Boston-headquartered Iron Mountain acquired Cork, Ireland-based Wisetek, continuing its growth. | Sundry Photography / Shutterstock
Major publicly-traded IT asset disposition firm Iron Mountain has continued its recent string of acquisitions, with Wisetek joining the ranks of Regency Technologies and ITRenew as Iron Mountain assets.
Wisetek sales representatives informed customers of the business ownership change early Monday.
“The partnership of Wisetek with Iron Mountain marks a significant milestone in both of our journeys,” an email to clients read. “For Iron Mountain, this represents a huge step forward along one of the company’s most important strategic initiatives, and for Wisetek, this will further elevate our resources and capacity to serve our customers.”
Boston-headquartered Iron Mountain confirmed the acquisition on Sept. 25. A company spokesperson declined to share the purchase price or provide additional details about the acquisition.
“Iron Mountain has acquired Wisetek, a leading provider of IT asset disposition, data sanitisation, and reuse, headquartered in Cork, Ireland,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to E-Scrap News. “This strategic move and Wisetek’s expertise strengthens our ability to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. We look forward to working with and learning from the Wisetek team as our integration gets under way.”
Wisetek has facilities in the U.S, Ireland, the U.K., United Arab Emirates and Thailand. The company has grown steadily in recent years, even amid an environment of low secondhand market pricing. In its 2022 fiscal year, the company reported gross revenue of 81.57 million euros, which was about $86.43 million at the time of the financial report.
In the U.S., the company’s processing locations span the country. The most recent U.S. facility is a 40,000-square-foot space in Northborough, Massachusetts, in the Boston area, that opened in 2022. Wisetek also has processing locations in Sacramento, California; Austin, Texas; and Winchester, Virginia.
Iron Mountain has grown its ITAD arm, which it calls Asset Lifecycle Management, substantially through acquisitions over the past few years. In 2021, the company announced it would buy ITAD firm ITRenew for $925 million, and less than two years later Iron Mountain signed a deal to buy Regency Technologies for $200 million.
Iron Mountain in 2023 reported $5.48 billion in company-wide revenue and $261 million in revenue from servicing ITAD clients. Although the company has not disclosed financial details of the Wisetek acquisition, that information may be included in future financial filings.
According to the email to clients, the newly combined companies provide “28 strategically located facilities and a global operational presence, offering a consistent IT asset lifecycle management solution across the world.”
Following a clear strategy
The acquisition fits squarely into a growth strategy company leaders have publicly detailed as recently as this week. CEO Bill Meaney commented on the company’s growth strategy through acquiring ITAD firms during a Sept. 24 discussion at the 2024 RBC Capital Markets Global Communications Infrastructure Conference.
“I think it’s fair to say we’ll continue to do bolt-ons like we did with Regency, which is one of the best operators in North America in terms of the asset lifecycle management,” Meaney said.
During the same panel, Iron Mountain’s chief financial officer, Barry Hytinen, called the ITAD landscape a “very fragmented industry.” While ITAD firms for the most part are relatively small, he said, Regency is “probably one of the larger assets that’s out there.”
The ITAD portion of Iron Mountain is one of its three big growth areas, Hytinen added, joined by data center operations and digital solutions. ITAD makes up about $400 million in revenue, he said, and collectively these business segments are growing “in excess of 20% on a compound basis.”
Company leaders also commented on the future ITAD business growth opportunity they see from the increase in artificial intelligence deployment. AI is heavily dependent on hyperscale data center operations, and Meaney noted that the desire to enter that segment of data center decommissioning was a core driver of the ITRenew acquisition in 2021.
ITRenew “really gave us both the capability and the platform to really have the discussion with the hyperscalers, because that’s where you see a big part of the refresh, as they’re putting in the latest GPUs to drive their AI or their large language model capacity for their customers.”
Meaney added that AI is driving data center operators to perform significant refreshes and upgrades to their facilities.
“They need to refresh a lot of that equipment, and when they refresh that equipment, that gives us … a boost in the revenue in that business,” Meaney said. “So we do think that’s tailwinds over the next few years in that business.”