Data Exchange in $16m IPO

Local tech company The Data Exchange Network has excited investors on its first day of trading on the ASX, after the completion of a $16 million initial public offering.   

The company, which has established an engineering and manufacturing facility in Perth, builds and sells data centre modules and associated infrastructure to third-party data centre owners.

Data Exchange issued 80 million shares at 20 cents each, with Bell Potter Securities and Cadmon Advisory acting as joint lead managers to the offer.

Shares in the company were trading 40 per cent above the offer price at 28 cents each at 1230pm AEDT.

Following the offer, the company had 182 million shares on issue, with an entity owned by co-founders Dean Coetzee and Tim Desmond holding a 30 per cent stake in the company.

Fellow co-founder and managing director Peter Christie has a 7.6 per cent stake through private entity Herdsman Lake Capital Asia.

Prior to his role with Data Exchange, Mr Christie was the founder and executuive director of Datacentre, the first company in Australia to build a containerised data centre.

Also on the board is independent non-executive chairman Richard Carden, who has more than 25 years’ experience in the telecoms, data centre and IT industry.

He is currently the senior vice-president of integration for ASX-listed company Speedcast International.

Terry Smart is an independent non-executive director; he was a founding director of JB Hi-Fi.

Mr Carden said the funds from the offer would be used primarily to establish two data centre facilities, in Sydney and Melbourne.

“The next phase of our business development will see us create two new company-owned colocation facilities in Sydney and Melbourne while we continue to sell our solutions to other facility managers, in Singapore and the Philippines,” Mr Carden said in a letter to investors.

“Data Exchange is unique amongst colocation data centre operators in that it designs, engineers and intends to construct its own data centre technology from the ground up.

“Data Exchange believes that this in-house capability will allow it to construct data centres at a much lower capital cost than many traditional data centre developers.”

The company said it had two revenue streams, namely colocation rack revenue and manufacturing of infrastructure.

The colocation revenue will be derived from customers paying a monthly fee to rent racks that house their computers in Data Exchange’s proposed colocation facilities.

The company will also generate revenue from the construction and sales of data centre modules and associated infrastructure.