky.

Jacky Wu, CFO

Thank you, Marc. And good morning, everyone. As a reminder, in addition to the release of our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings, we filed the supplemental financial report this morning, which is available within the shareholder section of our website. Starting with our fourth quarter results, the company finished the year with a strong quarter and saw rapid growth in digital segments, driven by successful fundraising in digital investment management and by tuck-in acquisition and organic growth in digital operating. With the digital transformation complete, our financial reporting will be streamlined in 2022 following the sale of the legacy wellness infrastructure business, which is expected to close this quarter. AFFO per share has reached an inflection point this year, and we expect even more positive momentum as we march through 2022 as I will later discuss. We successfully rotated over $78 billion of AUM, everyone now at $45 billion of all digital AUM today. We are excited to be entirely focused on our high-growth digital business this year. The company is strong and healthy, driven by our asset-light investment management business that generates high-quality long-term fee earnings, as well as a transformed corporate capital structure after reducing corporate debt by 80%, and significantly reducing borrowing costs. For the fourth quarter, reported total consolidated revenues were $256 million, representing a 65% increase from the same period last year. Total company adjusted EBITDA was $21 million on a pro-rata basis, which improved from $18 million last quarter, and from a $2 million loss the same period last year. The continued adjusted EBITDA improvement was primarily driven by successful fundraising in our high-margin Digital IM business, including DBP II, which officially closed at $8.3 billion in December. AFFO was a $5 million loss, and GAAP net loss attributable to common stockholders was $21 million or $0.04 per share. Moving on to our full year 2021 results, 2021 total consolidated revenues were $966 million. GAAP net loss attributable to common stockholders was $386 million or $0.78 per share. Strong growth in revenue and earnings in our digital business drove significant improvement in our financial results in 2021. In addition to more than doubling revenue, EBITDA turned positive as the business continued to scale, and we rotated our legacy assets to our digital platform. Digital AUM increased by over 50% during 2021, ending the year at $45 billion. Consolidated core digital revenues were $250 million, a 64% increase from the same period last year, driven by new DBP II fees. Looking at the right side of the page, consolidated digital FRE and adjusted EBITDA increased to $117 million during the fourth quarter, which is an 82% increase from the same period last year, also driven by new DBP II fees. Since the beginning of 2021, our annualized digital fee revenues increased from $100 million to $175 million, and digital FRE increased from $41 million to $97 million. Investment management capital formation has been phenomenal over the last year, led by DBP II which closed at $8.3 billion in total commitments, exceeding the $6 billion fund target by 38%. We also exceeded our year-end $17 billion fee earning equity under management targets that we outlined at the beginning of 2021, ending the year at $18.3 billion. We expect another strong year in 2022, with a target of over $22 billion. This asset-light high-margin investment management business was the key driver of our consistent growth over the last year, which we see continuing in the future, which I will discuss in more detail later. The growth in our digital operating segment revenues and earnings are the result of tuck-in M&A at Vantage and DataBank. We will continue to grow digital revenues and earnings through our rotation of the company's balance sheet, and the high-quality digital assets and investments that support our investment management business. When Marc and I started in our current role almost two years ago, we outlined our commitment to delever and lower our borrowing costs. I am proud to say that we have completely transformed our corporate debt profile, decreasing debt from $6.7 billion to $1.4 billion, which represents an 80% reduction. Our borrowing costs have been reduced by entering into longer duration financing agreements, as well as introducing a first-of-its-kind investment-grade fund fee securitization with a triple B rating. These new lower-cost financings result in over 300 basis points in savings compared to the legacy preferred stock that was redeemed with those proceeds. We are expecting another strong year in 2022 with normalized FRE growth of over 50% and a midpoint of $120 million of FRE in 2022. We are also expecting a 26% adjusted EBITDA growth this year in digital operating segments, resulting from new tuck-in capital deployments and organic lease-up in our existing platforms, but that excludes any contemplated M&A and new platforms. I will outline our corporate guidance forecast. Starting with the digital investment management, our recent fundraising success has demonstrated that DigitalBridge is a leading global digital infrastructure investment platform and the partner of choice for investors deploying capital into this resilient, growing asset class. We have expanded into key digital infrastructure adjacent verticals, including credit, core, and ventures to position our platform for growth. We have a unique investor-operator model with a talented and experienced team, which has been the key to our growth. We've continued to build our team to capitalize on the many opportunities we seek to support the growth of our customers and generate strong investment returns for our limited partners. As a result of the success, we are increasing our 2022 guidance, along with our 2023 and 2025 investment management framework. Our 2022 digital management fee revenues guidance target range is $190 million to $200 million. Our digital fee-related earnings target range is $115 million to $125 million. Excluding one-time catch-up fees, this represents over a 23% increase in fee revenue, and over a 52% increase year-over-year in FRE. We are increasing our 2023 and 2025 digital management fee revenues and FRE target ranges as a result of our tremendous success in fundraising, underwriting, acquiring best-in-class digital companies, and launching new products. We look forward to continuing to leverage the strong growth in our digital platform for further improvements to our capital structure, where we see meaningful enhancements to corporate cash flows, including reducing our effective cost of capital. And with that, I'd like to turn it back to Marc, where he will lay out further details on our 2022 plan. Thank you.

Marc Ganzi, CEO

Thanks, Jacky. As we look forward to 2022, I wanted to set the table by addressing some of the key variables affecting a pretty dynamic macro business environment today. It's important to note that we're always monitoring these factors and planning ahead. This management team has been through many cycles, and that experience informs our preparation and management of our digital businesses. Inflation is the first variable that everyone is talking about. There was bound to be an impact from all the excess capital in the global financial system. That's shown up for us primarily in two areas: higher raw material construction costs and higher labor costs to build or install fiber towers and data centers. On balance, we've maintained our development yields by passing through these increased costs via our contracts with customers, so it has not materially impacted our expected returns. The silver lining is that as owners of digital real estate, we benefit to some degree from higher inflation as the value of our underlying assets increases nominally. Secondly, supply chain issues have emerged where it's common to hear about bottlenecks disrupting entire supply chains. We've seen backups in areas such as power generators. We've weathered this headwind by leveraging our scale and committing to purchasing contracts that have kept us largely on schedule. And we expect this issue to dissipate as the worst of COVID begins to subside. Next is geopolitics. With Eastern Europe in the news, as it relates to our businesses, power and utility costs in Europe are 100% passed through to our customers, so any price increases do not materially impact our businesses. More broadly, it's worth noting that we don't have exposure to those geographies. Analyzing and factoring in geopolitical risk is a key part of our investment process, and we have generally steered clear of investing in non-OECD economies. Finally, interest rates are trending higher back towards normalized levels. This is another area where we have a lot of experience. For the last year, we've been locking in low rates at the corporate level, where 100% of our debt is fixed rate, at our digital operating businesses, which are 73% fixed rate. We expect rates to settle into normal levels but not trend substantially higher. If they create disruption in values for digital infrastructure assets, we believe that will create a window for us to take advantage. Now, before I wrap up, note how shielded digital infrastructure is from the broader macroeconomic setup. The demand for connectivity is always trending higher, and we find ourselves in one of the strongest CapEx cycles in a generation, protected from cyclical forces, and positioned to succeed as we support the growth of our customers. Let's get into DigitalBridge and what we're most excited about as we look ahead to 2022 and the opportunity finally to focus 100% on digital. With the transition complete, as we accelerate our focus this year, our key theme is time to build. Working with our digital constituents will drive new proprietary deals, and continued strong capital formation as we extend our global reach. First, on the organization. We've been incredibly effective working from home for the last couple of years, but as we get back in person, it's clear that there are tangible benefits to in-person collaboration, from new idea generation to sharing best practices and asset management. Next up is capital. We've proven that we're the partner of choice to institutional investors wanting to focus on digital infrastructure. When people commit hundreds of millions of dollars to long-term vehicles, they want to connect in person. We've done some of that during the pandemic, but we're poised to get more active, especially with our new strategies in credit, core, and ventures. Third, customers. Following the logos has long been my guiding principle. We believe that customer interactions will drive more proprietary deals and more opportunities to help them unlock value for their existing infrastructure and trust to deliver more converged solutions. Finally, supporting our portfolio companies' growth is ultimately how we generate value for investors. It's about manifesting their strategic plans. This year, we plan to deploy over $7 billion in growth CapEx on a global basis. Bottom line, 2022 is about accelerating and scaling our high-performance platform, and I'm incredibly enthusiastic about the year ahead. To accomplish our goals in 2022, we first focus on building our digital investment platform. We've scaled this business by raising between $5 billion to $6 billion a year over the past two years. We target at least $22 billion in TAM in 2022. We achieve these objectives by forming capital around three new strategies: credit, core, and ventures. Before I get into those, I want to share perspective on how we've assessed these opportunities and how we're following the DigitalBridge playbook as we execute. We look to leverage our existing relationships and ensure we have the right people driving the product and deploying the capital. Strong investor interest from our LP base is critical, and we need to target big markets that can positively impact our operations. Leveraging our proprietary deal flow, which results from our position at the center of a converging digital infrastructure landscape, is essential. All these strategies meet these criteria as we assess the opportunities. We then move to build the team and have done that for all three strategies, bringing on talented executives who can help us develop and craft our strategies to form capital and ultimately deploy it. The goal is to establish DigitalBridge as a full-stack digital infrastructure investment manager, able to invest and most importantly, operate and capitalize on a $400 billion annual global CapEx spend in our industry. We believe this uniquely positions us at the intersection of supply and demand, with the capability to pair capital with opportunities to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns for our investors. Our global reach allows us to engage customers effectively. Let's start with credit, where we believe institutional investors are underexposed to growth in the new economy. While the S&P 500 is about two-thirds leveraged to growth sectors, credit markets are only at about 40%. Many firms that originally focused on equity strategies built credit businesses that rival or exceed their equity franchise size. We believe there's a huge credit opportunity, and we've assembled a credit team led by Dean Criares, which has worked together for a long time. We've developed a broad strategy focusing on identifying and providing skill capital to value-added opportunities where we can leverage our business-building expertise from our flagship funds to support growing businesses with credit needs. We're already incredibly active, having closed six loans with a deep pipeline of 28 new opportunities totaling $1.6 billion. We've warehoused our first six loans on our balance sheet totaling around $120 million and already fully realized two of those loans, showing proof of concept and readiness to proceed with more capital closure in 2022. Next, the core opportunity is one of the most exciting strategies we're launching. There is strong growing interest in longer-duration, predictable return strategies, as generic fixed-income strategies no longer hit return targets. We believe we're uniquely positioned with global strategic customer relationships and deal sourcing capabilities to identify and prosecute opportunities that fit this profile, combining supportive secular trends with high-quality, long-term contracted cash flows. In 2021, we brought in Matt Evans from AMP to lead this strategy, supported by Peter Hopper from Abry. Their qualifications position us to scale this opportunity effectively. This strategy focuses on high-quality defensible businesses and assets with cash yields, low development exposure, and conservative capitalizations, which we expect to see significant opportunities in the future. Lastly, ventures: this space holds unique prospects for us due to our domain expertise and market intelligence that give us an edge in sourcing, vetting, and investing in late-stage companies across the emerging digital infrastructure technology vertical. Many of you heard me discuss the software-defined layer of networks, which directly relates to the physical layer of digital infrastructure we manage worldwide. We launched a pilot fund internally and successfully made two investments from this vertical. This strategy targets late-stage companies with strong, de-risked business models in partnership with top-tier VC investors, creating significant growth in the broader ventures vertical. Now, let's go into how we plan to deploy the capital across the globe. This reach is how we deliver on a daily basis. Continuing on the buy versus build concept we've discussed over the last year, it is clear that building is favored globally today. DigitalBridge companies committed $7.8 billion in growth CapEx in 2022 alone, primarily focusing on construction to support the growth of our customers. We have projects underway in five continents across all four core verticals of digital infrastructure; the busiest being North America, with $4.7 billion focused on supporting hyperscale workloads and fiber. In Latin America, we expect nearly a half billion to introduce 5G networks and cloud applications. In Europe, plans include $2.2 billion on low-latency computing at network edges, aiding mobile carrier partners in reducing overall network infrastructure costs. Meanwhile, in Asia, we’re investing $0.5 billion into new projects at Vantage Asia and EdgePoint Southeast Asia. This is an exciting development at DigitalBridge. Building is where we create value for customers, generate returns, and have an impact as we help construct converged networks. In conclusion, let's focus on the key drivers underlying the next phase of the DigitalBridge investment case: our acceleration. We benefit from powerful secular tailwinds, being at the intersection of supply and demand, benefiting from the higher demand for connectivity while enjoying institutional investment interest in digital infrastructure and our investment management platform. We've established ourselves as the partner of choice through our expertise and experience. Our transition to a high-growth business model has moved us to 100% digital, and our commitment continues as we find ways to simplify and enhance our growth, delivering earnings driven by digital assets. This is my pledge to you as investors in DigitalBridge. When focused on quarterly results, it's easy to miss the bigger picture opportunity. Preqin forecasts growth in the global private infrastructure market will more than double from $864 billion today to $1.9 trillion by 2026. This surpasses real estate as the largest real asset class allocation—a significant momentum for us. Investors are significantly under-allocated to digital within broader infrastructure. Combining this with our market leadership means a powerful setup for our investors, as DigitalBridge aims for $100 billion in AUM within five years—a target we can hit within four years with over a 20% annual organic growth rate. Now, let's present our scorecard for the year. It's simple yet effective. Four key areas to focus on: we must successfully extend our investment management platform into new verticals—credit, core, and ventures—effectively raising the required capital. We must meet and exceed both our fundraising and financial operating targets. We also need to continue investing in high-quality digital businesses, leveraging proprietary deal flow, and we anticipate deploying $7.8 billion in capex this year into our existing platforms and new platforms. Lastly, advancing our ESG and DEI initiatives, focusing on integrating renewables into operating businesses. That's my priorities for 2022: building full-stack digital infrastructure management, constructing billions in new digital infrastructure, and continuing our business growth. Thank you for listening to our earnings presentation. I’d like to turn the call back over to the operator to initiate our Q&A session.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from the line of Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. You may proceed with your question.

Ric Prentiss, Analyst

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Busy day. So appreciate all your comments and your prepared remarks. Marc, on your comments you're planning ahead pays dividends. And one of the questions we get a lot is are you going to reinstate a dividend?

Marc Ganzi, CEO

Yes, it is our intention to reinstate a small dividend. I believe I was clear about that last year. We continue to see opportunities, Ric, for the incremental cash on our balance sheet to redeploy into higher-returning objectives and investments. So, we will turn back on the dividend this year, targeting to harvest as much cash as possible. I see the world a bit differently; we’ve been cautious about how we use our capital. Although asset values are high, we observe changes indicating there are excellent opportunities. So, I believe there will be remarkable opportunities this year to invest where we see high returns. We can't front run what's currently in motion, but I'm confident our cautious approach will prove correct in the long run.

Ric Prentiss, Analyst

You're not going to sit on it; you're just not going to deploy it in dividends?

Marc Ganzi, CEO

Correct.

Ric Prentiss, Analyst

What other questions we get a lot seem to touch on your ability to maintain REIT status with the fast-paced fundraising on the digital investment side. Can you update us on how you think about REIT status and what it means for your shareholder base?

Marc Ganzi, CEO

Since Jacky and I took over about 18 months ago, nothing has changed. We've maintained a pragmatic approach to REITs while considering growth. Our dual business model—digital operating and digital investment management—allows rapid growth in both segments. Our investment management business is exceeding expectations in raising capital and supporting innovative ideas, solidifying our position as a prime digital infrastructure capital provider. This growth challenges our capacity to maintain REIT status, but it also does not preclude us from it. If our TRS, tax-free subsidiary, grows to the extent our business reaches a point where maintaining REIT status becomes difficult, we will hold discussions with our investors. In summary, there's not a significant impact on our taxes if we decide to pursue REIT status.

Ric Prentiss, Analyst

More operationally, the question of buy versus build: can you elaborate on the pace of building, given the supply chain and other considerations you mentioned?

Marc Ganzi, CEO

We've monitored this closely. As we discussed last summer, our supply chain hasn't faced significant disruptions. It could be a matter of good planning or perhaps just luck. What I can say is we have excellent CEOs who strategically plan by purchasing ahead of time, which has kept us ahead of challenges. When managing $50 billion in global assets, our purchasing power allows us to negotiate effectively with vendors. Looking back on 2021, very few companies missed their construction budgets. Remarkably, we came in under budget for our CapEx in 2021, which exceeded my expectations. The setup for 2022 looks promising; we completed budgeting cycles and are well aware of developments. Our portfolio companies' KPIs and dashboards provide us with granular data down to each data center and tower, ensuring we maintain control of our spending and operations.

Jacky Wu, CFO

Ric, I echo Marc's thoughts. Our industry is inherently resilient across various challenges such as recession and inflation.

Ric Prentiss, Analyst

Great, I appreciate it, guys. Looking forward to seeing everyone again live soon.

Marc Ganzi, CEO

Likewise. Thanks, Ric.

Jacky Wu, CFO

Stay well.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Colby Synesael with Cowen & Company. You may proceed with your question.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Hi, this is Michael on for Colby. First, regarding your pipeline for additional on-balance sheet M&A, how would you rank the greatest opportunities across the verticals of digital infrastructure? Secondly, with public evaluations for public companies contracting, have you begun to see any contractions in private multiples? If not, does this change your perspective on potential take-privates?

Marc Ganzi, CEO

To stack rank our balance sheet priorities, we remain focused on supporting our edge compute business, DataBank. We recently acquired four campuses from CyrusOne in Houston and have a robust pipeline for hyperscale leasing there. The second priority is hyperscale; we will continue adding hyperscale campuses to our balance sheet. With pricing moving into favorable territory, we feel confident in deploying our balance sheet to those segments. Our third focus is mobile infrastructure, including towers and easements. Finally, the fourth vertical involves acquiring long-haul fiber routes, which has gained traction recently. As for private market multiples, yes, we're beginning to see a retreat and some recent middle-market deals pulled because they didn't meet pricing expectations. The market is re-establishing itself; the days of extremely high multiples are behind us, and it may take time for private multiples to match public comp valuations. The key is always to be pragmatic and patient, making sure we strategically deploy our capital; I've been doing this for 25 years, and this year presents a favorable setup.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Perfect, thank you.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of John Atkin with RBC Capital. You may proceed with your question.

John Atkin, Analyst

Thanks very much. I was interested in your comment about asset values in fiber towers or data centers. Any noteworthy trendline you've seen year-to-date given transaction volume and cost of capital changes? Secondly, regarding the 2023 and 2025 guidance, it seems like you increased it by similar amounts, but given the implied capital-raising piece, your 2025 guide might seem a bit conservative. Am I missing something?

Marc Ganzi, CEO

Entering over 50 days into the year, my observations are regional and asset-based. In U.S. towers, we haven’t seen diminishing multiples; those values have held firm. Hyperscale data center assets are also holding well, but retail and Edge collocation comps are tightening a bit, moving toward mid-20s multiples from heavier comps in the upper 20s. In fiber assets, we saw one private deal complete at a lower value than before, suggesting degradation in that space. That's the overall insight; however, Europe's data center values have been rising. We anticipate significant organic growth in regions like Asia, which has shown noteworthy resiliency.

John Atkin, Analyst

Thanks.

Marc Ganzi, CEO

We're excited about 2022.