Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT lead the market who, along with their various joint ventures, account for 30% of all colocation revenues. They are followed by CyrusOne, the DigitalBridge group of companies and KDDI.
Chinese operators account for further 13% due to their dominance in their home market, while the remaining 50% of the market is controlled by an extremely long list of medium-small data centre operators.
As for the Chinese operators China Telecom, GDS and VNET lead the market. While the next tier of colocation providers, those with the highest growth include STACK Infrastructure, Mapletree, Chindata, Iron Mountain, Switch and H5 Data Centers.
“The colocation market continues to grow at a healthy pace, driven by large cloud and internet companies needing ever more data centre capacity, and by enterprises pushing increasing amounts of IT infrastructure off premise and into multi-tenant data centres. Given the long-term nature of leasing arrangements, we confidently forecast strong continued growth over the coming years,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.
“The competitive landscape is a mixture of a small number of companies who are building a global footprint and a large number of national or regional specialists. Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT continue to expand globally by a combination of organic growth and by some aggressive M&A activity, but theirs is not the only path forward. Smaller data centre companies can also build growing and sustainable operations by focusing on specific countries or geographic regions.”
Geographically, the US and China account for almost half of the globally market, followed by Japan, UK, Germany, Singapore and India, which together represent 24% of the total. The markets with the highest growth rates are China, Brazil, India and Singapore.
According to segment, retail colocation continues to account for the largest portion of the market, although wholesale revenues are growing faster, this is largely due to hyperscale operators leasing large amounts of capacity.
Over the last four quarters global colocation revenues reached $47 billion, this excludes recent exchange rate movements, while the market continues to grow at a double-digit growth rate.
