This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
Goodman has quickly completed its blockbuster $4 billion capital raising, which will turbocharge its portfolio of data centres amid skyrocketing use of AI and cloud storage.
Goodman announced the raising on Wednesday as it posted a solid set of interim numbers.
“We’re very pleased with the strong support we’ve received from both existing and new institutional investors for this Placement. It highlights continued confidence in Goodman’s established strategy of providing essential infrastructure for the digital economy,” said group CEO Greg Goodman.
“The funds raised will enable us to optimise the opportunities we’re creating over the long term, particularly through our data centre offering, and provide greater financial and operational flexibility to manage the next phase of growth.”
Around 119.4 million new securities, equivalent to approximately 6.2% of securities on issue, are expected to be issued under the placement. The issue price of $33.50 per new security represented a 6.9% discount to Goodman’s previous closing price of $35.98.
It closed yesterday at $34.20, down nearly 5%.
Goodman, which has a market cap of nearly $69 billion, has been one of the star performers on the ASX in recent times, riding the wave of the e-commerce boom and demand for logistics facilities and now reorienting its development workbook toward the surging data centres sub-sector. Data centres now make up 46% of its $13 billion development pipeline.
Goodman’s total portfolio comes in at $84.4 billion, growing 7% year-on-year in the first half of FY25.
Goodman’s raising comes as the Future Fund and Infratil acquired a 12% investment in CDC Data Centres for circa $2.05 billion from the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation. The deal pegged CDC at an enterprise value of around $17 billion.
It is the biggest data centres deal since last year’s $24 billion sale of AirTunk to Blackstone.
The CDC deal means the Future Fund will take its total holding in the company to 34.55%, and Infratil its stake to 49.75%.
David Di Pilla’s HMC Capital recently launched its new ASX-listed data centre asset platform, DigiCo Infrastructure REIT, with its $2.746 billion IPO successfully underwritten. The trust was created with an enterprise value of $4.5 billion in data centre assets across Australia and the United States.
That came on the back of HMC’s $1.937 billion acquisition of Global Switch Australia and the $400 million takeover of iseek.
HMC undertook a $300 million raising to underwrite the Global Switch Australia acquisition.
