Luxembourg-based Cube Infrastructure Managers has agreed to acquire Firstcolo Datacenters GmbH, a Frankfurt-based data centre business providing colocation, dedicated servers, managed services and private cloud solutions, for an undisclosed amount.
Firstcolo owns two-state-of-the-art “Tier III+” data centres in Frankfurt (photo), both of which are powered by green electricity. Tier III is where data centre tiers get serious, with far superior redundancy and increased uptime than lower tiers. Tier I and II require only one path for power and cooling. Tier III requires an additional path for backup in case of a failure. Tier III+ means in excess of the Tier III standard, but not all the way to Tier IV, the highest level.
“Cube IM invests in businesses which capitalise on megatrends driving the need for sustainable infrastructure,” said Stéphane Calas, a partner at Cube IM, who explained that Cube has conducted a dozen digital sector transactions since 2008, in a press release. “We believe firstcolo to be very well positioned to address the increasing needs of German SMEs in terms of colocation and cloud services, with the ability to anticipate the future needs of customers.”
Raif as vehicle
Cube IM is acquiring the firm through its “Cube Infrastructure Fund III” brownfield fund. The fund was registered in Luxembourg as a Reserved Alternative Investment Fund, or Raif, in June 2021. As a “brownfield fund” its strategy is to invest in existing production facilities in order to start a new production activity.
In recent years, Cube IM has raised 3.9 billion euro across four European-focused funds including its brownfield Cube I, II and III funds and its greenfield telecoms focused Connecting Europe Broadband fund.
Firstcolo was founded in 2007, acquiring Accelerated IT in 2017. When EMERAM Capital Partners, which describes itself as “one of the leading investment companies for medium-sized companies” in the German-speaking region and its subsidiary diva-e Excellence GmbH (diva-e), a portfolio company active in digital marketing, came in as new majority shareholders, firstcolo became an independent subsidiary of diva-e.
Substantial growth
Firstcolo’s management team grew its revenues substantially around the firm’ co-location service. The firm also successfully entered new high growth areas such as private cloud solutions.
Cube said that it saw firstcolo’s strong platform characteristics and significant growth prospects, supported by an increasing demand for colocation and cloud solutions across Germany, as representing an attractive proposition for its “buy and grow” strategy.
“With Cube, we have gained a long-term oriented owner who will support us with our ambition to expand the platform and to triple in size,” said Jerome Evans, Firstcolo’s CEO. “Our goal is to build more data centres in the future that have industry-leading PUE (power usage effectiveness, ed.) values in terms of energy efficiency.”
Efficient data centres
“We are proud to have supported firstcolo to become one of the leading and most efficient data centres in the Frankfurt region with a differentiated and customer-centric value proposition,” said Dr Alexis Tran-Viet, a partner at Emeram.
The parties to the deal have agreed not to disclose any financial details on the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions.
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