the US telco has announced that it has retained financial advisors to assist in the exploration of strategic alternatives for the Company’s datacentres and colocation business operations.
CenturyLink has 59 datacentres in North America, Asia and Europe with more than 185 megawatts of power across 2.6 million sq ft of raised floor capacity. The review of strategic alternatives will involve a full range of options including, but not limited to, a partnership or joint venture, a sale of all or a portion of the datacentres, as well as keeping some or all of these assets and operations as part of CenturyLink’s portfolio.
Glen F. Post III, chief executive officer said “We are confident in our strategy of combining enhanced network and hosting capabilities with a suite of related managed services offerings for our customers. We expect colocation services to remain part of our service offerings, but we do not believe ownership of the physical datacentre assets is necessary to effectively deliver those services. Therefore, we are exploring all of the strategic alternatives available for our datacentres. We have not set a timetable for completion of this process and will take the time necessary to ensure we best position CenturyLink and deliver value to our shareholders, while remaining focused on providing our colocation customers excellent service,”
The news came on the back of the release of the company’s Third Quarter 2015 Results the highlights of which included the company: Achieved core revenues of approximately US$4.0 billion in third quarter 2015; Revenue from high-bandwidth data services provided to Business customers, including MPLS3, Ethernet and Wavelength, grew more than 7% year-over-year; Revenue from Consumer strategic services also grew more than 7% year-over-year; Generated free cash flow of $747 million, excluding special items; Driven in part by tighter credit and collection processes, ended the quarter with approximately 6.1 million high-speed Internet customers, a decrease of approximately 37,000 customers in third quarter 2015 and purchased and retired nearly 9.8 million shares of CenturyLink common stock for US$263 million during third quarter 2015.
Post commented on these “CenturyLink achieved solid third quarter revenues from its Consumer and Business retail network customers, while Business wholesale and hosting revenues declined, Demand for high-bandwidth data services remained strong as our business network sales increased sequentially and year-over-year, primarily driven by enterprise and global customers”.
