Berkshire Partners has plans to acquire a majority stake in Teraco Data Environments, an African provider of co-location data center infrastructure. The Permira funds, an existing shareholder, will remain a significant investor.
Based in Johannesburg and established in 2008, Teraco is the largest provider of data center services in Africa. The company offers vendor-neutral co-location and other related services in secure and resilient data centers. The Permira funds initially backed a Teraco management buyout in December 2014, and in that time the business has multiplied its capacity more than six times. The company operates five high-quality facilities with 30 megawatts of critical power load serving more than 450 clients, including global internet companies, across five core ecosystems: telecoms, managed service providers, content, enterprise and financial services. With more than 13,500 interconnects, Teraco’s data centers are the most interconnected facilities in Africa, allowing clients to connect directly to each other, to the onramps of all major cloud providers, as well as to the continent’s largest and fastest-growing Internet Exchange Point, NAPAfrica.
The data center market in Africa is poised for continued strong growth, with increasing demand for global applications and content, as well as the accelerating adoption of cloud services. Teraco has built a strategic position to capture this regional opportunity as a trusted and secure partner with resilient data center facilities built to international standards.
“Over the next few years, we aim to double our installed critical power load from 30 megawatts to 60 megawatts and we look forward to working closely with Berkshire Partners on this ambitious growth journey,” said Jan Hnizdo, managing director of Teraco.
Larry Hamelsky, a managing director at Berkshire Partners, added, “We believe that Teraco is exceptionally well-positioned to capitalise on the fast growth of the Sub-Saharan data-center infrastructure market given its highly interconnected ecosystems, well-designed facilities and ability to offer a wide array of deployments.”
The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and the customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in first quarter 2019.
