Tata Looks to Monetize Its Data Centers

According to an article on LiveMint, Tata Communications is shopping its data center assets.  They are said to be talkign with both private equity and strategic buyers to sell a 74% stake in the company’s data center subsidiary, raising something in the neighborhood of $300M.  

Over the last few years, both Tata and Reliance have put all or parts of their international telecom and data assets on the market in some form.  However, one could argue that their hearts haven’t really been in it, since they haven’t actually sold anything yet.

In this case, Tata split off its data center business in the spring of 2014 into its own subsidiary that pulls in about INR3750M (US$60M) in annual revenues. It has over 1M square feet of space across 44 locations, with a 28% market share in India itself.  That Indian footprint might be the most valuable to international buyers, as it’s probably rather more difficult to build that sort of infrastructure in India’s business environment than to reproduce the company’s other assets in the US and Europe, for instance.  And there seems to be growing interest in having such a footprint, at least from the cloud/content side. Whether the data centers in question would be suitable for such a job is another question.

But this seems to me to likely end up as yet another trial balloon that finds that the offers don’t come in high enough to make a deal happen.

 

 

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Categories: Datacenter · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions