December 2018/January 2019 Issue

When one of the country’s biggest groups ran into financial trouble, the country braced itself for a market-wide crisis. Two months later, market observers describe the episode as a new step towards a more professional infrastructure sector. Eduard Fernández reports.

Incursions into the edges of the market and the debate around what, exactly, constitutes infrastructure have been with us since the dawn of the asset class. But with more money coming into infrastructure than ever, we ask three LPs for their take on what these assets are.

The €23bn Danish pension's director of private investments, Kasper Struve, is comfortable with such investments so long as they pass the ‘infrastructure test’.

CIO Sam Sicilia says the superannuation fund will consider non-core and infra-like assets, but only on a case-by-case basis.

CIO Jang Dong-hun is concerned these investments might prove harder to exit, expresses a preference for publicly regulated assets and recalls a bad experience with crematoriums in Korea.

Without a clear definition of what it is and what it can offer investors, the infrastructure sector does itself a disservice, argues Sarah Tame, associate director at EDHEC Infrastructure Institute.

After closing the year’s largest fund on $7.4bn, KKR’s infrastructure team gathered in Miami to discuss its future strategy. We catch up with head of infrastructure Raj Agrawal and key team members to find out what’s changing.

CohnReznick Capital’s John Richardson argues that, while demand vastly exceeds the supply of projects, private capital is not funding an irrational growth story.

'How can you have a $7bn business where performance has been very strong over 20 years, then have to shut the thing down?' asked one former director. We take a look at how it got to this point and the lessons learnt.

And it isn’t just the growing number – and size – of the primary infrastructure vehicles that will fuel secondaries’ growth, Campbell Lutyens’ Gerald Cooper explains.

There is no lack of enthusiasm for impact investing, but a lack of definition risks undermining progress.

Australia deciding to block a Chinese purchase of a national asset is not new – but its decision to block CK Infrastructure’s bid for APA Group feels different.

Even if the framework’s demise was very much Chronicle of a Death Foretold, to have it stated as a matter of government policy still packs a punch.