Singapore-headquartered multinational Keppel Telecommunications and Transportation has taken a 50 per cent stake in Dublin-based Premier Data Centres (PDC) for a total consideration of €12 million.
Through a subsidiary, DataOne Asia, Keppel paid €10.5 million for 50 per cent of the loan capital, amounting to €25.7 million, of PDC. It paid another €1 million for 500 new shares in PDC and granted a shareholders' loan of €500,000 to PDC.
PDC is owned by Real Capital International (RCI), which is the ultimate beneficiary of the deal. RCI, is a holding vehicle for the technology investments of Noel Meaney and Chris Nightingale, and has owned Premier Data Centres since 2002. PDC owns and operates a 6,500 sq m data centre in Dublin's CityWest and has an exclusive reseller agreement with IT giant Hewlett Packard.
HP provides outsourcing services to a number of Irish and international clients including Bank of Ireland from the centre, which has an occupancy rate of 97 per cent. Approximately 100 people work at the PDC data centre but only 12 of these are employed directly.
Mr Meaney said PDC would now look at building new data centres - one in the greater Dublin area, with the others likely to be in eastern Europe. He said demand for data centre services was being driven by financial regulations which require companies to back-up their data and mirror their software applications at secure data centres.
In 1999, another arm of Keppel purchased AIB's private banking and treasury arm in Singapore, and AIB subsequently had a small stake in Keppel Capital when it was taken over in 2001 by Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, Singapore's second-largest local bank.
Mr Meaney is the former chief executive of Metromedia Fibre Networks' European operations, which invested €650 million in European data centres and fibre optic networks. When the company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002, Mr Meaney and financier Mr Nightingale bought the European assets for €60 million.
PDC took over the Dublin data centre while sister company Global Voice took ownership of a partially-completed fibre ring around Dublin and international connectivity.
