Thank you very much for joining us today. My name's Meredith, and I work with our team here at Argo on shareholder engagement and communication. It's an extraordinary turnout here today, and it's great to see so many of you here, including a lot of familiar faces. We do appreciate you taking the time to come into the city today to be with us here. I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today. I'd now like to introduce your speakers for today. They'll be presenting on Argo Investments and Argo Global Listed Infrastructure, or Argo Infrastructure, as we call it, and then answering your questions. Up on the stage with me here today, we have Jason Beddow, Argo's Managing Director.
He's been with the company for more than 20 years, and I'm sure many of you, or all of you, know him. We have Colin Whitehead, who's an investment analyst with Argo Investments, and Tyler Rosenlicht, who's a Portfolio Manager from Cohen & Steers. They're a global specialist fund manager, and they manage the investment portfolio for Argo Infrastructure. Tyler's just flown in direct from New York, where he lives. I'm sure you'll be interested in hearing his insights from on the ground in the United States, given the dramatic events of recent weeks, and in fact, in the time since he's left New York. Without further ado, I'll now hand over to Jason Beddow.
Thanks, Meredith. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming to our meeting. As Meredith said, that's a great turnout. I must say, it's been one of the trickier, I guess, lead-ins to doing a roadshow and telling shareholders what's going on in the market and what we think about it, because literally, it changes with a tweet. Even yesterday, there were potential talks that China and the U.S. might be having on, at least, softening of trade. Clearly, overnight, we've had releases. Markets have aggressively rallied in the U.S., and everyone's walking away that the tariffs are maybe not solved, but we're in a bit of a holding pattern. They're big material numbers, going from a 145% tariff down to a 30% tariff. They're really, really tricky times. The financial press have been having a field day.
If you do follow the Financial Review or other online financial platforms, every day is an extreme event, and markets are reacting extremely on both sides. We have seen some amazing moves in the last six weeks, both up and down. I guess despite it all, the Australian market sits at a price level higher, and I have no doubt it will be up again today, than where it traded on April 2nd, Liberation Day, the day that President Trump announced 10% tariffs on all imports into the U.S., but more importantly, many more punitive country-specific tariffs, particularly China, on correcting trade imbalances. The market fell heavily. A lot of economists in the U.S. and globally, the U.S. is now going to go into a recession. A lot of, I guess, forecasts changing on where index targets would be.
These are likely to follow the market back up, at least short term. This is only a 90-day reprieve. Some of this, I guess, strength in the Australian market does not surprise us too much. I mean, Australia has a very small trade balance with the U.S. Australia always looked pretty favorably to us on any sort of tariff outcome. The other thing that has happened, and again, it may reverse, is a lot of capital has left the U.S. We follow some of the big ETFs, some of the passive money. There have been big outflows, and economies like Australia have benefited. Money has flown into Australia. As a safe haven, the Aussie market has been a beneficiary. It is certainly fascinating times. We are going around the country, so this is day two. As it may be, the story may change a little every day.
We'll see. Just a quick disclaimer, what we're going to talk about today, these are some of the people involved with the week. And I'd like to thank all of them. There's a lot of work that goes into it. Look, just quickly on Argo. I mean, Argo is very well known in this room. This is our last result, and I guess just current numbers. Look, we think it shows that and does reinforce that we are delivering on our main objectives for shareholders. So delivering a growing fully franked dividend. The AUD 0.17 was a record interim dividend. And we look at the portfolio, our balance sheet, and particularly our franking capacity, but also what we're going to grow in the franking balance. And I see no reason why Argo's dividend can't continue to grow from here.
On growing the assets, the capital growth side of the equation, in early February, the Australian market reached an all-time high. Aligned with this, Argo's reached an all-time high NTA in January of AUD 10.37. We are growing the capital base. We continue to do this in a very low-cost way. The MER, the management expense ratio, is 0.15%. That is despite, I guess, quite a lot of inflationary pressures in the economy and in service providers over the last few years. This is only possible because we are employees of Argo. It is internally managed, so you, the shareholders, own the manager of your company. Portfolio and turnover continue to be managed in a tax-effective manner, and we are well supported by the independent research ratings.
I mean, one area where I guess where we are a little disappointed, and we think is still cyclical, is the share price discount to NTA. We can see over time, this has happened before, and we have then gone to a large premium, but it is one of the bigger discounts we have had for some time. We believe there are several reasons impacting the whole LIC universe of companies, not just Argo, which is one of the smaller discounts. Still, we continue to focus and work on this. It should be remembered, actually, out of five years, the NTA is about par, is about square over five years. What are we doing about it? Meredith has introduced herself and spoken. We are engaging with planning groups and advisors. There is a lot of change in that part of the market following the Royal Commission and what is happening in wealth management.
More tangibly, I guess we neutralized the DRP last dividend. Instead of issuing new shares at a discount, we bought shares on market. That satisfies those shareholders that are in the DRP, but also avoids any dilution for the company and for shareholders that are not participating. Now, Argo, as I said, is internally managed. This is, I guess, different to most LICs in the market. They are externally managed, and that makes them quite different. Fees paid to the manager are generally higher, but more often than not, they are accompanied by a performance fee. We think this sort of does lead to a change in behavior. To achieve the performance fee, turnover can be multiples higher, results in much higher costs, much higher tax bills. A number of these, we think, have disappointed shareholders, and some of that has flown into the LIC sector.
The other thing clearly in the market, and they've done very well and have a big profile, is the growth of ETFs. Now, we think that's also had some impact on the LIC sector. One benefit of the ETF is they do trade at their daily net asset value. We would argue, though, I guess the index ETFs, while they do deliver an index minus cost, so their returns are slightly below the index, they have a much more volatile dividend and franking profile for those investors that are trying to get income. It's basically what's delivered by the index. In times of COVID, when that fell by nearly 50%, so did the income. As a trust, the ETF returns are pre-tax, so you get your pre-tax return. At present, Argo is growing its dividend, growing its fully franked dividend, and we think that'll continue.
The actual dividend in the Australian share market is falling. Even on top of that, the level of franking paid by the index is also falling, more of a result, really, of the success of a number of Australian companies. They're earning more money offshore. They're paying less corporate tax in Australia, so their dividends are partially franked. Now, we can manage that in our company structure, our corporate structure. We pay tax on profits and also on unfranked dividends, and we generate our own franking credits. The success of the Macquarie Group, Computershare, Aristocrat Leisure that are earning a lot of money offshore, CSL, does impede that level. We believe that Argo, with public company board oversight, the stable pool of capital, can deliver better long-term returns when franking's included than the ETF.
We keep working on that, and we keep sharing the message, and we'll keep growing the dividend. We think that this is a cyclical time. To the market itself, I guess that's really the right-hand side is the short-term focus, and it's been very volatile. We think, I guess, it remains volatile. We're about five weeks into the first moratorium on the 90 days, with most of the rest of the world on trade negotiations. We expect there'll be some resolution with maybe some big economies like Japan, who may buy defense and LNG from the U.S., and balance trade. We're now beginning 90 days with China. This will continue to be noisy. President Trump's turned his focus to the EU and clearly going after pharmaceutical pricing.
There's always a part of the market that's probably going to be positively impacted by what's coming out of the U.S., but also negatively. For those of you that follow CSL, you'd see CSL's share price has been under significant pressure. I mean, from our perspective, I think logic always suggested that some sort of rational deal between the U.S. and China had to be done. Those punitive tariff levels really were going to be pretty diabolical for both economies. Clearly, how long it takes to get a resolution, whether the resolutions stick, the actual levels of the resolution, I think it makes it a pretty interesting time in markets for the next few months.
I guess coming back to the Aussie market, while we do not have NVIDIA and the Magnificent Seven, and I think they were up about 6% last night in the U.S., the Australian market still managed to return about 100% since the COVID low, including dividends, which is not a bad return. When we do our work and the analysts are looking at stocks, and we look at the banks or other businesses, we think the market looks fairly full on valuation. Some sectors look relatively expensive. There are a number of points if we step back a little bit and think that we think our market will remain well supported over time, and maybe some of these higher valuations are here to stay. We think the quality of the Australian share market has never been better.
Is more growth and capital-light stocks in our market and less capital-intensive and cyclical businesses than ever. Corporate balance sheets are in excellent shape. Corporate balance sheets are very different to how, I guess, the public companies were looking pre-GFC in that early 2000s, where I guess the business model was to gear up as much as you could, and that caused a lot of challenges. There is also a record number of buybacks in the Australian market. There are more companies buying back stock than ever, and that is also supporting valuations. There does seem to be significant cash looking to invest in what is a shrinking equity market. That could become more pronounced as interest rates fall in Australia and returns on cash fall aligned with that. There is potentially more money looking for a home in equity markets.
One area of cash we know is looking for a home is the mandated superannuation flows. Now, these continue to grow, and they continue to drive the market. There are record net flows into superannuation at the moment. We have strong population growth, record unemployment, and increasing contribution levels, all contributing to this extra money flowing into superannuation. A percentage of that is flowing into Australian equities. In July 1, we are going to have another increase in the contribution level. We think that also supports the market. Finally, I guess the Australian market remains one of the highest-yielding markets in the world. For those looking for income, and that is pre-franking credits, the Aussie index does provide meaningful income and somewhat inflation-protected income. A little bit in context to, I guess, what is happening in the economy.
I've recently had the federal election, resounding win to the Australian Labor Party, which is the first government to have an increased majority in their second term, which I didn't know. Also, probably more unusually, we lost both the leader of the Liberal Party, Peter Dutton, and the leader of the Greens, Adam Bandt. Both lost their seats. The ALP are in a fairly formidable position. We think the ALP will likely be able to pass legislation through the House of Representatives. They'll have a majority, but also get a passage through the Senate with the support of the Greens. They successfully negotiated with the Greens in the first term, and they will have more power, more seats in the second term. We think a lot of those things are likely to get through.
Some of the key policies they went to the election with around housing supply, income tax cuts, cost of living relief, and expanded Medicare, as well as continued fiscal support for the economy, are likely. Some of the more, I guess, unusual things we're a little more wary of, and I don't think they're the first priority, but we do have superannuation we think may come under the radar. Unrealised tax as part of that we think is not a good policy. We think it's very hard to do things with. Labour over time have also had, I guess, a negative view of excessive franking credit returns, and these are things, I guess, that we need to be wary of. The economy itself has been fairly sluggish, so in contrast to the stock market, which, so it's not really been, I guess, earnings that have re-rated the Australian stock market.
It's been money flow and a re-rate as global markets have rallied. Lower GDP is not new. It's actually been quite weak post-GFC. And on a per-capita basis, the numbers have been poor and actually are falling per person. Population growth has certainly helped, and that's with immigration, and that has increased GDP. It is slowing now. It's also added to some of the inflationary challenges, though, particularly around, I guess, well-publicised housing, affordability, and shortages. We do not think much changes, but I guess we also do not expect a lot of productivity growth. I know the Treasurer has said this second term they will be looking for productivity, but we can see GDP growth over the past 12 months has really been driven entirely by federal and state governments. We expect this to continue, but this is not particularly productive growth.
I mean, government spending is not generally very productive. It is large, but not particularly productive. Aligned with that, again, household spending has been weak. We have seen a little bit of an improvement at the tail end of that, and we do expect it to continue to improve. We do expect interest rate cuts in addition to incoming tax cuts and further government support for those households that need it. Look, clearly, household spending is not evenly spread among the economy. There is a wealthy cohort. There are some households that are really challenged and everything in between. Statistically, the older age households are both asset and retirement income wealthy, and they are increasingly supporting consumption. CBA, when they put out their half-yearly results, put out some fantastic slides, Appendix 140, 45, with all the breakup of what is happening in the economy. For anyone that is interested, that is on their website.
Just on that, our slides have been released to the ASX, and they're also on our website if anyone's interested. I think we're also going to email them out in a week or two. This older cohort, the baby boomers and others, are providing the bank of mum and dad. I'll come back to that. Those consumers that are struggling, they're trading down. We can see Aldi is doing far better than Woolworths at the moment. Consumers are chasing cheaper brands, trading down on they're not buying, I guess, craft beer anymore. They're going back to standard beer because the price is different, and they're shopping around for specials. The cost of living does continue to be a burden for a large number of households.
Though even in that context, data suggests that consumers are still, and maybe there's some change of behaviour from COVID still, but are still willing to spend money on experiences and holidays. Those numbers are staying very, very strong. Look, the bank of mum and dad, I guess this term relates to children who are receiving some financial help or support from their parents. This also extends to the bank of grandparents. It's alive and well. UBS conduct a really good consumer survey and have some really interesting data around this. The numbers are a lot bigger than, I guess, we thought. Maybe that's why the economy is holding up. We're not seeing bad debts, and bank results are strong. Based on their results, up to 25% of households are receiving some help from parents and increasingly grandparents.
Over 50% of this help is just going to pay for general living expenses, paying the bills, school fees, shopping, things like that. 30% is helping to pay with mortgages and debt repayments, and only 20% to actually purchase or guarantee a property purchase. And some of the numbers are very large. Like 25% of the households being helped, were receiving over AUD 200,000. So there's a lot of money in the economy. It's just not evenly spread. A positive, I guess, from an interest rate perspective and just in general for the economy, inflation's moderating, and it's retraced back to the 2-3% band, which is the RBA's target band. We expect on the back of that, after the RBA initially cut rates in February by 25 basis points, they meet next week. We expect another 25 basis point cut that'll bring the cash rate back to 3.85%.
Look, there's expectations out from forecasters, economists' forecasts, for two to four more cuts this year. Yeah, we don't particularly have a view. I think it's very much going to depend on what happens globally and in the Australian economy. I guess the RBA has capacity to further cut if the economy needs it, which should support the Australian economy and is probably good for the market. I'm going to hand to Colin. He's going to talk a little bit more granularly about Argo's portfolio and some of the things we've been doing. Thank you.
Just set my timer just to where there's diminishing returns if I go on too long. Thank you, everyone. Good morning. Thank you, Jason.
I will, as Jason said, talk through the portfolio, look at the sector structure, a few of the top holdings, touch on the tariff exposure, and then at the end, we are just highlighting a potential tariff or shifting trade flow beneficiary. First of all, this chart shows the ASX 200's sector performance over a 12-month period, 12 months until the 31st of March. It excludes the tariff impact that occurred from the 2nd of April, Liberation Day. As you can see, there's still a reasonable amount of volatility. It seems to be the current state of play for investing these days. From the far left, the outperformance there is, of course, the banks, almost 20% from the sector as a whole. Excuse me. CBA within that is quite a phenomenal story. It's been the most significant outperformer. It's defied gravity around traditional expectations of valuation.
It's the most expensive bank in the world. I think, as Jason touched on, the safe haven status of the Australian market has seen quite a significant flow of offshore money. I think that's been a more acute factor recently, but it's certainly also been a factor through the 12-month period shown on the chart here. At the other end of the spectrum, we've got the energy sector. It's always a function for that sector of commodity prices, and that's certainly been the case here. The oil price specifically has been weaker. It's also been weaker, actually, since the 31st of March, although I think stronger overnight. Interesting to note, consumer discretionary, Jason was talking about the slower, weaker consumer spending, but in fact, the consumer discretionary sector has been positively performing relative to the others.
Although we feel the bank strength has been driven in large part by the defensive nature of the banks, it isn't necessarily a defensive market. We see traditionally defensive sectors such as consumer staples and healthcare on the negative side of the ledger there. If I step forward to the next slide, this shows the sector allocation of the Argo portfolio itself. As you'd be aware, the Argo portfolio is structured to withstand given volatility within the index and, of course, also engineered around delivering a growing fully franked yield to our shareholders. No surprise therefore that the banks and other financials make up the larger part of the pie. Oops, sorry, wrong button. This quadrant here. Moving around, the materials are also important for our dividend harvesting.
In fact, the next in the order as we go around clockwise, we move to telcos and IT and healthcare, which were IT and healthcare-based negative performers in the sector allocation, but actually have grown for us. Obviously, the stock-specific allocation is different within the portfolio relative to the benchmark. We have had the energy drag, which is inescapable, but minimized by the smaller allocation there. We have around the 10 o'clock position, about 7% allocated to that sector. Which takes me to the top 20 holdings. Many of you would be familiar with this. There is not a frequent amount of change in the names of those stocks. Of course, we expect them to be moving up in value over time, the most significant of which is Macquarie, who I have had to call one out.
The largest holding in the top left there, over AUD 500,000,000 of the portfolio is allocated to Macquarie. It's been a phenomenal story over the years. It's, I would imagine, probably trading quite well this morning. It reported on Friday. The result was well received by the market. Bottom line earnings growth of about 5%. Within that, of course, a mixed bag of outcomes across the group. The commodities space business was weaker. No surprise there given the environment it's operating in. Asset management was stronger. They had an asset sale, which boosted the result. They would typically consider asset sales to be a lower quality earnings driver. In the case of Macquarie, that's core to their business. I think in a nutshell, Macquarie is all about seeking opportunity around the world and recycling capital to more favourable opportunities, which we expect them to continue to do.
The other main grouping I would call out is the banks themselves, the Big Four up there. We have more than AUD 1 billion allocated to the Big Four, necessary for our dividend, of course. They have all, with the exception of CBA, recently reported. We're still going through meetings with management, but the high-level takeaway would be a continuation of stability for the banks. Large, stable, well-capitalized. Very little growth, though. It speaks to the quandary around valuations, particularly for CBA. Difficult to see how CBA specifically would be able to grow its earnings to justify its valuation at this point in time. Actually, it'll be interesting to see how it trades over the next few days based on the presumably risk-off dynamic that we'll have today in the market and potentially less flow to Australia.
It's an ever-changing dynamic market, so we shall see on that front. It's an emerging element of interest, though, although they are very well-capitalized and certainly in the face of what is a benign credit cycle, we are seeing higher loan losses, but from very low levels to still very manageable levels. The regulatory capital requirement is shifting in terms of the buffer that the banks and specifically ANZ called this out, that the banks hold above that level. This isn't actually a real credit risk. It's more to do with the calculation of the capital requirement. We would expect to see ongoing dialogue between the banks and the regulator and probably some change with that calculation at some point in the future. Just call out another stock, Telstra, another key dividend payer for us. They have their investor day coming up towards the end of this month.
We're expecting probably a few main areas of interest. First of all, the business under Vicki Brady has been scaling back to its core, which is infrastructure and the mobile business. There's actually about AUD 3 billion of revenue outside of those businesses generating only a couple of hundred million dollars of EBITDA, so inadequate returns. We'd expect there to be a focus on further costs out in that group with a strategy of lifting returns across the group. Also, with regards to the dividend, they have the capability to pay a higher dividend based on their cash earnings and certainly the expectation of cash earnings per share growth. The limitation has actually been more around the ability to fully frank the dividend. We're expecting possibly a reshaping of their capital management policy, which may include a partially franked dividend rather than maximizing a purely fully franked dividend.
We favour full franking. We also favour higher dividends. As long as the franking credits are fully distributed, then we would support a higher dividend rather than it being artificially constrained. The next slide here shows some recent movements in the portfolio. These are the more significant movements that have occurred since our last update for you of the result. There are obviously a lot of other smaller movements, but we just wanted to call out some of the majors. The keen eyed among you may notice Myer is occurring on both sides. That is not a mistake on the behalf of people pulling together the slides. I would reassure you as well, it is not that we have become more significant traders or particularly indecisive. The Myer holding comes from our position in Premier Investments. Premier also owned Myer.
They sold some of their legacy brands, Dotti and Just Jeans, for example, to Myer. They in turn received Myer stock. Premier Investments doesn't have a particularly optimistic view for the longer-term outlook of department stores in Australia. We share that view, I think it's fair to say, and hence we sold the stock, and it appears on both sides there. Rio is a simple matter of taking advantage of lower commodity prices when we look at the market and take note of commodity price weakness. Generally speaking, we're not viewing that as a structural shift, and therefore it throws up opportunity and a high-quality exposure such as Rio Tinto. Origin at the bottom of the buys there is an interesting story, certainly linked to one of our small-cap investments, Superloop. They have a partnership with Superloop to resell the NBN over Superloop's network.
It's more economically valuable or economically significant for Superloop given the respective size of the businesses, but still an interesting area of growth for bundling of their energy products with NBN. Really, the investment case, as well as the energy generation, obviously declining in coal for Origin, moving more towards gas and renewables is a key part of it, but also the investment that they have in the U.K.'s energy retailer, Octopus Energy. Octopus sits on the Kraken platform, which Origin also has a stake in, and Kraken is at the forefront of the digitalisation of energy retailing. A component of the digital revolution that's occurring across all sectors, but in the energy retailing space, which we think is quite exciting longer term. On the sales, we have Aristocrat and Computershare, both businesses that we continue to like.
We have seen significant or strong performance from both of them, and it's just a standard or a sensible thing to do to take some off the top as they've run fairly hard and recycle into other opportunities. Computershare also does have exposure to the lower cash rate environment. As we're moving through the cash rate adjustment phase, that is negative for them, which also factored into our decision there. At the bottom, DUI is another listed investment company. That holding pertains to a years-old strategy of investing in other listed investment companies, I think with a view to acquiring them, which is no longer relevant, and hence we have fully exited the DUI position. Tariffs, the story of the day. This slide shows a potential impact that the tariffs could have on countries' GDP as a percentage of GDP. Numbers are positive.
The impact is negative. This is a particular economist's output based on a set of assumptions around the tariffs, the response to the tariffs, how trade flows will actually eventuate. In a nutshell, very difficult to actually forecast. I was thinking about this this morning, thinking potentially we should have animated this slide and had the bars just going up and down in the order of the countries changing because it is an ever-changing dynamic. Ultimately, we will not know the impact until we see the full completion of trade negotiations and what actually sticks on the tariff front and to what extent manufacturing actually moves. This is really a snapshot of an uncertain outcome. There is an area there where we can be certain, circled on the chart, Australia, and being among the lowest affected by the tariffs. That is simply the case, as Jason mentioned as well.
Australia already has a balanced trade position with the US, and so it's not in the crosshairs as other countries are. Once again, I think this is likely to prove, depending on how things pan out, a safe haven attraction for offshore flow into Australia, which again, I think has been a CBA, for example, has been a key beneficiary. While that remains the case, we'll probably continue to see elevated valuations there. Again, it's an ever-changing movement. A couple of interesting points just to call out. The actual shiftings of the tariffs are all about rebalancing the trade, but also targeted at moving manufacturing. That can take many years, and it's very difficult to invest in greenfield manufacturing in a world of uncertainty. Where there's already manufacturing outside of China, for example, then we have seen quicker movement.
Apple, for example, in their results recently called out that all of their iPhones will now be shipped out of India to the U.S., or they used the word the majority of. So they have pre-existing manufacturing capability in India. That's already moved. We don't own the stock, but here in Australia, Reliance Worldwide, their manufacturer of plumbing supplies, has announced that among other things, as well as potentially pushing through price where they can, they will be moving all manufacturing out of China regardless of the outcome of negotiations and the eventual tariff landscape, just because they feel it's no longer strategically sensible for a U.S.-orientated business to manufacture there. Part of that is going to benefit other Asian countries and then also their existing manufacturing facilities in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. The impact of tariffs on Australia is negligible.
We are Australian investors in Australian stocks. Therefore, we're not expecting significant impact to company earnings themselves. Obviously, we are absorbing significant volatility in the market itself, but we do have investments in global businesses that are exposed to the U.S. We needed to have a more scientific approach to quantifying the portfolio's exposure. To that end, we recut the portfolio by company, looking at the geographic source of revenue for each company weighted by portfolio weight, which we are then able to aggregate by country exposure, resulting in this information here. You can see more than half of the portfolio is domestic only, so no tariff exposure. In this middle section, we do have the U.S.-exposed businesses. Again, reiterate that the focus is on manufactured physical goods crossing borders, and these are service providers. Exempt from tariffs, highly unlikely to be impacted.
We have other companies as well that are fully exposed within the U.S. to the U.S. market, but not crossing the border, so therefore in a stronger position. We think where we do have exposure, potential second-order effect would be China. Were we to see a weaker China, then that would, of course, impact most significantly in the Australian market, the materials companies. We have significant positions in Rio Tinto and BHP. However, this is not an outcome that we consider to be highly probable. It has become less of a risk over the weekend and on the back of the talks in Geneva and what is happening currently. It will remain a risk until things are finalized. Ultimately, China is also able to stimulate its own economy fairly effectively, which it has already begun to do.
They had, prior to the weekend, already quietly exempted about $40 billion worth of U.S. products from their reciprocal tariffs aimed against the U.S. I think what we're seeing with regards to the U.S. and China relationship in the trade negotiations is a good degree of pragmatism that probably avert or both sides are well motivated to avert more significantly negative outcomes. Finally, I just wanted to call out a potential beneficiary of tariffs and adjusted global trade flows, and that is Lynas. Lynas is the only producer of separated rare earths ex-China, outside of China, from their Mount Weld mine in Western Australia and processing facility in Malaysia. The reason this is significant is because, as you can see from the chart there, 70% of mine supply is from China. 85% of the refined product, which is the product that matters, is from China.
Anyone thinking, "Perhaps I'll source some recycled product," can think again, even more of that is from China. This makes Lynas fairly unique in the world. The reason that is interesting is because, as many of you would know, rare earths, although not particularly rare, are used ubiquitously through many products. We have a few examples up on the slide there. They go into magnets, which are used in electric motors, of course, and pretty much all electronics require some rare earths. That is significant for all economies, but specifically the U.S., as they seek to rebalance their reliance on China, not least because of the economy, the benefit to the economy, the requirement of these products, but also electronic products are ubiquitous through defense products as well.
For the U.S. to have found themselves in a position where they're reliant on a potential opponent for the supply of critical elements that go into their defense supply chain is an interesting position to be in. We're not necessarily advocating for Lynas specifically. We do hold the stock. We do like it. It has run quite hard and is currently fairly volatile. I just wanted to call it out because it is a good example of the market that we operate in being ever-changing. To misquote Newton, but borrow from him slightly, every reaction has a reaction, not necessarily equal and opposite in markets, but where we have challenges in one area, there will be opportunities in another, and it's those that we seek to exploit on behalf of our shareholders. With that, I'll move on back to Jason.
Thanks, Colin.
There will be plenty of time for questions at the end. Looking ahead, I think it is pretty tricky on a short-term basis. Like I said, we are fairly constructive on support for the Australian market and the Australian economy. Short-term, really, what will Donald tweet tomorrow, to be fair? I thought, interestingly, this was a really good, and this is from mid-April, but one thing we do know, there are 1,361 days to go. We know that in that timeframe, we will have a new president in the United States. They are the two bookends. We have a tweet tomorrow, and we have 1,345 days now. We think Australia is in relatively good shape from a tariffs perspective. It is starting off in good shape as well. One point of vulnerability might be the commodity cycle.
It might be China, but we do think that they will stimulate and do what's best for China's economy, which should cushion that. Interestingly, last week, Macquarie held its Australia conference, and I forgot to put up the big picture of the Don, apologies. There were 120 companies present at this conference. Myself and all the investment team, we spend a lot of time up there. It is pretty valuable to get a cross-section of what's going on in the economy. We heard from a wide range of companies. Clearly, tariffs was the key conversation. While not a lot were doing things directly yet, I guess a lot of them were war gaming, and certainly it was providing a lot of uncertainty, and it was negatively impacting confidence.
There were some downgrades to company earnings, but these were actually quite limited and fewer than what we thought there might have been, which is, I guess, relatively positive. To Colin's point, where there's an upside, there's a downside. There were prospects of actually cheaper goods from China coming to Australia. If the U.S. did keep the tariffs and China was to steer some goods away, China may send discounted products to a lot of the rest of the world, and that might be actually deflationary and quite good for retailers in the country. A number of companies, and there were U.S. economists and others dialing into this. Australia was highlighted as an attractive investment destination by a number. Positive demographics for a Western economy, low unemployment, stable government, and likely interest rate cuts.
Discussions about AI, which I guess was the topic du jour and still remains so, but it was much more overshadowed by tariffs for the moment. I guess there were concerns about the longer-term impacts if the tariff sticks and at what time would companies have to make a decision to maybe spend real money, invest, and deploy capital to change their supply chains. Generally speaking, companies continue to manage well through what's a period, I guess, of heightened uncertainty. Look, we're certainly alert, I guess, to the current challenges, and we're taking a pretty conservative approach as we do to managing the portfolio. That's all we'd like to say on Argo Investments. Look, I'll just take a very brief introduction to Argo Infrastructure. Tyler's come all the way to New York, and we should give him the floor.
ALI is celebrating its 10th birthday in July, and that's gone frighteningly fast. I remember that like it was only a year or two ago. Look, we're pretty pleased with how it's performed and grown. The asset value, the growing fully franked dividend it's providing its shareholders, and in particular, the asset class, how it's performed. Now, listed infrastructure has a low correlation to Australian equities, and we think it does provide great diversification for investors who are in the equity market. Within the last 12 months, it's a great example of this, and clearly there are years when this is the reverse. The Australian market returned just under 3%. The benchmark listed infrastructure index is 18.5%, and that's a huge difference for one year.
CNS, under Tyler and his team's watch and others, managed to generate some alpha and do better than the benchmark as well. That is a great highlight as to why some listed infrastructure in a portfolio at different times of the cycle, particularly, is really beneficial. Look, ALI is under the same pressure from an NTA share price discount, but we do think the asset class is performing well as the rate-cutting cycle continues, which is generally good for the space, that investor interest will come back to the space and will help to push that along. We have maintained a great relationship with CNS. It has been excellent, and we look forward to growing ALI and continuing to manage that for shareholders for years to come. In the interest of time, I am going to pass to Tyler. Thank you.
All right.
Thank you all for your time here this morning. I'm going to briefly go through a discussion about the listed infrastructure markets and some of the opportunities that we see with the goal of getting to Q&A fairly quickly so you can all ask me questions about Trump, of which I'll say I have as little knowledge as you guys do. We're just trying to figure out in America as well. In terms of infrastructure, the way that we're going to go through the presentation today is sort of why global infrastructure? What does it provide to investor portfolios? Why now? We've been managing listed infrastructure at Cohen & Steers since 2003, so over 20 years. I would argue this is probably the best period in terms of forward outlook that we've seen.
Kind of weird to say in the context of all the global uncertainty, but we're seeing lots of opportunities across all of our core subsectors, and we're really excited about deploying capital and making investments today. We'll talk a little bit more about why Cohen & Steers, but obviously we've had a long partnership with Argo and are excited to continue working together. In terms of why listed infrastructure now, I think about infrastructure as being a relative island of safety in a sea of uncertainty. There's lots of concerns around global growth, around tariffs, around deglobalisation, around new politics and new administrations. Infrastructure are critical assets. They're a lot more predictable than you get in many other markets. We think that that's really important and a big differentiator why the asset class provides the diversification that people really look to it for.
There's incredible secular growth drivers today that I think are becoming a lot more widely understood, which we'll talk about, things like the energy addition, things like the changing supply chain, AI, digitalisation, and so forth. Again, for us, the differentiated performance profile at a time when valuations today are still fairly attractive. Just narrowing in a little bit more on the investment case for listed infrastructure, why we think investors should be looking at it and why they should be considering it for their portfolios. I'd start with we invest in the assets that are required for the global economy to operate. If you're not paying your infrastructure bills, you're not getting energy delivered to your home, you're not able to use airports, you're not able to move goods, this is the critical backbone that's required for everything to operate.
We think that's really important because this is basically the first bill that you have to pay, which means as you see all this volatility and uncertainty, these businesses tend to be a lot more predictable. Also, in very what you call high barrier to entry assets, it's really, really hard to build a new airport. Once you've got that airport and you own it, that provides you a really good moat. It allows you to grow and grow cash flows and grow profits because it's really hard to compete with these businesses over time. Very long operational lives. We're looking for assets that we can own for many, many decades that can continue to help develop economies and so forth. Again, importantly, predictable and often inflation-linked cash flows. We all see toll roads raising their prices on us and so forth.
That just shows you the pricing power and the competitive advantage that these businesses have. In terms of investments in infrastructure, the middle column here, equity-like returns. Everybody likes to see really strong returns from their portfolios, but I would argue two big differentiators are downside capture. What that means is, generally speaking, infrastructure stocks go down less than the broader market when the broader market's down. If the broad markets were to sell off 10%, infrastructure tends to go down about 6%. It is that sort of relative safe haven. Inflation sensitivity. As inflation surprises and inflation accelerates, which we do think could happen again globally, infrastructure businesses are able to pass their costs on to customers, which means that the securities can relatively perform well. In terms of the structural drivers that we are seeing today, it is things that people understand.
In the developed world, we have aging infrastructure. I mean, I'm living it right now. I live in New York City, and Newark Airport has had major challenges in terms of being able to operate the airport because of the aging traffic control systems and so forth. We need to update that in the developed world. The developing world needs new infrastructure. It's population growth moving into cities, it's urbanisation, technological advancements. Again, all of this is opportunities for infrastructure investors because we need to finance these investments, and we need to make sure that we can satisfy the global growth demands that the economy requires. That is why uniquely infrastructure today, we think, is really, really well positioned. This chart is what I call the 4D chart, and it articulates the four mega trends that we're focused on. One is digitalisation.
Last year, when I was here, people were really excited about AI and wondering what it was. I think it's now a lot more widely understood how much we're moving online, how much the cloud is taking over, how much artificial intelligence is accelerating, and all the infrastructure required for that is a big opportunity for us. Decarbonisation. We're in this weird tension. We need more energy. We want it to be clean. That's a huge opportunity for utilities and other businesses that are making sure that we have the energy supply we need for the global economy to grow. Deglobalisation, a little scary in the short run. We'll talk a little bit about freight volumes for rails and marine ports, but I would argue deglobalisation is a big opportunity for infrastructure businesses as we work to retool the global supply chain.
The last one is debt, which is kind of a weird one to put on here, but it's pretty simple. We need to invest a lot in infrastructure. Governments can't afford to do it. The bottom left here, you can see the government debt to GDP. We're living it in the U.S. Basically, everybody's in the same position. We have these huge requirements to spend, to grow our infrastructure base. The government has historically been the provider of the capital. They really can't afford to do it anymore. You can see on the right, some projections have $79 trillion of investment needed by 2040. I promise you that number's wrong. You're measuring in trillions, but massive, massive need for investment globally. We think listed infrastructure companies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of that.
When you talk about this relative security, this relative island of predictability in a sea of uncertainty, most people would say, "Hey, this stuff has to be expensive. These stocks have to be trading at a big premium." The reality is they're not. We actually think that there's really attractive relative value in listed infrastructure today, particularly relative to global equities. As you're worried about things, we think infrastructure is actually a less expensive place to get exposure to equities. We measure it with these two charts here. The chart on the left looks at absolute cash flow multiples of infrastructure in blue and equities in purple. What a cash flow multiple is, is how many years, how many times next year's earnings am I paying for the business. A high number means it's really expensive. A low number means it's cheaper.
Infrastructure used to trade at 13 times cash flow. Today, it trades at about 11.5 times cash flow. It's gotten about 10-15% cheaper. Equities, you see the opposite. Post-COVID, equities used to trade at about 10 times cash flow. Today, they trade at 13 times cash flow. They've gotten more expensive. We look at that ratio on the right. A discount means it's a cheaper way to get exposure to the asset class. Today, infrastructure is trading at basically the second cheapest it's ever been relative to global equities, a 10% discount. We actually would make the case that you should pay a premium for infrastructure businesses, again, because they are predictable and we have these secular growth opportunities. I do not even need to make that case today.
If we were just to get back to the same valuation as equities, there'd be a lot of total return opportunity for infrastructure investors. I've alluded to some of the key themes that we'll talk about today in detail, but one is going to be the evolving global supply chain. Again, that's a challenge in the short term, but we think a big opportunity in the long term. We'll talk a little bit more about the digital transformation of economies, and then we'll spend a few minutes on the energy addition, which we think is a really important thing to consider. A couple of years ago, it was all about the energy transition, and I think people misunderstood what that meant. Energy transition used to mean out with the old. Let's get rid of traditional forms of energy. In with the new. Let's invest all in renewables.
We still need the investment in renewables, but we also need the stability in traditional. We're in a more of everything energy world going forward. We actually think it's an energy addition landscape for many decades into the future. What's going on with deglobalisation and this opportunity that I've talked about, about the changing global supply chain? This is a map that shows global trade flows. It's kind of complicated to sort of figure out what it's saying, so I'll try to simplify it as best I can. Red means less trade flows between now and 2032. Yellow means a little more trade flows. Green means a lot more trade flows. I look at this chart and my first conclusion is there's a lot more green and yellow than red. Trade flows are going to increase around the world.
Yes, we are deglobalising, but we're actually going to see a spider web effect of the global supply chain. My anecdote, which is completely made up numbers, would be if I was the supply chain procurement manager at Apple, I had the easiest job in the world in 2019. I want to consume 100 units of port demand, all from China. I'm just going to buy everything from them because they provide it to me as cheaply as possible and I can get it really quickly. Post-COVID, post-Russia-Ukraine, post-concerns around China-Taiwan, I've got a different job today. It's no longer 100 units of port demand from China. I probably only want 60 units of port demand from China, but I also want 40 units of port demand from India, 30 units of port demand from Malaysia, 20 units of port demand from Brazil.
I used to only require 100 units of port demand. Now I require 150. Demand's going to go up a lot, again, as the spider web effect takes shape in global supply chains. The reality is we're not building many new ports. This is finite infrastructure. This is finite real estate. It's going to be about getting more out of the existing port system. We're always looking for investments where demand is growing faster than supply. Global ports, we think, is a great example. These are assets that we think are generally undervalued with really good pricing power. Yes, there will be some growing pains as things like Chinese ports struggle in the short term and maybe tariffs cause dislocations in terms of volumes. Over the long run, we think global marine ports is a really critical investment opportunity for infrastructure investors.
The next slide speaks a little bit more about the energy addition. This is what I call the back to the future slide. This shows North American power demand for the last 50 years. The chart on the top left shows annual growth by decade. It's actually pretty surprising. Even as North America has grown quite a bit, our electricity and power demand has decelerated quite a bit. In the 1970s, we were consuming 5% more per year. In the 1980s, it was 3%. In the 2000s, sorry, the 1990s, it was 2%. We really haven't seen any power demand in North America since 2007. It's been completely flat. That's inflecting in a big way. It's started to grow again. We think it's going to accelerate to 3% later this decade.
Doesn't seem like a big amount, but going from zero growth to 3% growth is a huge opportunity for things like utilities, who are going to be relied upon to make the investments to make sure that we have the power and the energy and the electrification to satisfy all the demand growth that we see. Now, I'd say AI is a big part of it. It's not just AI. You can see the bottom left, the amount of spending that we've done in North America, which I think is consistent in other markets around the world in terms of Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, the Infrastructure Investment Act. We are all becoming more energy dependent, and we think infrastructure is actually one of the best ways to invest in this theme.
The analogy would be, at least from the U.S. perspective, back in the 1800s, when everybody moved to San Francisco to become gold miners, the gold miners themselves did not make a lot of money, but the companies that sold picks and shovels and made the jeans were the ones that got really rich. That is our view of what energy infrastructure is going to be in terms of this AI build-out and so forth. You can invest in data centers and tech and AI. It is going to be a lot more volatile and a lot more speculative, or you can invest in the bricks and mortar, the companies that are actually facilitating the investments in these themes. Potential impact of a second Trump presidency, 1,160 more days. Hopefully, there will not be a third one because that would cause some real challenges in America, but we will work through the second one here.
In terms of opportunities that we see, clearly there's going to be less support for renewables. There was a bill released last night, or I guess this morning. I was up about 1:30 A.M. because I'm still very jet-lagged. That started to talk about pulling back some investments in renewable energy. That's something that we expect to happen, and we're actively managing the portfolio around that. In freight rails, we think there's going to be tension in the short term as volumes potentially are disrupted, but we do think if tax reform were to happen, they would be beneficiaries. We've talked about marine ports at some length.
We also do think midstream energy, which is traditional oil and natural gas pipelines, are really well positioned as you start to see an acknowledgment that, hey, we're going to rely on things like natural gas for a really long time to satisfy energy demand growth. The last presentation went through tariff impacts on the Argo broader portfolios. I'm excited to say from the Argo infrastructure portfolio, similar message, which is that tariffs are really not a big factor in our portfolios today. We believe that most infrastructure businesses are really relatively insulated from tariffs because of their ability to pass through rising costs on customers. Again, utilities and so forth are generally pass-through entities.
We did a very granular bottom-up analysis of what is the earnings risk for infrastructure broadly in a sort of really bad tariff world, and we came up with a less than 3% impact on earnings. Again, in this concerns around volatility and so forth, infrastructure is a relative safe haven. We think sort of infrastructure can continue to provide the defensive investment characteristics that people like. The portfolio in action, a couple of ones to highlight. In the U.S., we think the average utility might face some challenges as they have to invest a lot, and that's going to be inflationary on their customers.
We think that there is a select handful of utilities that are in the best position they have ever been in because they have good balance sheets, they have good regulatory relationships, and they're in places where things like data centers want to go. A great example of that would be Entergy Corporation. We think they can grow their earnings well in excess of 8% through 2028. They are attracting data center investments highlighted by Meta's $10 billion investment in Louisiana. They do not have any rate cases, which means that their earnings are very predictable, and they're trading at an average multiple. As they start to articulate some of these growth opportunities, we think that that stock continued to perform really well. American Tower is a cell phone tower business. We think cell towers are great businesses. They're very capital efficient.
It's about densifying the network in North America and around the world. It's very accretive growth for them. They've gone through some growing pains with higher interest rates. We think they're through the worst of that, and we're excited to see an acceleration of earnings and cash flow growth there in 2026. The last one that I would note is NTPC, which is an Indian-based utility. They're actually the largest power producer in India. Kind of a weird investment case, but generally speaking, we as consumers don't want to have blackouts. Blackouts are really good for companies like NTPC because it's an acknowledgment that, hey, we need to build even more power generation. We had a big blackout in Spain, obviously, a couple of weeks ago. There's more rising blackouts across India.
NTPC has really good regulatory relationships, and we think they're going to be able to accelerate their investment and CapEx build-out to help solve some of these generation issues, which we think will help them accelerate their earnings. A couple more of our top 10 here, which I won't go through in detail, but you can see it's a diversified portfolio, though we're obviously striving for active management to generate alpha, do better than the benchmark for our investors. That's why we come to work every day. Very, very briefly in terms of YCO and Insteer. Obviously, we've been in the business for over 20 years and helping manage this portfolio for over 10. Very experienced global investment team with, we think, a very unique and cycle-tested track record. We're a very large manager with over AUD 10 billion under management for this strategy.
All we do is listed real assets, and we have really strong alignment of interest in terms of our own ownership and management of the funds. We're a global team, so we have four portfolio managers spread across the U.S. and London, as well as, I guess, six analysts across New York, Hong Kong, and London. Infrastructure assets are local assets. We think being global is really important. It's really about understanding what's happening at the local and regional level. There are some summary slides in terms of why GLI, but I think I've kind of hammered those through in a really, hopefully, interesting way, and you can see sort of why Cohen & Steers. With that, I will pass it back over to Jason to maybe invite some Q&A.