Business

Pretax profits at Irish arm of data centre company Equinix more than halve

Decline driven by the higher costs of sales

An engineer checking equipment at an Equinix data centre in San Jose, California. Pretax profits at its Irish arm more than halved last year to €7.86m. Photograph: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
An engineer checking equipment at an Equinix data centre in San Jose, California. Pretax profits at its Irish arm more than halved last year to €7.86m. Photograph: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Gordon Deegan
Tue Nov 12 2024 - 16:01

Pretax profits at the Irish arm of data centre builder and operator Equinix more than halved last year to €7.86 million.

Equinix (Ireland) Ltd operates data centres in Dublin at Northwest Business Park, 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.

Its latest accounts show that Equinix (Ireland) Ltd recorded the 51 per cent decrease in profits despite revenues rising by 33 per cent from €48.9 million to €65.2 million. Cost of sales more than doubled from €22.7 million to €46.82 million.

A directors’ note with the accounts said the gross profit margin had decreased to 28 per cent mainly due to the increase in cost of sales.

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The accounts show that the business continued to expand here this year with the note stating that the company on April 9th had entered a deal to acquire a building, DB2, located at Kilcarbery Business Park, Dublin 22, for €7 million, with additional transaction costs amounting to €550,000.

“Demand for Equinix Ireland’s premium data centre capacity remained solid,” the note said. 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”.

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Numbers employed by the Irish unit increased from 64 to 92 made up of 70 in engineering and technical; 19 in sales and administration and three directors. Staff costs increased sharply from €10.11 million to €11.98 million. Pay to directors totalled €273,000.

The company recorded post-tax profits of €7.1 million after incurring a corporation tax charge of €745,000.

Shareholder funds totalled €106.58 million that included accumulated profits of €62.8 million. Cash funds totalled €3.5 million.

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Gordon Deegan

Gordon Deegan

Gordon Deegan is a contributor to The Irish Times

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