Channel Partners

July 1, 2000

2 Min Read
Business News - T-Rex Stalks Hartford (Relax, It's Only a Telecom Hotel)

Posted: 07/2000

T-Rex Stalks Hartford (Relax, It’s Only a Telecom Hotel)
By Ken Branson

Terremark Worldwide Inc. (www.terremark.com)
has purchased three insurance company buildings in Hartford, Conn., with plans
to turn the 140,000 square feet of space into a T-Rex telecom hotel.

Telecom Routing Exchange Developers Inc.
(www.t-rexchange.com), also known as T-Rex, will develop and manage the project, Terremark officials say. They also say they are in the process of acquiring T-Rex.

Terremark officials declined to say what they paid for the buildings, or from whom they bought them. Aetna Inc.
(www.aetna.com) formerly used the buildings to house its back-office operations.

The Hartford project–to be called T-Rex Technology Center Hartford–is the fourth such project Terremark has announced. It has built the T-Rex Technology Center @ Boca Raton (Fla.); and the Cleveland Technology Center in that city. Recently, Terremark and the Miami Heat basketball team announced they would jointly build and develop the Technology Center of the Americas, a 700,000-square-foot telecom hotel, in Miami.

Company officials say they are negotiating for more space in Hartford, as well as for properties in Detroit and Denver.

Terremark is an unlikely developer of telecom hotels, in Hartford or anywhere else. In less than a year, it has evolved from being a successful, privately held real estate developer and builder of hotels, malls and office complexes in southern Florida into a publicly traded, would-be powerhouse of telecom hotels. Company CEO, chairman and founder Manuel Medina says he expects to develop telecom hotels in North America, Latin America and Asia.

Terremark Worldwide is an amalgam of three companies and a Singaporean financier. The companies are the former Terremark Holdings Inc., the real estate and construction company Medina built up; the former AmTec Inc., a company formed in the mid-1990s to provide telecommunications services in China; and Fusion Telecommunications International
(http://fusiontel.com), in which Medina is an investor.

The financier is Francis Lee, who was an investor in Terremark Holdings. Lee, who is described as “having contacts in southeast Asia and China,” has contributed $30 million to the new company in exchange for 35 percent of its stock.

Fusion was a partner with AmTec in launching Internet-based communications ventures in Taiwan and China. In a complicated deal announced late last year, AmTec, which did not have much in the way of money at the time, and whose stock was trading in the $1 range, agreed to “acquire” Terremark. Terremark shareholders (Medina and a few others) control 40 percent of the new company’s stock, and the AmTec shareholders control 25 percent.

Terremark Holdings sold its showcase Terremark Centre office and residential complex in Coconut Grove, Fla., to a management company and leased it back as headquarters for the newly named Terremark Worldwide.

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