Iron Mountain (IRM) Debuts In Asia With Singapore Data Centre

In a bid to expand its global data-center platform,Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) recently unveiled a multi-tenant data-center facility in Serangoon, Singapore. With the opening of the SIN-1 data center, the company now sets foot in the Asia-Pacific region as a data-center provider.

Notably, the enterprise-class data center currently provides customers with 1.5 megawatts of capacity, with ability to deliver additional three megawatts through future phases. Further, at full built-out, the facility will offer 5.5 megawatts of capacity across four 10,000-square-foot data halls.

The campus will provide efficient and cost-effective hybrid-IT services, including cloud backup, migration and disaster recovery. Further, the facility is poised to deliver a plethora of flexible wholesale and retail colocation deployment options through private suites, individual cabinets and secure cages.

In fact, SIN-1 has been carefully designed as a purpose-built facility to meet the growing needs of global customers, including many Fortune 1,000 customers who need to meet compliance and IT-asset protection programs.

Additionally, the new facility will strengthen Iron Mountain’s global footprint in this strategic and fast-growing market. Moreover, the move highlights the company’s commitment to build top-class data center offerings for global organizations. With this, the company is well positioned to fortify its digital strategy.

In fact, the company has been scaling its data-center platform by developing and adding new facilities. This includes the development of nearly four megawatts of turn-key data-center capacity in Amsterdam and London as well as the opening of a second enterprise-class data-center facility, AZP-2 in Phoenix.

Through these dedicated efforts, Iron Mountain has curated a data-center platform that consists of 14 facilities located in 13 markets across three continents. At full build-out, this portfolio has the ability to support more than 350 megawatts of IT capacity.

Importantly, this will supplement the company’s storage segment’s performance and offers a long growth runway.

However, lower volume growth in the company’s more mature markets have resulted in aggressive pricing and will likely keep margins under pressure in the near term. Furthermore, declining paper needs and the resultant contraction of physical storage volume is a key concern for Iron Mountain.

Shares of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have inched up 1% over the past three months compared with its industry’s 6% rally.

Stocks to Consider

Investors can also consider some better-ranked stocks from the same space like Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE:ARE) , Extra Space Storage Inc. (NYSE:EXR) and EastGroup Properties, Inc. (NYSE:EGP) , each carrying a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy), at present. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Alexandria Real Estate’s Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 funds from operations (FFO) per share remained unchanged at $6.98 in the past month.

EastGroup Properties' FFO per share estimate for the current year remained unrevised at $4.92 over the past month.

Extra Space Storage's Zacks Consensus Estimate for the ongoing year’s FFO per share climbed marginally to $4.87 in a month’s time.

Note: Anything related to earnings presented in this write-up represent funds from operations (FFO) — a widely used metric to gauge the performance of REITs.

Looking for Stocks with Skyrocketing Upside?

Zacks has just released a Special Report on the booming investment opportunities of legal marijuana.

Ignited by new referendums and legislation, this industry is expected to blast from an already robust $6.7 billion to $20.2 billion in 2021. Early investors stand to make a killing, but you have to be ready to act and know just where to look.

See the pot trades we're targeting>>