APG Buys 20% Stake in Greater China Data Centre Operator OneAsia

Dutch pension fund manager APG Asset Management has made its second investment in Asia Pacific’s bustling data centre market with the acquisition of a 20 percent stake in Hong Kong-based operator OneAsia.

The amount of the transaction was not disclosed. OneAsia said in a press release last Friday that the two companies had formed a strategic partnership to speed up OneAsia’s regional expansion beyond Hong Kong and mainland China and into Japan, Korea and Thailand.

APG previously acquired a 10.43 percent stake in data centre operator Chindata, later upping its stake to 19.1 percent after the Beijing-based company’s IPO led by Bain Capital last year.

“We are very pleased to partner with APG,” said Charles Lee, founder and chief executive of OneAsia. “We are convinced that the partnership with APG will accelerate our expansion in the high-growth data centre market, especially when we are extending our network into other countries in Asia.”

Working the Cloud

OneAsia, which provides internet connectivity services to enterprises in Hong Kong and mainland China, currently holds a set of four data centre assets spread across the two locations. After the APG acquisition, the company is now 80 percent owned by IT firm Legan, founded by Lee in 1992.

Founded in 2009, OneAsia has amassed data centre assets including the Legan Centre in Hong Kong’s Kowloon East area and the Nantong data centre campus northwest of Shanghai.

The Legan Centre is a six-storey, 14,000 square metre (150,695 square foot) data centre housed in what was formerly known as the Wai Yuen Tong Medicine Building in the Kowloon Bay area. The property has been refitted to hold up to 2,000 standard server racks and has a power capacity of 16MVA.

The campus in Nantong, a city in Jiangsu province just across the Yangtze River from Suzhou, consists of five six-storey buildings with 120,000 square metres of space and a power capacity of 150MVA.

In addition to those two facilities, OneAsia owns a 20MVA facility in Shanghai’s Waigaoqiao Pilot Free Trade Zone, with capacity for 6,000 standard server racks, and a 200-rack facility in an office building in Hong Kong’s Chai Wan area.

APG was advised on the OneAsia investment by Baker McKenzie, which also assisted in last year’s Chindata stake purchase.

“This transaction represents another important milestone for APG in gaining increased exposure in the fast-growing data centre market, and we are very pleased to have been able to play a role,” said Jason Ng, partner and co-chair of Baker McKenzie’s global funds group.

Doubling Down on Data

APG’s head of real estate for Asia Pacific, Graeme Torre, sees this latest investment as fitting with the €573 billion ($690 billion) pension manager’s strategy of backing the data centre industry regionwide.

“With the increase in data usage for all aspects of our social and business lives, we identified the need to make a strategic and global allocation to this asset class,” Torre said. “However, with the rate of change in technology it is important to invest alongside partners that will keep us ahead in terms of development and innovation. OneAsia’s track record in this respect and its aspirations in the field of ESG made them an obvious partner for us.”

Torre, who joined the Dutch company in 2017 from Invesco, also led APG’s purchase last year of the 10.43 percent stake in Chindata, giving the pension fund manager the second-largest interest after Bain’s 57.17 percent controlling stake.

Chindata raised $540 million in a NASDAQ IPO last September. APG disclosed in January that it had raised its stake in the company to 19.1 percent.