Daruvala and his family will own a 30% stake in the new data centre entity, Sterling & Wilson Data Center Pvt Ltd, while the rest will be held by investors including Ashish Kacholia, Lashit Sanghvi, Madhu Kela and Mukul Agarwal, people involved in the matter told ET. Sterling & Wilson, a Shapoorji Pallonji Group company, will not have any ownership of the new entity.
“With the global data centre market expanding rapidly, it was essential to carve out this business into a dedicated entity, fully capitalised and singularly focused on growing our leadership position in this very exciting industry,” Sterling & Wilson chairman Daruvala said, confirming the creation of the new company.
After a sale of the data centre business was announced in March 2024, the first six months of this year witnessed an order inflow of more than what was won in the past five years, he said. “What is extremely gratifying is that most of the orders have come from our repeat clients,” he told ET over email.
The data centre EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) division was a 100% business unit of Sterling & Wilson. It was debt-free and profitable with revenue of Rs 460 crore. The new company was instituted last week after receiving all the approvals.
“We are targeting 50-60% (revenue) growth this year, followed by close to 100% next year,” said Prasanna Sarambale, chief executive of Sterling & Wilson Data Center. “We have won new orders of over Rs 1,400 crore in the first six months of this year and we estimate that the total addressable market shall grow significantly over the next five years.”
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With the company’s strong presence in India, the Middle East and Africa, it is looking out for M&A opportunities, he said. “We are in ongoing dialogues with technology companies to strategise how to partner together in these geographies.”Over the last eight years, Sterling & Wilson has built 25 data centres totalling 63 MW of capacity across India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Congo and Angola. Currently, the company is setting up a data centre of 90 MW for a hyperscaler and 6 MW for a colocation platform in India. It plans to start five projects in Egypt including cable landing stations.
To fuel this growth, the new company is planning to “expand operations significantly, both in terms of geographic reach and capacity. We are also ramping up our talent acquisition, with plans to hire across multiple functions and key international markets,” Sarambale said.
He called this as a “resurgence” for the new company, as Sterling & Wilson lost a significant number of employees during the Covid pandemic but still managed to deliver projects like NIC, STPI and Nxtra by Airtel.
“It was extremely painful to lose key colleagues during that time of uncertainty, but we pulled together and focused on our core strengths. Within a very short time, we have regained our footing, expanded our team and restored our position in the industry, emerging from the crisis. We have restored our team as many of our key talents have come back, with even more set to re-join us in the days to come,” Sarambale said.
