Pre-tax profits fall at Irish data centre operator Equinix despite revenue growth

Pre-tax profits at the Irish arm of data centre builder and ­operator Equinix more than halved last year to €7.86m.

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Pre-tax profits at the Irish arm of data centre builder and ­operator Equinix more than halved last year to €7.86m. Equinix (Ireland) Ltd operates data centres in Dublin at Northwest Business Park (two), Citywest, Blanchardstown and Kilcarbery Park, and globally operates 260 data centres in 72 locations.

The company’s clients include Oracle, Nvidia, Google Cloud, Netflix, Dell Technologies, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Zoom. New accounts show that ­Equinix (Ireland) Ltd recorded the 51pc decrease in profits despite revenues rising by 33pc from €48.9m to €65.



2m. However, pre-tax profits decreased as cost of sales more than doubled from €22.7m to €46.

82m. The directors state that gross profit margin has decreased to 28pc, mainly due to the increase in cost of sales, which was primarily driven by the higher commissionaire’s expenses. The accounts show that the business continued to expand in Ireland this year, with a note stating that on April 9, the company entered a deal to acquire a building, DB2, located at Kilcarbery Business Park, Dublin 22, for €7m with additional transaction costs amounting to €550,000.

The directors for the US-­headquartered firm state that “demand for Equinix Ireland’s premium data centre capacity remained solid”. They state that the market “continues to show strong growth, driven by increasing internet traffic, rises in requirements for power and cooling, the expansion of computing requirements of the financial services industry, the emergence of cloud computing and software as a service, despite the high capital costs associated with building and maintaining in sourced data centres”. They said the company “is benefiting from a growth in demand for data centre and interconnection offerings and intends to continue to increase its capacity”.

Numbers employed by the Irish unit increased from 64 to 92. Staff costs increased sharply from €10.11m to €11.

98m. Pay to directors totalled €273,000. On risks facing the company, the directors said it “is exposed to the risk that electricity providers may not be able to provide further capacity in locations where the company expects to expand”.

The company, whose managing director for Ireland is Peter Lantry, recorded post-tax profits of €7.1m after incurring a corporation tax charge of €745,000. Shareholder funds totalled €106.

58m that included accumulated profits of €62.8m..