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Equinix Inc (EQIX -0.66%)
Q2Â 2020 Earnings Call
Jul 29, 2020, 5:30 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good afternoon, and welcome to the Equinix Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]
I'll now like to turn over the call to Katrina Rymill, Vice President of Investor Relations, you may begin.
Katrina Rymill -- Vice President, Investor Relations
Good afternoon and welcome to today's conference call. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that some of the statements we'll be making today are forward-looking in nature and involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary significantly from those statements and maybe identified by the risks, we identified in today's press release and those identified in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K, filed on February 21, 2020 and 10-Q filed on May 7, 2020.
Equinix assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or comment on forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition, in light of Regulation Fair Disclosure, it's Equinix' policy not to comment on financial guidance during the quarter, unless it is done through an explicit public disclosure. In addition, we will provide non-GAAP measures on today's conference call. We provide a reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a list of the reasons why the Company uses these measures in today's press release on the Equinix IR page at www.equinix.com.
We have made available on the IR page of our website a presentation designed to accompany this discussion, along with certain supplemental financial information and other data. We'd also like to remind you that we post important information about Equinix on IR page from time to time, and encourage you to check our website regularly for the most current available information.
With us today are Charles Meyers, Equinix' CEO and President and Keith Taylor, Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we'll be taking questions from sell-side analysts. In the interest of wrapping this call within an hour, we'd like to ask these analysts to limit any follow-on questions to just one.
At this time, I'll turn the call over to Charles.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Katrina. Good afternoon and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. As we all continue to navigate various health, economic and social changes occurring in our world, our key priorities remain clear. Focusing on the health, safety and well-being of our colleagues, customers and communities and enabling our customers to respond effectively to the increased urgency of digital transformation as a critical business priority and a driving force in the global economy.
Even in the face of an uncertain macro environment created by the global pandemic, the Equinix business continues to perform well, and our relevance in enabling digital business and connectivity remains a core tenet of customer purchasing decisions. In Q2, we delivered the third best gross bookings in our history, driven by a record quarter in the Americas, continued strength in channel bookings, robust interconnection performance and a high volume of small deals.
Our expanding go-to-market engine continues to fuel the business, generating over 4,200 deals in the quarter across more than 3,000 customers. And the importance of our global reach continues to shine as our customers scale and expand across the globe, leveraging our platform across 56 metros in 26 countries.
We're continuing to increase the scope of customer deployments and customers operating in all three regions now represent 62% of revenue, up 1% quarter-over-quarter. Our organic expansions continue, opening Hamburg this quarter and adding more dough as a strategic subsea landing location in support of a key hyperscale. And we're using, disciplined M&A as a tool to enter new markets and scale our platform.
On June 1st, we announced our intent to acquire 13 Bell Canada data centers, expanding our coverage in Canada to a national platform and unlocking opportunities for global corporations to capture growth and innovation in the Canadian market. This acquisition, which is expected to be immediately accretive upon close in Q4, reflects Equinix' continued commitment to executing platform enhancing acquisitions on financially attractive terms.
Before we get into the detailed quarterly results, I want to share a few thoughts on our commitment to social change and our continued work to build a culture and community that can have a meaningful sustainable impact on the future of our society. Recent events in the U.S. have triggered outrage and an outpouring of emotions around the world. We have actively tapped into this energy fostering a rich and inclusive dialog on the topics of equity and social justice. With a focus on improving our collective understanding of each other and creating a commitment to action, which is imperative to moving us forward positively as individuals, as a company and as a society.
While still early in our journey, our vision remains clear. For Equinix to be a culture where every employee, every day can truly say I am safe, I belong and I matter, and for our workforce at all levels to better reflect and represent the communities in which we operate. We acknowledge that we have work to do in achieving this vision, but are fully committed to demonstrating measurable enduring progress against the multi-year strategy and continue to believe that our culture remains a key competitive differentiator. Our approach includes traditional aspects such as diversity targets, bias training and mitigation, community plan the programs and employee mobilization. But we also believe that lasting change will only happen by pushing ourselves even further in our pursuit of becoming a truly equitable and global organization.
Our objective is to continue to make our culture a critical competitive advantage, seeking to engage every leader and every employee at Equinix, and integrating diversity including and belonging every aspect of how we run the business. As a company, we will continue to put in the work and reaffirm our commitment to cultivating a workplace and a society that embraces and vigorously defends equality and diversity.
Now turning to our results as depicted on Slide 3, revenues for the second quarter were $1.47 billion, up 8% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA was at 9% year-over-year and AFFO was again meaningfully ahead of our expectations. Interconnection revenues continued to over index substantially growing 16% year-over-year, reflecting the important role of interconnection in digital transformation and highlighting our clear market leadership in this area.
Unit volume was fueled by growth in provision capacity to support increased traffic and solid new product performance reflecting our ability to meet the evolving connectivity requirements of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. These growth rates are all on a normalized and constant currency basis. We now have over 378,000 interconnections and we continue to see healthy expansion of our dynamic ecosystems across the globe. In Q2, we had an incremental 8,000 interconnects driven by streaming, video conferencing, enterprise cloud connectivity and investments in local -- at local aggregation to support work from home.
Internet Exchange had one of its best quarters ever with peak traffic up 44% year-over-year as the peering community augmented capacity for video conferencing, gaming and over-the-top video replacing headroom that had been exhausted by COVID-related traffic growth. ECX Fabric also had a great quarter, eclipsing 2,200 participants in demonstrating robust multi-cloud adoption, particularly from network providers with one-third of them scaling bandwidth to fiber more clouds. We're also making good progress in integrating the Packet business with strong new logo engagement and continued go to market integration, as we work to deliver on our vision for Platform Equinix to underpin the foundational infrastructure for today's digital leaders.
We're also strengthening Equinix' leadership position in the cloud ecosystem through expansion of our Hyperscale strategy, allowing us to service both retail and large footprint in key markets, while maximizing the efficiency of our balance sheet through our partnership with GIC. We're seeing strong customer demand in our initial xScale JV in Europe and we'll soon expand this JV to include our seventh asset Paris 9. This facility is slated to open early next year and is immediately approximate to our market leading Paris campus and already -- and is already 100% pre-leased to a major hyperscale. We are also tracking to close our new xScale JV in Japan with GIC in Q4, adding new locations in Osaka and Tokyo.
Now let me cover highlights from our verticals. Our network vertical achieved record bookings, driven by robust reset reseller activity and network expansion to support traffic growth. Expansions included Cal, a global telecom provider adding capacity at the interconnected edge to support increasing user demand as well as Vocus Communications an Australian specialty fiber and network solution provider deploying infrastructure to increase scale and improve end user experience.
Our financial services vertical had second highest bookings with strength in global financial and insurance firms as they accelerate digital transformation. New wins and expansions included, a leading Nordic insurance company leveraging hybrid multi-cloud and distributed data and Galileo Financial Technologies, a payment solutions platform rearchitecting their network and securely connecting the ecosystem partners.
Our content and digital media vertical also saw solid bookings, with particular strength in gaming and video, driven by the spike in demand for indoor entertainment. New wins and expansions included Eyeota, a leading audience technology platform, looking to expand their footprint to serve the ad-tech industry, and Moody's leveraging ECX Fabric to rearchitect our network in multi-cloud -- multi-cloud access for increased performance.
Our cloud and IT vertical also showed strong bookings led by the infrastructure and software sub-segments with continued momentum in cloud adoption. We continue to extend our market leading cloud density adding 10 cloud on ramps this quarter alone as cloud providers expand services into new metros, including Bogota and Mexico City. New wins and expansions included Cisco, extending service capabilities to additional regions to support new product offerings and security and client demand for Cisco Webex communication solutions, and BMC Software, a leading platform provider of digital workflow solutions, deploying infrastructure to support their expanding customer base across the region.
Our enterprise vertical saw solid bookings and broad-based demand with particular growth in businesses and professional services, government and energy, despite some COVID-related friction. COVID continues to ship -- shift enterprise spending patterns, resulting in increased demand for various cloud-based services, including telephony, messaging and conferencing.
New enterprise wins included Swedish engineering company, optimizing its global network to provide optimal employee experience the global spirits distributed that switch from building its own on-premise data centers to Equinix to support rapid deployment, as well as Fung Group, a global leader in supply chain solutions leveraging ECX Fabric to digitize its supply chain ecosystem.
Our channel program had a record quarter accounting for over 30% of bookings and delivering great productivity from this go-to-market vector. The channel program continues to be a new logo engine for the company, generating over 60% of all new logos. We had great wins with reseller and alliance partners, including Orange Business, Cisco, AT&T, Microsoft and Dell across a wide range of industry segments with projects focused on both digital transformation and COVID-19 response. New channel business this quarter included notable wins with AT&T, for a global insurer transitioning from on-premise data centers to a hybrid multi-cloud solution to enhance the elasticity and performance and with Vodafone, for a premier global energy company, supporting their adoption of SD-WAN and hybrid multi-cloud enabler.
Now let me turn the call over to Keith to cover the results for the quarter.
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Charles, and good afternoon to everyone. Nice to speak with you again. I and Charles, hope you and your families are doing well and staying safe. With respect to Equinix, the business continues to perform well. Q2 revenues, adjusted EBITDA, AFFO and AFFO per share were ahead of expectations, despite disruptions experienced by our customers, our suppliers and partners, our employees over the past few months.
In the quarter, we had significant gross, pag and net bookings including very strong net positive pricing actions. Interconnection activity was very healthy, both at the physical and the virtual level. We're making solid progress across our new Edge services products. Our performance scans our key operating metrics, was again positive, including solid increases in our MRR per cabinet and billable cabinet metrics.
For the quarter, we're tracking against our expectations and COVID-19 related impact and cost. As expected, there are certain cost trends going both directions and we'll continue to make the appropriate adjustments to our forecast, as needed. And as you've heard us say before, but it's certainly worth repeating again, achieving an investment grade rating and now from each of our three credit rating agencies after Moody's may upgrade, has proven to be a highly strategic and valuable milestone, enabling us to access the debt capital markets expeditiously, while broadening the investor base and tightening the credit spreads on our issued debt. This is particularly important during times of great volatility and disruption like today.
In June, we refinanced $2.6 billion of high yield debt at a blended interest rate of 2.07%, the lowest interest rate ever achieved by any BBB- rated issuer. Interest savings on an annualized basis will approximate $50 million and these savings were effectively offset the dilution associated with our $1.27 billion equity raise in May.
We have an active construction pipeline with 29 projects under way across 20 markets in 14 countries and we continue to work closely with our suppliers and partners to deliver capacity as close to the target dates as possible.
Now let me cover the quarterly highlights and know that growth rates in the section are on a normalized and constant currency basis. As depicted on Slide 4, Global Q2 revenues were $1.47 billion, up 8% over the same quarter last year, our 70th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, including a $3 million net FX benefit when compared to our prior guidance rates. We've seen positive momentum in the first half of the year, driven by strong net bookings and price increases resulting in a healthy recurring revenue uplift, but later then planned non-recurring revenues due to the timing of custom work and decreased Smart Hands revenues.
Global Q2 adjusted EBITDA was $720 million or 49% of revenues up 6% compared to the prior quarter and 9% over the same quarter last year, due to strong operating performance and favorable revenue mix, including $1 million net FX benefit when compared to our prior guidance rates. Global Q2 AFFO was $558 million above our expectations on a constant currency basis, largely the results of strong operating performance. We continue to manage the business and support our AFFO per share goals.
Turning to our regional highlights whose full results are covered on slides 5 through 7. EMEA and APAC were the fastest MRR growing regions on a year-over-year normalized basis, at 16% and 10% respectively, followed by the Americas region at 3%. The Americas region saw record gross bookings with healthy pricing and strong exports to the other two regions in the quarter. The Americas growth rate was partially muted by our decision to weight certain Smart Hand fees and the timing of planned churn. We expect the Americas growth rate to step up in the second half of the year. We also completed the integration of the Mexico assets and won several key internationally based magnets into our network and cloud verticals as customers start to leverage the value of the Equinix platform into our Mexico markets.
Our EMEA region saw strong bookings in the quarter, particularly across a number of smaller and emerging markets, including Dublin and Madrid. Paris continues to perform well and market we're seeing an increase in demand and the tightening of supply. A broad build out initiative across the region remains active.
Interconnection were substantially up on a year-over-year basis, driven by volume and pricing initiatives and billing cabinet stepped up in the quarter.
And finally the Asia-Pacific region saw another very strong quarter of bookings including a record into our Japan markets and the region enjoyed solid exports particularly in into EMEA. APAC interconnection had a strong quarter with many providers scaling network connections for future growth, but higher than average net adds and cross connects and inter metro connections.
And now, looking at our capital structure. Please refer to Slide 8. We continue to increase our operating and strategic flexibility through the management of our balance sheet and capital allocation decisions. Pro forma for the debt refinancing activities, we have approximately $2.7 billion of unrestricted cash and investments on the balance sheet. Our total liquidity, including our available revolving line of credit of almost $5 billion. We will use this liquidity alongside our capital and balance sheet initiatives to opportunistically expand the business with organically and inorganically, as we work to maximize the long-term shareholder value creation. Including the benefit of the $1.7 billion equity transaction completed in May, our net debt leverage ratio decreased approximately 3.3 times in Q2, annualized adjusted EBITDA well within our target leverage range.
Turning to Slide 9, for the quarter capital expenditures were approximately $482 million including recurring Capex of $30 million. We had seven openings in Amsterdam, Chicago, Dallas, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Toronto and Washington D.C. This included the opening of Dallas 11, a new IBX completed on the Infomart Dallas campus, which is an interconnection Epicenter and a major hub for the Southern U.S. And we announced four new expansion projects, the majority of these projects to be developed on own land being Bordeaux, Hong Kong, Milan and Warsaw.
We continue to expand our ownership acquiring land for development in both Frankfurt and Manchester markets. For the year, we now expect capital expenditures to increase by approximately $150 million, which reflects the anticipated timing of the closing of the Japan joint venture with GIC. Once this transaction closes, GIC's portion of the capital expenditure spent prior to the close date will be reimbursed Equinix an amount that is expected to range between $150 million and $200 million, including certain previously incurred costs.
Revenues from owned assets is probably 55% the metric that we anticipate will increase over the next 18 months. Our capital investments delivered strong returns as shown on Slide 10. A 148 stabilized assets increased recurring revenues by 6% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. These stabilized assets are collectively 84% utilized and generate a 28% cash-on-cash return on the gross PP&E invested.
Now please refer to Slides 11 through 15 for our summary of 2020 guidance and bridges. Starting with revenues, we expect to deliver an 8% to 9% growth rate for 2020, a reflection of the continued momentum in the business and includes a net FX benefit of $23 million, compared to our prior guidance rates.
Non-recurring revenues are expected to remain at these levels for the rest of the year. MRR churn is expected to remain in our target range of 2% to 2.5% per quarter for the remainder of the year. We expect 2020 adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 48% excluding integration costs the result of strong operating leverage in the business, including revenue mix, offset in part by the anticipated investments on our go-to-market and product organizations and higher than initially planned salaries and benefit costs.
We expect to incur $20 million of integration costs in 2020 for the integration of our various acquisitions, and we are raising our 2020 AFFO, which is expected to now grow between 14% and 18% compared to previous year. For 2020, we expect AFFO per share to grow between 8% and 12%, including the effects of the capital market activities completed in Q2.
So let me stop here and turn the call back to Charles.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Keith. We are delighted with our Q2 results and are pleased with the continued outperformance of the business, a result of our focus on providing customers distinctive and durable value as they embrace digital transformation. Our impact with customers in the financial results that follow are the reflections of the dedication, flexibility and ingenuity of our teams. Over the course of Q2, we like many others had to rapidly adapt our business, adjusting our go-to-market motion, the current realities evolving operating procedures, while maintaining our exceptional service reliability and executing on highly attractive equity and debt deals to enhance liquidity and drive AFFO.
Customers remain at the center of everything we do, and our customer satisfaction rating moved up the last two quarters to its highest score in the last three years. While we are delighted with how the business is performing. We fully recognize the strain, the shifting challenges and the continued uncertainty we are all facing and as such, we will remain diligent and closely monitoring market dynamics and further adapting our business has appropriate through the back half of the year.
The secular drivers of demand for digital infrastructure have never been stronger and we believe that Equinix is uniquely positioned to execute on the expanding opportunity presented by the accelerating importance of digital transformation and the shift to hybrid and multi-cloud as the architecture of choice. We remain steadfastly focused on evolving our platform to respond to this unparalleled market opportunity. Investing to drive top line growth, leveraging our operating scale to fuel attractive AFFO per share growth to our investors and delivering positive impact to our many stakeholders as we continue to build an enduring and sustainable culture and business.
So let me stop there and open it up for questions.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Tim Long with Barclays. Your line is open.
Tim Long -- Barclays -- Analyst
Thank you. Appreciate the question here. Wanted to start off with the smaller newer piece of business with Packet, if I could. Sounds like it's moving along pretty well. Just curious if you can give us an update on how you're moving along with features and the sales force in the channel with the ability to sell the new products and maybe just a little color with the business that you're doing now, if you can give us a sense maybe what kind of vertical, what kind of customers or applications are being sought out by those to take on this new business for you? Thank you.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure, Tim. Thanks. This is Charles. I guess it's important to maybe back up and continue to put the acquisition of Packet into overall context, I think that as we have talked about on prior calls, this was a way for us to continue to adapt to the changing consumption patterns of our customers in terms of how they want to sort of gain access to the value if you will of the Equinix platform.
And I think we -- adding the bare metal service that Packet brings to the table and integrating that with the bare metal service that we had under under development organically. We think it really represents a big opportunity for us to continue to adapt to those changing needs. The integration is going well. We've now aligned on a coordinated and integrated roadmap for -- and coordinate that into a single offering that we will -- that we'll deliver as a company. We have continued to integrate to go to market motion and we've actually taken some folks from within the Equinix organization and blended them into the sales team and have that acting as a bit of an overlay today to our larger sales force.
Still early days there and I think probably -- and a lot of the customer activity is with some of the more digitally native targets that Packet had traditionally been serving. But we're really starting to see the building funnel of enterprise targets, particularly large enterprise targets as well as, some service provider sort of types that are really resonating with the Packet opportunity and that offering.
So it continues to go well, again very -- still very early days, but one of the things that we've been talking about internal as we talked about delivering physical infrastructure at software suite, which is kind of been a rally prior tag line that really resonates with us internally, and more importantly resonates with our customers. So again a product roadmap is well aligned now. The engineering teams are under way on bringing a fully enterprise feature set to the bare metal offering over the coming quarters and our go-to-market motion is still relatively early, but good momentum in the pipeline.
Tim Long -- Barclays -- Analyst
Okay. And if I could just do a quick follow-up. You talked about pricing, it looks like Europe and Asia saw a pretty good MRR per cabinet AST growth. Could you just give us a little highlight on why you're seeing better pricing there? Then I'm done. Thank you.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. The key to pricing for us is really continuing targeted discipline in our sales targeting and we've talked about that for many years now, right, delivering -- targeting the right customers with the right used cases into the right IBX locations. And I think we've really -- we're really doing that well in terms of adapting, delivering against the used cases that are really important to customers right now, in terms of hybrid multi-cloud implementations, win rearchitecture, distributed security, a number of things that are really highly featured and I think their digital transformation plans.
And when you're doing that I think you're able to deliver outsized value and therefore, get good solid pricing and we're seeing that show up in our yields.
So I think, and if you look at it in the way our quarter was composed in terms of bookings, we talked about 4,200 deals across 3,000 customers, that means we're doing a lot of deals, more sort of small to mid-sized deals, interconnection oriented, ecosystem centric and that really helps us on the pricing front.
In Europe in particular, we're also seeing the effects now of the roll through of the interconnection pricing adjustments that we've made and I think those have gone really well. Obviously, generally customers don't jump up and applaud when you raise pricing and your services, but I think in this case, our team has done a really good job of articulating the value that people are getting from interconnection, and also think we've been very measured and kind of appropriate about how we have phased those implementations in those price implementations and working with the customers.
And so, so thus far it's gone well. We're starting to really see that roll through and the impact on the EMEA numbers in particular.
Tim Long -- Barclays -- Analyst
Okay, thanks very much.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jon Atkin with RBC. Your line is open.
Jonathan Atkin -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst
Thanks very much. Two questions. First one probably for Keith. I'm just interested in kind of the medium-term margin puts and takes, as we think about where you are in Asia-Pac now, comfortably past the 50% margin threshold. What are the factors to kind of think about at a corporate level of you getting toward those levels over the next kind of several years? And then I have a follow-up on xScale. Thanks.
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, sure, Jon. I think as the -- overall as it relates to margins, as we sort of said in the prepared remarks, we're sort of -- we're very pleased with where we are, pardon me, I am in poor network. We're pleased with where we are, pricing actions have certainly been and net positive to us and so that's represented itself very well in our gross profit or EBITDA and our AFFO margins.
All that said, there is a number of things that are going on in the business, one of the things that we did want to certainly highlight was we want to continue to invest in our go-to-market and product organization. And this ties nicely back toward Charles, when we talked about with Packet. So there is an example of where we can continue to drive profitability up. I think, Q2 was, I don't want to say is aberrational, because obviously it's an outcome of many, many great things, including revenue mix where our non-recurring revenue came down and as it was -- and our recurring revenue went up, and as a result, you've got a favorable mix shift. I mean that we think we'll continue for the rest of the year.
But the other part is we want to continue to invest in the business and we think we're on our -- on track to deliver against our expectations. Again I look pretty back to the June 18 Analyst Day, we believe we can deliver 50% EBITDA margins or greater. I don't think that's ever, just a never a question for us, is doing it with the right discipline and mindset knowing that we want to continue to invest in the business. And right now we just see a very substantial opportunity not only in the assets we have today, the ones we're acquiring, an example being Bell Canada. And so we'll continue to make those investments in the same time and I think we can continually find ways to drive more profitability in the business, if we're not investing in our future growth.
Jonathan Atkin -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst
And then, I don't know, Charles, if you would have anything to add to that. But my second question was just on xScale and I think there have been maybe some management changes, wanted to maybe getting commentary on that. Any kind of milestones around future JV financings? And then if you could maybe provide a little bit of color or maybe reminder on the fee structure that you've secured in these agreements, so we can kind of understand more of the impact on AFFO?
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure, Jon. Yeah, I mean I'll make just a couple of -- reiterate a couple of comments on the margin side, and just again say, I think we're seeing as we've talked about in the past, we're continuing to try to look at driving operating leverage in the business. I think we're being successful in doing that. And then again, we're seeing some positive benefits associated with the mix of business, mix shift and then, again that's balanced against the reality that we want to continue to position ourselves to take advantage of what we think is a really big growth opportunity in front of us as hybrid and multi-play -- multi-cloud really plays out.
And so we will continue to invest in the business and that will be both on the capex side and the opex side, which I think will be a bit of a moderating factor on the margins. But I think we can continue kind of up into the right in turn -- over the long haul.
Relative to xScale, things continue to really go well and that overall, we did have some adjustments. Jim Smith has made the decision to step down from his role as Managing Director of the program, but does remain as an advisor to the initiative and we've asked Krupal Raval, who's been on the xScale team now for a period of time and incredible background and we've asked him to step into the MD role. He has done that and really kept the continuity with the team. The team is recruited in there, I think is incredibly strong, very experienced and is really starting to hit their stride. So, it's going well. We've -- we talked about in the script that we are probably likely adding there or very soon adding the Paris 9 asset that is a 100% pre-leased to hyperscaler and we continue to see good customer interest in pipeline on the other facilities.
The JV in Japan is now been announced, we're working toward closing that later in the year and then we're looking at additional JVs beyond that. So good momentum in overall. And then relative to the fees, maybe I'll let Keith comment quickly on kind of how that structured and impact on business.
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
Sure. So, Jon, just as it relates to the fees, it's really four primary fees. So put aside the equity ownership right now, we're treating the businesses, both it looks like the Japanese JV will be an equity oriented investment, likewise, the initial EMEA JV. And so the way it works is there is basically an asset management fee and facilities fee, a development fee and the sales and marketing fee. And when you break those down, some are recurring revenue, some are non-recurring. And then the benefit we get from the profitability created by the joint venture, that comes in below the line income from an affiliated entity.
So that's how it sort of the fee structure works right now. It's still pretty early on as you know because we've just got the first two assets up. Charles alluded to Paris 9 and having that 100% pre-lease and we're actually engaged across a number of other assets, both in development and also in the marketing of those assets across the platform. So we're pretty excited about the performance that our group is going to take new leadership role in this entity. So, great progress to date.
Jonathan Atkin -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst
Thanks very much.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Colby Synesael of Cowen. Your line is open.
Colby Synesael -- Cowen Inc -- Analyst
Great, thank you. Just a few. Last quarter, you called out a zero to $50 million headwind to guidance, revenue guidance for COVID-19. I was wondering what the headwind or impact was in the second quarter and if you still feel that you're going to be within that zero to $50 million, and maybe you could take that up a little bit if possible at this point?
Secondly, your Americas growth missed our estimate, I think that's probably one of the weaker part to the quarter. Keith, I know you mentioned the Smart Hands rate fees, but I think that's just a $3 million impact. And on the churn side, when I look at least the cabinet and the interconnects, both those numbers still went up, yet the revenue came down which just to seem to me since it's just more of a pricing impact, so I'm trying to get a better understanding there.
And then before Katrina kills me, just one last one. Your previous guidance on organic growth was 7% to 9%, you raised at the 8% to 9% and I believe that excludes FX, that's the only change I saw in your guidance, was in fact FX. I'm wondering where that extra 1% to 8% at the low end came from? Thank you.
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
Charles, do you want me to take the first part?
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. Go ahead.
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
Just to make sure. Because we are in different locations, everybody, so of just making sure we organize accordingly. Let me first start off by saying, look, we are absolutely delighted, Colby, with the performance of the business for the second quarter. And as you know, when we went into the quarter, we give ourselves a relatively wide range, wide berth from zero to 50, and for the -- for this quarter, as you know, we basically delivered slightly above the top end of our guidance range. So said differently, then we basically got a lot of flexibility through the second half of the year and we chose to leave it intact, other than FX, very similar to what Charles did last quarter. He made the reference to the fact that we're going to adjust for currency and here's a range of zero to 50 and -- but we're also going to hold absent FX we're going to hold AFFO, we're going to target a mid point.
Well, when we look at the second half of the year, there's just a lot of uncertainty that still remains, not so much in our business per se, but the reality of how all of the terminal gets manifested into our results. We let that flexibility inside our guide.
And so, what you're seeing is not per se any specific headwind, on the margin there is a few adjustments that's affecting us. We obviously it's three quite bad debt reserve than we had before, but that was planned for. I have made some reference to the fact that there is cost going both directions, clearly our travel and entertainment or is relatively low to almost zero. But that, offsetting that of course is our salary and benefits costs less attrition less paid time off and we're doing a very good job of hiring and hiring the staff that were slated to be hired. That's why our salaries are a little bit higher.
So I think that sort of deals with perhaps the majority of the discussion, other than the Americas. Americas as we said, relatively flat this quarter. Colby, you're right there is $3 million of Smart Hands fees, there is also the impact of the Brazilian currency fairly substantial degradation to an unhedged currency and then you've turned on non-recurring revenues.
When you look at it from a pricing perspective though, MRR per cabinet was relatively flat quarter-over-quarter. And so we're delighted with where we are. We alluded to the fact that pricing was strong, good gross bookings, we have momentum in the business, but you also have some things, timing of churn and the Smart Hands plus non-recurring in Brazil, all affecting the results. And that's the benefit we get therefore of having a very global and diverse set of assets that things are going to move around on a continuous basis. In this case, you're starting to see currency trends moving in our favor and so, albeit we might be a little bit more susceptible to weaker currencies in the Americas, you're going to see -- you're seeing uplifts in Asia and in Europe.
So let me stop here. Charles, you jump in if there's anything you want to add or if there's anything we need to clarify.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
No, I mean, I think again on the zero to 50 obviously we saw the Smart Hands impacts across the regions in the quarter as well as a fairly meaningful impact on our customers NRR and so, but, so the NRR was meaningfully impacted. I think we had a strong recurring revenue quarter, bookings were solid. We are seeing some level of friction still out there, but as you know, as of our results imply the team powered through that and had a good quarter, but we have two sort of big step up quarters remaining in front of us in the back half of the year. And as we look at that we -- and plus, I think a very uncertain environment still in terms of sort of second wave if you will on COVID and the implications of that and -- how the protracted economic impacts are going to begin to affect companies, etc.
We've felt like it was prudent to sort of maintain the revenue guidance and just book the FX impacts into there, so that's where we landed.
Colby Synesael -- Cowen Inc -- Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Frank Louthan with Raymond James. Your line is open.
Frank Louthan -- Raymond James Financial -- Analyst
Great, thank you very much. So talk to us a little bit about more in the Americas. We've talked in the past about what's going on with the Verizon space and how that leasing is going. To talk just a little bit about that? And then follow-up thoughts on inorganic growth for the remainder of the year, on a very that one deal clearly not shying away, what are your thoughts on those opportunities? Thanks.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
And Frank, I'm sorry, the first one was on Verizon assets?
Frank Louthan -- Raymond James Financial -- Analyst
Yeah. The Verizon assets and where you are as far as beginning to fill that space out to magnify the utilization there.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Yeah, again, it's been good long time now that we've kind of integrated. And so we tend to think about them all is really part of the platform now, so it's tough for us to think about or even fully measure that, but the -- but we are seeing good utilization. Obviously, we made some investments into some of the assets, where we actually had some really strong deals this quarter in Miami and Culpeper actually and so we're seeing a good progress on some of the very key assets there.
Overall, as we said, I think that the Americas business, we expect that to step up to more like a 5% growth rate in the back half of the year. Again it was a really solid quarter from a bookings perspective. And so overall, I think with the starting to, I think really having worked through the issues on the Verizon portfolio in terms of the churn and things that have happened there. And seeing that stabilize, I think we're looking at a solid back half of the year for the Americas there.
And relative to inorganic, I think that there are plenty of opportunities out there still. We think that we're going to continue to have a posture that if you really look at it, our strategy remains unchanged. We have used M&A for market entry, for market scaling, for sort of capturing strategic interconnection assets and now for sort of capability additions as we look at the future of Platform Equinix and what that means.
And I think there are opportunities in all those categories. Obviously, the Canadian deal was really an opportunity for us to really scale in a market and reach national presence in Canada. We think there are some other opportunities in terms of new market entries that are areas that we -- our continued -- that we'll continue to be focused on, that are potentially actionable out there.
And so, and it's one of the reasons really that we went, did the equity deal, is making sure that we kept some dry powder on the balance sheet to be appropriately opportunistic about growth opportunities that present themselves.
Frank Louthan -- Raymond James Financial -- Analyst
All right, great, thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Rollins of Citi. Your line is open.
Michael Rollins -- Citigroup -- Analyst
Thanks, and good afternoon. I was curious if you could delve a bit more into what you're seeing out of the enterprise vertical in terms of the ability for them to make decisions and the growing interest that the management team has been describing that you're seeing for hybrid cloud architectures. Thanks.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, I think that we're seeing a -- there are few things, one, I do think that we have seen some projects have delayed decision making, so things pushed out further in the pipeline, but I think that's been offset to some degree by a broader realization that I think you've heard us and probably many other companies in ours and related spaces. For example, the cloud providers talk about this elevation of awareness around digital transformation and the priority that exist there, even in sectors of the economy that are meaningfully impacted by COVID. I think that what people are seeing is that those companies that were better prepared to further ahead in their digital strategies are weathering the storm better, and I think that that's leading people to say, we've got to make that investment.
In some cases, even if their businesses are a bit on their back, they kind of say, look, we're going to take that medicine, but we're going to invest in business and in future and make sure we're making the digital investments that are necessary.
So that is, I think we are seeing a little bit of sort of both sides of the coin there, which is some delays particularly new projects that might be delayed just by a variety of factors including it taking longer to be able to visit sites, although they are -- we are now having tourism visits into the sites on a -- on an appointment basis and so we're sort of freeing up somewhere and the wheels are turning on that. But there is some of that.
If you look at new logos, they are a little bit lower than our pre-COVID levels, but we also are there targeted more at larger, larger accounts with bigger wallet sizes. And so a little bit of a mixed bag. But on balance, I think, what the enduring phenomenon that we think we're really seeing is this increased commitment to digital and also very much in terms of people saying, look, I -- we still have private infrastructure requirements, we want that private infrastructure over time to be, it is probably going to be smaller than what we are doing now, but we need what we -- what remains to be immediately proximate to the cloud and deliver both performance and economics in a different way, and we think Equinix really rises to that challenge for them.
Michael Rollins -- Citigroup -- Analyst
Thanks.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Niknam with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Matthew Niknam -- Deutsche Bank AG -- Analyst
Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the questions. Just two if I could. First, maybe to go back to the last question. In terms of sales cycles, any notable delays during the quarter that you'd call out that may have deferred some bookings in the third quarter. And then secondly, on the competitive front. If you can talk about the competitive backdrop in Europe, whether you've seen any changes in the landscape in recent months after some of the recent M&A -- larger scale M&A in the region. Thanks.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. As I said, we have -- obviously we've got a very sort of deep command in the pipeline in terms of deals that are in there. We did -- there were certainly some opportunities that we had originally as targeted to close this quarter that pushed out, but that's the case every quarter, obviously there's some of that and, but some of those were -- people with chalk up to COVID related sort of delays in decision making. But on balancing when you look at it, you see our third best gross bookings score quarter ever a record in the Americas, obviously we're, we've been able to sort of power through some of that and still deliver strong overall bookings results.
So there is some of that what we are seeing I think quite encouragingly is that those are our just delays not cancellations of projects. I mean at this point, we think it's just a matter of when we're going to bring those those opportunities in. So on balance I think feeling very good and feel like the team really rallied and delivered an exceptional quarter given the broader circumstances that we face. In terms of the competitive backdrop, I would say not a meaningful change. I feel like particularly in I know relative to, I think. commenting on the sort of post interaction digital combination in Europe and impact there. I would say it's still very much seems to be in a digestion phase and I think customers are working to sort of figure out what that means for them. I think employees are -- of those companies are trying to -- of that company are trying to figure out what it means for them and we're trying to stay focused and deliver and execute effectively while that digestion occurs.
And so I think obviously the performance of our business in EMEA sort of speaks for itself in the quarter and we continue to, as I've always said, interaction was always a very credible competitor for us in Europe and I expect they will continue to be one, but we are right now. I think we're seeing a digestion period and we're trying to take advantage of, of that while it exists.
Matthew Niknam -- Deutsche Bank AG -- Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Simon Flannery of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Great, thank you very much. Good evening. Coming back to xScale. I think when you were talking about the project, initially you talked about mid-teens type returns. I wonder if you could update us on what giving you've done some leasing. Now you've got a better sense of pipeline and economics.
What's your latest thoughts on the return profile on these projects? And then just coming back to the enterprises, what's going on the renewal side, what sort of pricing are you achieving on renewals. Obviously your pricing commentary has been pretty bullish overall, but we do see a lot of pressure on IT budgets broadly, are you seeing any of that coming through in terms of customers trying to get some relief when they renew with you? Thanks.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. Yeah, I would say that relative to xScale and return expectations. I would say that if you look at it, we obviously get some of the benefit, particularly as it relates to our lens on the returns of both fees flowing through as well as the development returns, which give us a bit of a lift on the returns overall. And I think will allow us to continue to have those into the double digits.
I do think there is some pressure on returns caused by just an overall pricing environment that continues to be aggressive, I think in terms of people competing aggressively for the hyperscaler business that is out there. So I think there has been, probably a bit of a pressure there, but I think it continues to be a very attractive return profile. I think for our -- for both for us and for our partner. And for us I think being able to do that with relatively limited sort of dry powder off our balance sheet, which we want to allocate to our higher returning retail business. I think the strategy still makes a ton of sense for us. But I would say some downward pressure on returns. It will be interesting to see whether that persists. I do think that Keith mentioned for example, there are markets where we see supply tightening and obviously that tends to improve pricing, but you do have a very powerful set of customers in the hyperscalers that are looking to sort of get the best available terms. So I think there has been a bit of downward pressure there.
Relative to enterprise renewals, as I said, what we're seeing I think is generally people are continuing to figure out how they can make most effective use of Equinix in pursuing their long-term hybrid multicloud architectures. And so that might mean that people are downsizing sort of elements of their architecture as they move certain applications to cloud and then focusing their private infrastructure or the private part of their hybrid cloud into Equinix facilities, proximate to the cloud and are still willing to renew those as what we consider to be very attractive rates that are good for us and delivers significant value for the customer.
We do see some saw through thing, which is because we have escalators -- annual escalators built into our contracts virtually across the board. Oftentimes when you see a renewal you might see that if you implemented a 3% to 5% annual escalator over a -- say a five-year contract then at renewal, you maybe above market and you may see us saw through thing of that occur, but that's all sort of part and parcel and are all included in our overall model, which again continues to reflect overall positive net pricing actions, which we think reflects the value that we deliver to customers.
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Great, very helpful. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jordan Sadler of KeyBanc. Your line is open.
Jordan Sadler -- Keybanc Capital Markets Inc. -- Analyst
Thanks, and good afternoon. So I just wanted to come back to xScale one more time. It does sound like you characterize the overall bookings in solid and seeing maybe a little bit of friction. I think as we talk to maybe overall enterprise. Is that also that characterization pertains the xScale business as well and was PA9x leased during the quarter?
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I wouldn't say the -- I think the dynamics are a little bit different in that, obviously we're targeting a much smaller set of customers and so when you look at the xScale dynamics, I think it's a bit more about where these hyperscalers are in their expansion, how that matches up relative to a sort of capacity, where it's needed kind of element.
And so if you look at hyperscalers and we're actually -- if you look at the performance and results of some of the other companies that are more focused on that. They tend to be lumpy. Now they have sort of a bit more boom and bust in their quarters based on the timing of sale, timing of bookings and kind of where hyperscalers are in there in their cycles of expansion. And so I think the dynamic is a bit different. But yes, the leasing was completed in the quarter for PA9x.
And so we were very pleased to get that done. And we do see a strong pipeline. It just takes -- those are a bit bigger, more complex deals with longer sales cycles. And I think the results in any given quarter tend to be a bit lumpier.
Jordan Sadler -- Keybanc Capital Markets Inc. -- Analyst
Okay. And then just as a follow-up, I think you touched on in your financial pricing in Europe. The adjustment that you've made there, where are you in the rollout of those adjustments. And what sort of the magnitude of that pricing adjustments?
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
We are -- we're reasonably well advanced. I think that we'll continue to see those adjustments flow through over the course of the next year. So -- because we try to be fair and balanced and not kind of overly aggressive or greedy about about how to the timeline on which we wanted to implement those and as we tried to -- as we talk to our customers and trying to implement something that we thought was fair and balanced. And so it will continue, I think through the course of the remainder of this year and well into the next year -- I think probably through the course of next year as well. But I think we probably have seen a good chunk of that we'll probably more than well more than half of that roll through and begin to into our results. But there is more work to be done. I think it will be a bit slower as we go through the course of the next several quarters.
And in terms of magnitude, I forget what the percentage increase was, it was meaningful and that is showing up in the results. But again, you still are seeing interconnection prevailing pricing in Europe meaningfully below what it is in the Americas, and I don't think we will be in a point where we will equalize that, but we are making progress in terms of delivering and I think pricing, it's more consistent with the value delivered to the customer.
Jordan Sadler -- Keybanc Capital Markets Inc. -- Analyst
Okay, thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Nick Del Deo with MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.
Nick Del Deo -- MoffettNathanson -- Analyst
Hey, thanks for taking my questions. First, Keith, I want to drill down a little bit more on the EBITDA beat, which was pretty meaningful. I think you suggested, it was a function of revenue mix and you said you expect those mix benefits to continue, but your guidance implies lower EBITDA in dollar terms in the next couple of quarters relative to Q2 and margins that are quite a bit lower. Was there anything else besides the mix shift that we should be bearing on like power costs or anything along those lines?
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
Overall, when we look at the second quarter specifically, there is, we made the comment about price increases across the board, so one, number one, it was good to see them, but most of that was really focused in the EMEA region. I mean that then offsetting that was non-recurring revenue, we saw the step down to probably 4.8% of our revenue of non-recurring, and so that comes in different margin profile. So you've got the benefit of those two things happening. So revenues are roughly at the high end of our guidance range, the currency neutral basis, but the mix is favorable and you saw the benefit of that going to the EBITDA.
In addition, what you -- we also saw was some moderation in our utility consumption, until we got some benefit attached to that. And then in some of the markets, particularly, one I'll refer to the Singapore, there is government concession due to the current climate and those concessions come through in a couple of different fashions, it's tax abatements, it is rent abatements, in some cases it's salary adjustments that is not -- we don't apply for your allocated and the company was the recipient of $7 from the Singaporean government as an example.
But overall, I'll just say look, we're on top of where our numbers. I think the look forward is as Charles alluded to, it's giving us the flexibility to look at the next two quarters, invest in the places that we need to and therefore, that's why you see revenues are moving up nicely, but we're also keeping that cost model at roughly 48% pre-integration costs. And that gives you a sense of that we're still spending in the areas go-to-market, new product.
And the other thing I did, I referred to in, at least in my one of my prior remarks, salaries and benefits are going up inside the business and that's not because -- that was something that was sort of an implication coming out of the pandemic. Less people are taking vacation and that and how it gets represented in the financials, something that we want to certainly encourage people take more and more time off. And also just the timing of our hiring, as you're getting the full quarterization and -- of the hiring, we had a record hiring quarter in Q2. 400 net ads to the business in the quarter and that's going to run through the quarter, the next two quarters as well.
And the last thing I would say, there is some seasonality built into our spend, particularly around recurring capex, Q4, more specifically and that's why you see the impact coming through our guide on the AFFO as well. So overall, we look at it on an annual basis, we allocated the dollars appropriately, some of which is a little bit more front loaded than originally anticipating, you'll get the full quarterization impact of it.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, that's actually...
Nick Del Deo -- MoffettNathanson -- Analyst
Okay. That's great.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
And I guess I just reiterate the SMB, the salary and benefits piece of that which is we are one, we're seeing lower attrition and I think that partially due to maybe concerns and about the pandemic. Also, I think it is just a reflection of people sort of being very excited about where we are and the culture and what the opportunities in front of us are. But that, I think that's rolling through in ways and we're hiring, we're moving forward the hiring plans across both go-to-market product technology, because we believe the opportunity is really big in front of us. The net impact of that in terms of, is that we have more, more cost on the books and I think that we're kind of calibrating on that in terms of pace of hiring and that kind of thing, but where we are at -- even if we were at the same sort of targeted number of heads, where with the attrition being a bit higher, it's -- you get some timing there where it takes to rehire and that sort of keeps things a little lower. So we are seeing a little bit of that and I think that's part of why it is impacting that in the back half of the year.
Nick Del Deo -- MoffettNathanson -- Analyst
Okay, got it. That's great detail. Maybe one quick one on the ECX Fabric. I think earlier this year you dropped a node into a partner facility in Belgium, just first when you've done like that. Any initial insights into how that's going or updates as to whether we'll see more deals like that?
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
It's still very early days. We have not seen and I think it's obviously happen right in the teeth of the pandemic. So I think probably still too early to tell there. I would say that I think that the broad, more broadly speaking, our thinking about how we want to extend the utility and the reach of ECX Fabric, both within our facilities continuing to do build -- do our build-outs aligns ECX Fabric closely with our Packet offering to make a more powerful Edge offering in our own facilities.
And then I think also look to potentially position that as something that it will be deployed in non-Equinix facilities. And so I don't know that it would look exactly like what we did in Belgium, but I do think the notion that we would be looking at extending the reach of the ECX Fabric and ensuring that the ability to use ECX Fabric as a way to plug back in from a bit of a further edge back into the the ecosystem and in particular, the cloud ecosystem is something that we are absolutely actively looking at. So I do think that's something that we'll be continuing to monitor and look at how to do that over time.
Nick Del Deo -- MoffettNathanson -- Analyst
Okay, terrific. Thank you, both.
Operator
Thank you. And our last question comes from Brett Feldman of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Brett Feldman -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Yeah. Thanks for squeezing me in and it's really just a point of clarification. You've talked about this call about an outlook for improved revenue growth in the Americas in the back half of the year and last quarter, you were talking about growth improving to something in the range of 5% or maybe better than 5% as you were getting into the fourth quarter.
I think that's still the -- what's embedded in your outlook based on your commentary, but I just want to clarify that you still targeting that 5%. And then whether it's 5% or anything, it seems like it's going to be better. I just want to be sure we understand where the momentum is coming from, the extent to which it's in MRR as opposed to non-recurring, because if it is on the MRR side, it would seem like you have really good momentum in the 2021 as well. Thanks.
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Keith, you want to grab that?
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
I'll take that, Charles. So yeah, the reference Charles already said earlier on, within my prepared remarks said the second half of the year. And Q3 looks like a quarter that we would see that step up and goes back to the -- our comments. Number one, we saw good pricing, we saw record booking. We still see some elements of churn inside the Americas business for the next two quarters. That all said, when we calibrate across the remaining part of the year, where we fully believe that between the pricing and the momentum of the business, including a strong pipeline, we you should see a step-up in the growth rate. And that's something that from our perspective, it would carry on into 2021, still a bit early to give guidance on that, but there is no reason why we wouldn't see that momentum continue.
Brett Feldman -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Thank you.
Katrina Rymill -- Vice President, Investor Relations
That concludes our Q2 call. Thank you for joining us.
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]
Duration: 65 minutes
Call participants:
Katrina Rymill -- Vice President, Investor Relations
Charles J. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Keith D. Taylor -- Chief Financial Officer
Tim Long -- Barclays -- Analyst
Jonathan Atkin -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst
Colby Synesael -- Cowen Inc -- Analyst
Frank Louthan -- Raymond James Financial -- Analyst
Michael Rollins -- Citigroup -- Analyst
Matthew Niknam -- Deutsche Bank AG -- Analyst
Simon Flannery -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Jordan Sadler -- Keybanc Capital Markets Inc. -- Analyst
Nick Del Deo -- MoffettNathanson -- Analyst
Brett Feldman -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
