Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to Macquarie's 2022 operational briefing. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Today, as is customary, our CEO, Shemara Wikramanayake, will give a 3Q update followed by an opportunity for you to ask questions. We also have a deep dive into our infrastructure business and then our EMEA business, and we have our group heads from MAM, CGM, and MacCap talking to that, plus some videos, and then there'll be an opportunity to talk to or ask questions at the end of those as well. We also have Paul Plewman, the CEO of our EMEA business, and he'll be introducing the EMEA section following the infrastructure. With that, I'll hand over to Shemara.
Great. Thanks, Sam, and welcome and hello, everyone, from me as well. As usual, we'll just kick off by noting the four operating groups that make up our business, which is our global asset manager, Macquarie Asset Management, our banking and financial services business, BFS, Australian focused, our global commodities and global markets business, and Macquarie Capital, which is also a global business. Now, all four of these businesses are ones in which we've spent many decades building deep specialist expertise, which hopefully is gonna allow us to deliver superior return for the risk through cycles. Also, hopefully, we are positioned well for growth structurally in each of these businesses, either through the sector itself continuing to grow, or us being able to grow our share from very small positions.
For example, in banking and financial services in Australia, we're still 4% of the home loan market and less than 1% of business banking. In Macquarie Capital in the U.S., in terms of the fee revenue pool, we're less than 0.5% of it. In asset management in the U.S., we're less than 1% in Macquarie. Hopefully well-positioned businesses and supported by our very strong operating platform across those businesses with our risk management group, our legal and governance group, our financial management group, and our corporate operations group, and the 4 businesses as well getting very good diversification. Now, looking at the Q3 and how the business performed in that period, it was actually a record result for Macquarie Group, following a record first half this financial year of just over AUD 2 billion.
Basically, that result was supported by improved overall market conditions across all of our businesses. Starting with the annuity-style businesses, they are down on the Q3 last year, principally because last year we had the big realization of the European rail assets in Macquarie Asset Management. Year to date, they're up on the prior comparable year to date, and that's driven by continued volume growth in the BFS business and higher base fees in Macquarie Asset Management, including the Waddell & Reed fees that we have, offset by the timing of performance fees and investment realizations. Turning to the market businesses, they're up substantially on both the Q3 last year and the year to date last year. The big drivers of that are in Macquarie Capital.
The principal income is up, driven by exceptionally strong investment realizations driving a substantially up result across market-facing businesses. In commodities and global markets, as well as the AUD 459 million one-off gain we had from the realization of the commercial and industrial meter leasing portion of the meter leasing in the U.K., we also had a very strong contribution from commodities income after taking into account the timing of recognition of income in storage and transportation contracts. Looking in a little bit more detail at what each of the operating groups has been able to achieve over this last quarter, and starting with Macquarie Asset Management. The assets under management are ending the quarter at AUD 750 billion, which is a record for assets under management.
In our public investments, that's mostly been driven by movement, market movements. In the private markets business, we've got just over AUD 160 billion of equity under management at the end of the quarter, and that's been driven by a busy period of over AUD 8 billion of raisings. That's across infrastructure, but also real estate, private credit and investments, again, over all those areas of over AUD 7.5 billion. A busy period of activity and also busy working on bringing the Green Investment Group to operate now as part of the asset manager from the first of April, and that process is progressing well. In addition to that, the asset management group entered into an agreement to buy a business called Central Park Group, which has about $3.5 billion of assets under management.
It's focusing on bringing private market investment opportunities to high net worth investors, principally in the U.S. at this stage, following the announcements of the acquisitions of Waddell & Reed and AMP. Banking and financial services also continuing the growth in the base of that business, an 8% growth in the home loan portfolio just over this last quarter, and also 4% growth in terms of all of deposits, the business banking book, and also the funds on platform, which are now at over AUD 120 billion.
The car leasing portfolio is down 12% as we continue to focus on that business, including exiting or selling the dealer finance portion of that business. Turning to the market-facing businesses and starting with commodities and global markets, there are three business lines principally in that business, and the asset finance portion of that business continued to grow balance sheet, particularly in resources, and in structured lending. The financial markets part of the business delivered a strong contribution across all of fixed income, foreign exchange, credit and equities, including futures. The third business line there is the commodities business, where market conditions were particularly volatile. Our clients were needing support through that period, and the business was able to step up and deliver a strong contribution, including client support, but also trading activity.
Macquarie Capital basically in this Q3, it was a very strong period for fee revenue, and our fee revenue is up significantly on the prior comparable period across advisory, equity capital markets and debt capital markets. Our investment-related income is up substantially on the prior comparable period, and that's because we had an exceptionally strong period of investment realizations in this quarter in Macquarie Capital. Now despite that, we're managing to continue to invest. Our principal finance portfolio is sitting at about AUD 15 billion at the moment, including about AUD 13 billion in credit investments, and we were able to put AUD 4.5 billion of new capital to work over the quarter, as well as having these strong realizations and fee-related income.
Now across these businesses, not only have they built their franchises well, but they give us, as I said, very good diversification by operating business line and also good diversification by geography, as you see here, where we continue to build our businesses in Australia, Asia, the Americas and the EMEA region. Now the operating business's performance is of course continuing to be supported by a very strong platform in funding and capital. You see here that our funded balance sheet remains strong with our term funding or term liabilities exceeding term assets, and in this last quarter, we are raising AUD 14.5 billion of further term funding and growing our deposits by another 5% to AUD 96 billion.
In addition to that, as you, a lot of you supported us with the AUD 2.8 billion equity raising that we undertook at the end of last calendar year. With that raising, it's contributed to our surplus over our regulatory capital minimum requirements under the APRA Basel III requirements, going from AUD 8.4 billion to AUD 11.5 billion. The other big contributor, of course, was the record earnings we had in this Q3. We have AUD 2.1 billion offset by a AUD 900 million interim dividend. Despite that, we saw good opportunity, as I say, to keep investing capital in our businesses, and AUD 900 million was invested in the businesses. You see here that all four of the businesses continue to invest.
In Macquarie Asset Management, we had that Central Park Group acquisition, which was a small one, but we had meaningful divestments as well, offsetting the net capital. BFS, ongoing growth in our home loans, partially offset by the sale of that dealer finance business, as I mentioned. In commodities and global markets, we had increased market risk capital usage as well as growth in the credit portfolio. In Macquarie Capital, as I mentioned, the principal finance lending activity continues to grow, as did also the debt capital markets underwriting, partially offset by the realizations. We're absorbing still good capital and seeing good opportunity to invest. That's partly why, as we mentioned, we went ahead and did the AUD 2.8 billion capital raising at the end of last calendar year.
That comprised the AUD 1.5 billion institutional placement and AUD 1.3 billion raised in the share purchase plan. We also raised AUD 83 million from the dividend reinvestment plan. Now, we really appreciate the support given by shareholders and investors to us in that. As we mentioned, we remain confident that we can invest this capital at superior returns on a risk-adjusted basis. Indeed, I mentioned this was an exceptionally strong period of investment realizations. Over 90% of those realizations were made since 2019, when we did our last capital raising, and we appreciate the support of investors. We have been able to deploy capital well and realize over 2-3 years those investments and see ongoing opportunity today. That raising has helped in terms of our broader regulatory ratios, which remain well above our regulatory minimums.
Just on regulatory matters, we should note that APRA, one of our two principal regulators, has a very active book of work . They were able to complete their work very successfully on the unquestionably strong program they were doing and have released their new bank capital framework. As we announced, that resulted in an AUD 2.2 billion reduction in our surplus capital over regulatory minimums. You can see there, APRA has a number of other projects it's working on to enhance the prudential strength of our industry. One of them that we're doing a lot of work with APRA on is CPS 511 in relation to remuneration. We also are working closely with APRA in relation to the remediation plan following the first of April announcement at the beginning of this financial year.
As we've mentioned, we are doing a lot of work ourselves in strengthening our operating platform with processes and controls, and this is a multi-year program. As part of that, we're working closely with APRA in areas like intragroup funding, internal exposures, and also our liquidity and capital reporting for regulatory purposes. We were also working to enhance the accountability, governance, and risk culture around that. Now, before I turn to the Q3 outlook, just one more thing that we wanted to touch on, which is letting you know that we have made an AUD 20 million additional one-off allocation to our foundation to help them expand the work they're doing on social impact investing.
We think with both the heightened community needs coming out of the pandemic, but more broadly, the need to address a number of issues in our communities, social impact investing has great opportunity to have really material outcomes. This money will be invested over the next couple of years in areas like capacity building for participants in this sector, as well as investing in social impact grants. Our team are very engaged and passionate about this and have put together a social impact investment advisory committee chaired by Verena Lim, who is a leader in the Macquarie Asset Management business based in Singapore and just took over from Ben Way as CEO of Asia. With that, I'll turn to the third, the short-term outlook. As usual, we'll look at this in terms of each of our operating groups.
Starting with Macquarie Asset Management, as we've been saying previously, we expect, excluding the Waddell & Reed impact, that base fees should be broadly in line with last financial year, but net other operating income should be slightly down, particularly given that European rail realization we had last financial year. We don't expect Waddell & Reed to have meaningful net profit impact this year due to integration costs and other one-off costs. In Banking and Financial Services, as you've seen, we see ongoing momentum in our loan books, our deposits, and our platform volumes. That will be impacted, of course, by competitive dynamics, which continue in terms of margin pressure, and also in terms of the investments we're making in technology, in increased regulatory investment, and also in terms of the growth of the books.
Of course, we have to continue to monitor provisioning in light of the COVID environment. Turning then to our market-facing businesses, in Macquarie Capital, as I just noted, the fee income was significantly up in the Q3, and we expect that transaction activity in the second half, throughout the second half, to result in the second half result being significantly up in terms of transaction activity compared to the prior comparable second half. And with investment-related income, we expect, given the exceptionally strong investment realizations that occurred in this quarter, we expect investment-related income to be substantially up on the prior comparable period. Well, I should mention, while we see no meaningful realizations occurring in the fourth quarter, and we continue to see good opportunity to deploy capital.
In Commodities and Global Markets, starting at the bottom bullet point there in the asset finance business, we expect a continued contribution from that business, which is a little more annuity style in its nature. But we did have the AUD 459 million one-off gain from the realization of the U.K. Industrial and Commercial meter leasing portfolio. The financial markets business, we expect a strong contribution, and we mentioned how it's performing across all the underlying businesses there. In commodities, we expect the result to be significantly up on the prior financial year, net of the timing of recognition of income in terms of storage and transportation contracts. At the corporate level, we expect both the compensation ratio and the effective tax rate to be in line with historical levels.
Now, that short-term outlook is, of course, subject to many factors that could influence the outcome. Things like the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economic recovery and the extent of government support for economies as we come out of it, or as it continues to be with us. Market conditions, including significant volatility events and geopolitical events, potential tax and regulatory changes and tax uncertainties, completion of period-end reviews, and the completion rate of transactions, and the geographic composition of that impact and of that income and the impacts on FX. Given that, we continue to maintain a cautious stance with, as you've seen, a conservative approach to our capital, our funding, and our liquidity to position us for the current environment.
Over the medium term, as I said at the beginning, we believe we are well placed to deliver superior return for the risk, given our deep positioning in these major operating business lines and the diversification across those business lines between annuity and market facing, as well as our strong and conservative balance sheet and our proven risk management framework. With that, I will hand back to Sam to take any questions you might have. Thank you.
Thanks, Shemara. We'll now open the lines, and I'll hand over to the operator to facilitate the Q&A.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star 2. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Ed Henning from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Firstly, the first question is just a clarification. In the short-term outlook, you talk about base fees being broadly in line. I know that's except Waddell & Reed. In the commentary, you talk about base fees being up. Is that just the Waddell & Reed and also potentially our fund going down in the last quarter? The first question.
Thanks, Ed, for that question. Yes, it is because of Waddell & Reed, principally, that in the Q3 our base fees are up.
Okay.
We're saying for the full year, we expect it to be broadly in line.
Okay. Base fees are up in Q3, excluding Waddell & Reed? Or is that-
No, including.
Just trying to clarify.
Including the Waddell & Reed contribution.
Oh, okay.
there in the Q3.
Okay. Thank you for that. The second question is, you've announced MIP VI. Can you just talk about the appetite out there still to raise funds? And you also mentioned, that you're seeing, good opportunities to deploy capital. Can you just talk about the opportunities you're seeing and what regions or what assets are out there are attractive at the moment?
In terms of the fundraising, we've got a deep dive on infrastructure, and you'll hear from some of our investors speaking actually in the introductory video. We're finding in this low rate environment, even though rates may go up a little bit, there's huge pools of capital after all the fiscal and monetary stimulus we've experienced that are looking for the sort of investments we deliver in real assets. Long-dated, capital-protected, defensive, long-duration investments to match people's pension and retiree money and even state money. We're finding all of our recent funds have been closing oversubscribed. That's partly because they've also been delivering very good results for a long time now. Certainly it's a conducive environment for fundraising, for infrastructure and real assets.
In terms of where we're investing, that is really driven by the deep expertise of our teams in every region and subsector. Thematically in the EMEA region, we've been investing a bit more in Eastern Europe. You will have seen in this quarter, we did some large investments in Italy in Southern Europe. We also are investing much more into areas like social infrastructure as urbanization continues in various regions into decarbonization infrastructure, and we bought the Green Investment Group alongside Macquarie Asset Management. The other big area is digital infrastructure, which has been accelerated by the pandemic as people work from home, learn from home, shop from home, they're doing things more remotely. Investment in towers, fiber optic networks, data centers, a range of areas.
We still see opportunity to continue to invest in transportation and utility infrastructure as well. Does that cover?
Okay.
It, Ed?
No, no, that's great. I'll leave it there. Thank you very much, Shemara Wikramanayake.
Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is from Andrew Lyons from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thanks, and good morning. Shemara, just a question on Macquarie Capital and then one on CGM. Starting with MacCap. In the quarter, you've had realizations that you've described as exceptional. While you're not expecting any material realizations in 4Q, I do note that the capital allocated to the division actually increased by AUD 200 million in the quarter. Can you, therefore just perhaps talk a bit about the runway for growth in the division, and perhaps what the 2023 base might look like for the business? The second question in a similar light in relation to CGM.
Based on the outlook described this morning, it does look like that division's gonna contribute in excess of AUD 3.5 billion this year. That's without any unusual weather events or positive timing impacts. Now, clearly, over the year, trading conditions have been pretty supportive, and you did have a realization in the first half, but it does appear as if the growth in the business, more than anything, is just being driven by the sheer scale of the business. Just with that in mind, do you think we now have to start thinking about this division as contributing close to AUD 3 billion in what you might call a normal year in inverted commas?
Okay, thanks, Andrew. I'll answer the Macquarie Capital question first and then come on to CGM. With Macquarie Capital, basically, as with Macquarie Asset Management, we keep investing off the back of the skills of our people, which you'll see in the upcoming videos, where they have deep expertise across sectors and regions. We are seeing an opportunity to deploy capital despite there being a lot of liquidity out there at good returns. As you saw, the capital, the investments that were realized, 90% of them done since 2019. the markets have been as competitive. We think we'll continue to be able to deploy and deliver realizations. The realization timing depends on when the best time is in terms of our adding value to that asset.
It just happened in this Q3 that we had a number of assets. We've realized about a dozen in Macquarie Capital this financial year. It was the right time to exit those assets to get the optimum return for the risk and the capital we've invested. That was an exceptionally strong period, but we're continuing to deploy capital. You saw AUD 4.5 billion deployed just in this last quarter. Now we're putting a lot into our credit portfolio. That delivers slightly more annuity style earnings because we're holding those positions just for a few years, but they are delivering ongoing yield and income.
That's why, in Macquarie Capital, we hopefully are trying to build now much more of a yield type return from investments, as well as the ongoing, slightly lumpier, returns that we get from realizing equity positions. We're seeing good opportunity to continue to invest. I will repeat that this has been a period of exceptionally strong investment realization income because of the timing of realizations coming, the markets we were exiting into, et cetera. We should continue to see both contribution from the fee income, but also from the investment realizations net of funding costs given the expertise of our people. Now, in CGM, as you noted, this year we had about AUD 460 million one-off gain from the meter realizations.
You mentioned there hadn't been any extreme weather events, et cetera, but we actually have had an environment of very high volatility, and that's been particularly in energy with all the things going on, with huge demand increase for energy as we come out of COVID, and goods demand has stepped up a lot because people can't consume services, and goods are much more energy intensive. Coupled with that, we've had the challenges in Europe where Groningen has run off, Nord Stream 2 is under pressure in terms of gas coming into Europe, the whole Russia-Ukraine situation. For example, Nick O'Kane will speak later, but in terms of European gas, the Dutch gas price, which is normally, I don't know, 10-30 EUR, it spiked to 180 EUR in December at one point.
We've had extreme volatility, and so that has contributed to trading income. Your point, I think, is that we're able to build our client franchises in times like this by stepping up with extra support. We do feel that the underlying client franchise is growing. Alex Harvey is here, of course, and at the half- year results and at previous results, he's been sharing indications of how the underlying income in CGM continues to grow. We have this icing on the cake, where we have things like the polar vortex, the Permian issue, the Texas freeze, or now this energy situation. It has been, I have to say, particularly volatile, particularly in this Q3. We've grown the franchise, but there has also been meaningful trading income.
Let me just ask Alex, do you want to elaborate on that?
Thanks, Shem. I think you probably covered it. I mean, we've talked about the growing franchise for some time, particularly those customer numbers. You recall the graph that we've had for the last couple of results talking about the split of client-facing income versus the trade income, about sort of 70%-80% client-facing and the balance, influenced by those market conditions leading to trading activity. The underlying story really is more customers dealing with them in more locations across more products. Then as Shemara's just talked about, the conditions over the course of this quarter, Q3, have been very conducive.
I might just make one last point, Andrew, which is in both of Macquarie Capital and Commodities and Global Markets, we call them market-facing businesses, but they both have got strong underlying franchises that give a stable base of income to them. Last year, Macquarie Capital was really impacted in the AUD 650 million result by the expected credit loss provisions we had to take given the market environment. Hopefully we're building those businesses to an underlying repeat base of earnings, as well as when market environments are conducive, being able to capture upside.
It's helpful. Thank you so much.
Thank you. The next question is from Andrei Stadnik from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Can I ask my first question just around compensation ratio? You mentioned an outlook slightly expected to be similar to historical levels. We've seen a trend across, your global peer group that, the better revenue growth has been covering the base salaries, and in a better way, enhanced comp ratios have just been mechanically coming down lower. What would you be thinking about in terms of compensation ratio for Macquarie?
Andrei, I'd say two things about that. One is, as you see through the cycle, there's a range in which our compensation ratio fluctuates. Usually when the business is doing particularly well for the point you made, the compensation ratio heads to the lower end of that range because the base compensation is fixed and doesn't vary with performance. Having said that, every single peer globally has been commenting, as have domestically, on the really hot market for talent at the moment. Base salaries are going up everywhere. I saw Jamie Dimon at J.P. Morgan said he'd never experienced anything like this. Here in Australia, we and our peers are fighting for areas like tech, operations, risk management. With the borders closed, it's been very hard to get talent.
Our business is ultimately a people business, being in services, and it is really dependent on attracting, retaining, and developing the best talent. You'll see that as you watch the videos, we do the deep dives by sectors. On the one hand, we should be at the lower end of the compensation ratio because we're at the higher end of earnings, particularly with the exceptionally strong investment realizations and the significant increase in terms of the commodities business. On the other hand, we are conscious that we're not going to trade off long-term gain for short-term gain by not being responsive in a competitive market for talent.
Thank you. Can I just ask a second question, just around perception from high interest rates? There's been a perception in the markets that high interest rates could be a meaningful headwind for Macquarie, but it seems that BFS and CGM could actually benefit. Can you maybe provide some comments on what you think higher interest rates, what they could do to Macquarie across the group?
Look, in the early stages of rates increasing, especially if it's driven by increasing growth, it should be positive for the business. We put out some analysis a few years ago for Macquarie Asset Management showing how infrastructure businesses tend to perform better in the periods when rates start increasing. For our market-facing businesses as well, typically you find activity levels are up in these environments where rates start to increase. We'd hope generally that we would benefit from it. In banking and financial services, ordinarily it's good because NIM increases, but we have to see what the competitive dynamic does in terms of those rate increases and how much of it get passed through to customers, et cetera.
Generally, and I'll let Alex comment again if he wants to, but I think generally it should be supportive to our operating businesses, but there'll be nuances by business.
Thanks, Shem. I think we've covered it from my perspective. The only other thing I'd say, Andrei, is that you've seen us over the last few years continuing to term out the balance sheet, so we raised a lot of term funding last year, and obviously, that's partly in response to a very conducive environment for raising debt funding to support the businesses going forward. To pick up the point that Shem made in the outlook slide, we continue to maintain a cautious approach to funding, capital, and liquidity consistent with this idea that we wanna make sure the business is positioned, irrespective of the rate environment, to be able to support the businesses in their activities.
That's a very good point. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Jonathan Mott from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Thank you. This is for both Shemara and Alex, if I could. You talked a lot about the conservative stance, conservative settings of the business. When you look at the quarter and the year, the environment is exceptionally good. You've both been at Macquarie for several decades now. Have you ever seen the environment better than it is today across your businesses for making money? What would it actually take for you to be less conservative in some of these settings?
Well, John, I'll have a go first, and then I'll let Alex comment. We've always been conservative. I've been here 30-something years now, and our view is we're thinking about the medium and the long term in terms of making sure we're here through everything. we always balance risk with return. When I joined in the mid-1980s, the markets were crazy, and we were actually, in that period, if anything, having to make sure we were very disciplined in terms of the risks we took on, the counterparties we dealt with, et cetera. I guess I've been through those sort of cycles in my time, and if anything, Tony Berg was our CEO at the time.
Those are times when you actually, if anything, need to be particularly disciplined and cautious and think about where you are bringing real expertise and value add, rather than just riding a market cycle. So that's my two cents. Alex?
I mean, hi, John. I know not much to add other than this. What we're obviously constantly trying to do with all the businesses, and the businesses themselves are trying to do, is just continue to improve the franchise. If you look at what's going on, in the asset management business, we're continuing to raise capital, we're continuing to diversify the geographies. We're continuing to diversify the products that that business is taking out to their investor base. Obviously, we've been able to make some acquisitions in the public markets business. I guess, with each of the businesses, we're trying to, continue to grow the franchise, and strengthen the franchise.
From a BFS perspective, big investments in technology from a CGM viewpoint, investing in that customer base, e.g., investing in that expertise, expanding where we're talking to customers all around the world. Same Macquarie Capital, and Shem already talked about the growth of the principal finance debt book for example and that sort of annuity style income coming through. It's hard to, analyze this period against any other period. I think the constant over a long period of time, and as you said, both Shem and I have been here for a long period of time, is just continue to work with the businesses to improve their underlying franchise. That underlying franchise obviously responds to whatever the market conditions are at the time. Obviously, it's been very good conditions in the last year to date.
In some of the businesses obviously, through Q3, as Shem said, there are exceptional conditions for realizing investments. I think the long-term point is how do you keep investing in these franchises to make them better and more responsive to whatever conditions are in front of them at the time.
Thank you. Just a follow-up question, if I could, on the commodities business. At the start of the call, Shemara, you started mentioning your market share in global M&A and, Australian mortgages, a few other products. Have you got a feel for the market share of your commodities business as a share of revenue across North America and Europe? Is there any McLagan data or anything you can point to show the opportunity there and what your share is in those businesses as a revenue share?
Well, Nick O'Kane is on. We're sadly separated physically in different rooms, but I might just comment briefly and then let Nick comment. In certain areas, John, we have a meaningful presence. In North American gas and power, we are the fourth biggest physical trader in North American gas. In other areas like the EMEA region, we obviously made the Cargill acquisition and in physical oil, built our presence, et cetera. We're much smaller in regions like EMEA and in Asia, but we are growing very nicely in those. I guess what we try to do is build deep specialist expertise patiently, adjacently into new markets, and then build up our franchise that Alex talked about based off that.
Rather than playing multiple arbitrage when we invest even into CGM, where we put balance sheet, what we're trying to do is back human expertise, where they understand the producers, the consumers, deep analytics of what's going on, the transportation infrastructure, and then can bring extra value through that. Let me just ask Nick, but John, we can look at sharing more data in terms of what the broader revenue pools are in our percents. I can just say briefly, we have a lot of scope to grow, and that's just in energy. Obviously in other sorts of commodities, we're small players. There are big trading houses, hedge funds and big peer investment banks that are very big players in these markets. Nick, are you there, and would you like to add anything?
Good morning. Good morning, Jonathan, and thank you, Shemara. I think you covered it well. I might just add that the commodities business is diverse, and it operates in a lot of different markets. It's difficult to benchmark us against, say, a traditional banking revenue pool or a trading house revenue pool or a hedge fund revenue pool, because we tend to operate across all of those different market segments. What is interesting to note is that the size of the commodities business is the commodities marketplace is vast. While we have scale in some of our businesses, there is still room for us to grow in other parts of the business.
What we'll continue to do is to grow out our customer franchise. That's something that we've always focused on and continue to focus on. That's where our growth comes from. We think there's a lot of opportunity to continue to grow into adjacent spaces, and we'll touch on that a little bit later on in the presentations as well. As we move into different parts of the energy transition, that there continues to be more opportunity to service our clients and to grow with our clients and to transition with them. That's what we'll continue to focus on as we evolve and grow.
Thanks, Nick. That's good.
Thank you. The next question is from Brian Johnson from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
First point, congratulations. Obviously, 2022 is gonna be a great year as some of your competitors struggle. Two questions. The first one is that when we have a look at the principal investments book, I'm just wondering, can we get a feeling for the target hold period and what the target ROE basically is? I had a second question after that one, if I may?
Sure. Thanks, Brian. In terms of the book, it's very hard to give you a target hold and ROE because it really depends where we're investing. You saw with the realizations, the slide set, and I should have noted that it was across infrastructure, including green energy, it was across business services, it was across technology. If we're in an early stage technology investment, we may only put a few dollars in, and we may be targeting a very high ROE because it's very high risk, and we may hold it for 10 years until that business has really got scale. If we're in a more mature asset, or we're doing a PPP project, we may only hold that for a few years, and it's a less risky asset, so we're targeting more moderate returns.
There's a spectrum of capabilities across the asset classes in which we have expertise in the regions. Again, in Asia, we may be targeting higher IRRs, possibly shorter holds than we would in North America and Europe because they're more nascent markets for us. It's hard to give a simple answer. I'm not trying to be difficult, but that's why our risk management teams, Alex and I, we work incredibly closely with our teams with every equity investment they're making to understand the risks involved, what skills we have to manage and mitigate those risks, and hence what return we should be targeting and what life cycle we expect the capital to be there for.
Perfect.
Sorry, Brian. That's not.
No, that's as good an answer as I could probably expect. Shemara, just the second one, if I may. Just when we think about the new Macquarie Private Markets funds that you're raising, can you just give us a feeling of the percentage initial co-investment? What is the management and the performance fee structure on the new ones that you're raising now?
Well, I mean, there's now a spectrum of what we're doing in private markets, and Ben Way is on the phone, so I might let him comment as well. Ben is bringing a new energy to that business because we've grown it very nicely and stably and safely, I would say, for the last decade or two. Actually the market is way bigger. We have become very strong in traditional infrastructure. Expanding across into real estate, where we've moved our principal investing team over to Macquarie Asset Management into private credit, agriculture, transportation, they're all things that we could do more of. With our core funds in infrastructure, where we have deep track record expertise and standing with investors, our co-investment is small. We're leveraging the capital Macquarie puts in materially.
I think we're now, 1% of the money we're raising as the funds get bigger and bigger. In newer areas, like if we're doing a tactical real estate club, we might put a much bigger piece of balance sheet there to show alignment early on with investors as they come on the journey with us and have much more skin at risk ourselves. It varies. In private credit, we're not having to co-invest a lot, and the market doesn't. Let me just ask Ben, if you don't mind, to see if he would like to give a couple of comments. Ben, are you there? Ben's in the U.K. at the moment, so very late for him.
Hi, Shemara, and thanks, Brian. I think, look, Shemara's answered that well. Our fee rates are generally in line for our flagship infrastructure funds with sort of what we've done historically. we're seeing really strong support for those products at market fee rate. that business continues to grow strongly and you know is delivering for us and for investors and importantly for shareholders. Shemara is right. In the other areas, the fees that we get are generally the fees that are in line with where that particular sector is operating, and that's quite different for real estate versus private credit versus agriculture and so on. I think the good news is we see lots of growth opportunities in those areas.
the good thing is we've got the balance sheet to support those funds where we are moving into new areas, so we can show really good alignment with investors, but also so we can give ourselves that, that kickstart to get going in those areas. Again, we're seeing good growth opportunities in the areas adjacent to infrastructure. We'll continue to, really focus on scaling those businesses up.
Ben, I should have-
Shemara, can I just.
Oh, sorry. You go ahead.
Sorry. No, can I just clarify, Ben? Sorry. As funds mature from a decade ago, where the initial co-investment in infra might have been as much as 10%, you're now initiating new ones where the initial co-investment is 1%? Did I hear that correctly?
No. No, we're not. Generally speaking, we will invest up to, we'll invest anywhere between 5%-10% in a scale vintage fund, for example, like the North American or the European funds. But we will have a cap depending on the fund raised. I think as Shemara said, in new funds where we're launching new strategies in the early vintages, it's likely that we would put a higher percentage of capital in, one to give that strategy momentum, also to show alignment where we're trying to do something new. Generally, as we get to more mature, larger vintages, our percentage of commitment comes down.
Ben, I was just gonna say, like the U.S. fund, there's been talk of the new U.S. fund potentially being $7 billion. Our co-investment in that wouldn't be $700 million, though, in a mature vintage like that, would it, Ben, in terms of,
No, it wouldn't. No. We would cap that at, somewhere at a much smaller rate. That's right, Shemara, on those much larger funds. Correct.
With the very big funds. I think that covers it, Ben. Just on the fees, I was just gonna briefly say, some years ago, Sam, it would have been about 7 years ago, we had Martin Stanley do a presentation that was showing that we were earning about 1-1.1% of base fees, 50 basis points of performance fees, 20 basis points of investment income. As time went on, the base fee number came down as real estate funds, et cetera, were on lower base fees. The performance fee number went up to about 70-80 basis points in the investment income as well. When Ben next updates on the MAM business, we can provide an update on that.
We've obviously been in a period where it's been a good environment for realizing on performance fees.
Thank you. The next question comes from Andrew Triggs from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you. Shemara, just a couple questions for you. The first one, a follow-up on investment realizations, particularly in the green space. I would expect the sequencing of some of these divestments to occur over the next few years, knowing that Q4 is not likely to see any meaningful transactions. The second question, around the BFS division, obviously, major bank updates are showing significant margin pressure in the quarter, with much of that driven by the fixed rate mortgage space, where, at least I've observed that Macquarie doesn't play as aggressively in the variable rate space. Just interested in any thoughts you have on margin pressure in the BFS division, and if you're happy with where mortgage margins sit versus the group average?
Just in relation to BFS, we are subject to competitive dynamics and margin pressure like all others. As you say, our book is probably less weighted to fixed rate, so that's fair enough. The main driver in growth in BFS has been the volume growth that we've been experiencing. We're now at just over 4% of market share in Australia. That's the big driver. We also get a cost to income benefit as well as we scale up. Although we are investing still a lot in technology particularly and regulatory compliance and growth of the book.
The only thing to add there is probably just from a return on equity viewpoint. Obviously, we're happy with the equity return we're getting on our BFS business. partly, as it's about servicing customers and servicing them quickly to actually provide the mortgage to them. I think the team's done a great job of developing the platform and continuing to originate activity at attractive rates of return on equity. Other than that, I think it's covered it. Obviously, it's a competitive market and we continue to obviously have to meet the market.
You're right to some extent, we didn't chase the same volume on the fixed rate side, which is probably helpful.
In relation to the green investment realizations, Alex at the half year gave you the Macquarie Capital balance sheet in terms of what was allocated to green versus debt, versus infrastructure, versus technology. We've still got AUD a few billion invested in the green space, and that will run off over time, over the next few years. As the Green Investment Group moves to Macquarie Asset Management, we will determine what will be invested through the fund mandate and what, if anything, will continue to be invested through the balance sheet. Over the next few years, we will have still a runoff of the book where we've been investing in what we think are good projects, where we're adding really good value, and it's across, waste-to-energy, solar platforms, wind platforms onshore and offshore.
We're doing more things in hydrogen, battery charging, et cetera. There'll be a portfolio of assets which will move across to Macquarie Asset Management, and the Green Investment Group team will continue to manage those to best effect for the balance sheet while they grow the asset management portfolio. Does that answer the question, Andrew?
Sorry. Yes, it does, Shemara. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Brendan Sproules from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I just have a couple of questions. Just firstly, on the runway of growth that you have highlighted here in the commodities business. I've noticed in the last 15 months, the capital you've deployed here has gone from about AUD 4.5 billion to AUD 7 billion. What is the risk appetite here for you to continue to grow the capital base here, particularly given you're a regulated bank where a lot of your large global competitors are private companies? To what extent is there any risk appetite limits, or other limits in terms of the amount of capital that you can ultimately allocate to this business?
I'll start and then let Alex and Nick comment if you'd like to. Basically, our decision in terms of allocating capital is the same as for any business, which is do we see superior return for the risk involved. Now, in CGM, the money we're putting in, a chunk of it is in terms of the credit portfolio, and we're analyzing those positions like we do with any other, lending or credit situation. Then a big chunk also is into market risk, where we're having to make calls. As volatility increases in sectors, we're holding more market risk capital and more funding as well. We're constantly stress testing our portfolios and looking at are we gonna be sufficiently funded and have sufficient capital?
If we're holding capital buffers for those extreme situations, what sort of returns do we need, and do we get appropriate return? At this point, we've been very happy with continuing to provide funding and capital to the CGM business as it grows because, we have teams with deep expertise that are able to bring insights and deliver great returns. Alex and Nick, any-
From my end, Brendan, I mean, obviously, the key driver of capital usage, which as you've seen in those charts that we put up again at the half year result, is client volume. What we have seen is the growing franchise, more clients in more markets and demanding more risk management type solutions. It's obviously attracting credit capital. As Shemara said, obviously in more volatile markets, we're also seeing some additional capital support the market risk. The risk management approach, the risk appetite hasn't changed for some time. What we are seeing, though, is just that growing customer franchise that's drawing capital from the group to support that activity level. Nick, I don't know whether you wanna add to that.
Look, I think you're on point there, Alex. It's the exact same approach we've had since we started the business decades ago. We operate within the same risk management framework and look at risks in the same way and stress those risks against the earnings profile and the probability of risk. That hasn't changed and won't change.
I have a second question on asset management. I just wanted to understand the outlook for the organic growth of base fees. Now, obviously, you've guided here to sort of broadly in line for this year, the similar level that you've had for the last couple of years. Just given the discussion around the composition of base average base fee, but also the fact that you are seeding some quite large new infrastructure funds, but we're not seeing sort of growth coming through in that base fee line. Is this the case now that you're at a size where you actually have to raise a lot just to stand still and the growth in this business is much more inorganic?
I think we should gradually see the base fees continuing to grow. When we say broadly in line, it can be up a few %, down a few %. They're still growing slightly. Of course, next year we will have a full year of Waddell & Reed come through and AMP come through. I think we should next year, and we're not commenting yet on FY 2023, we'll do that at the full year, but we should be seeing contribution from those businesses. Again, Ben, anything you'd like to add?
I think that's right, Shemara. I think, we expect as we invest in these, as we raise bigger funds and we also move into new areas, we'd expect over time that, we would see growth in the base fees. And as you said, there's also opportunities that will flow through from the acquisitions we've been making. I think to be fair, it's an inorganic and organic story, and I think that's good because that gives us multiple levers to drive growth.
may just add two things from my perspective. One is that if you look at the portfolio of funds, it's getting more and more diverse. If you think about the base fees that are broadly where they have been for many years, you're getting base fees from a more diverse range of funds, and obviously some of these are quite mature vintages of funds now and the size is going up. The second thing you see coming through base fees, Brendan, is obviously we're realizing assets out of funds as well as investing new capital. when you put it together in aggregate, obviously we talk about broadly in line, but the composition of that fee and where it's actually coming from is changing over time.
As the assets under management go up, you'd expect to see that base fee income trend up over time.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Dobson.
Great. Thank you. Thanks for all your questions. Before we hear from Shemara talking about our position and the opportunities within the infrastructure sector and our operating group heads, we have a short video to show you, which is our staff and client perspective on our expertise in infrastructure.
In all the dialogues and conversations I have with clients and stakeholders, there's a real recognition of the Macquarie legacy over the last 25-30 years in the infrastructure sector. That leadership and legacy remains with Macquarie and is instilled in every new graduate and new hire that comes through. Clients and partners come to us to really look at complex opportunities. they don't come to us for the simple opportunities.
What impresses me most about Macquarie is the deep bench strength and the wide network of regional and country teams that they have managed to build up over the years. Their ability to get these different teams to work together as one huge deal machine.
It's an amazing brand. The market power and reputation of Macquarie certainly has given us a leg up in terms of the halo effect that we get by being a Macquarie portfolio company.
We are quite a fast entrepreneurial company. When we look at transactions, in some cases, we need to move quite fast. I'd say Macquarie have been really with us, alongside us, moving fast and being dynamic.
Macquarie, from our point of view, also focus on getting the right risk allocation as dictated by the market to win project as effectively as possible.
Each of our regions' funds have a truly international investor base. For our Asia-focused infrastructure funds, we're seeing commitments from investors across North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Australia.
They bring a granular thought process to our business, whether it's on the waste side or the energy side, that has meaningful insight helping us run the business.
It has a unique blend of sort of in-house operational expertise as well as financial acumen. A real experience that comes from actually having managed and operated assets across a very broad portfolio for a very long time.
Their contacts and the people that they can introduce us to, both people that can be of service to us in different ways, as well as potential customers.
They have a demonstrated ability to adapt to the ever-changing market conditions.
Over our 25 years, we are proud of the way we've developed the infrastructure class and been able to present a much broader range of assets to our investors.
The real changes and opportunities that we're seeing on the infrastructure sector at the moment is a shift from what historically would be called core plus infrastructure. Digital infrastructure and social infrastructure really coming back into the mainstream of infrastructure going forward, and that's presenting a lot of opportunities for us.
There's also an acknowledgement that we continue to be at the forefront of the sector today around things like asset creation in renewable generation, battery storage, the decarbonization theme, digitization around digital infrastructure. Macquarie continues to lead the market when it comes to these sectors.
They have this tremendous asset base of green power. That green power and the know-how of that green power is something that we can utilize to also educate and help our customers, and work with Macquarie to provide longer term green solutions for the customers as part of our asset base.
Macquarie is able to bring global expertise in important topics like workplace health and safety directly into the businesses that we manage and improve the outcomes.
There is not a meeting that goes by that we don't talk about health and safety. Because of that, our safety stats and culture has improved vastly since their ownership.
Our teams come from diverse backgrounds with deep technical industry and finance expertise, and are located in the markets in which we invest. It's through this deep understanding of the local markets that we're able to secure and manage investments across the region.
You always get a good quality team on every transaction. It's not on and off as others might be.
We've got dedicated teams in Australia, in the Asia-Pacific region, in North America, in Europe, and dedicated staff who focus solely on infrastructure, whether it be third-party advisory or asset creation or project development.
We also have a very flexible balance sheet, so we can invest in construction, operations, development, and platform opportunities, which is quite unique. We have, very clear skill in financial ability and using our technical knowledge.
There's a lot of investors out there, and there's a lot of money out there, but the number of them that can really help you build your business in the infrastructure and government arena is pretty limited. We saw that as being exceptional among the various folks that we were talking to, and made Macquarie by far the most interesting.
In FCC, we are really excited for the future with Macquarie. We have expanded our relationship in Europe to the Americas, and that is bringing us big opportunities.
We see that we can, go big and go international, and we're really excited about being a partner of Macquarie's because we know they'll help us.
We look forward to building on the long-term partnership that we have with Macquarie in the years to come.
Great. Hopefully that video showed you the deep capabilities of our team, the relationships we have, the geographies and sectors we operate in at the moment. We've obviously been building this expertise, as you heard on the video. Now for nearly three decades, when we together with others were a pioneer of developing infrastructure as an asset class in Australia. Today we've built to a point patiently, adjacently building that expertise, where the biggest three areas in which we operate are in Macquarie Capital. We continue to be an advisor and a capital arranger. As you can see, we're number one global infrastructure advisor in that top row of boxes and continually winning awards. In the bottom row of boxes you see we also bring our balance sheet, and have been for some time, to invest alongside the expertise of our Macquarie Capital team.
As Mark Bradshaw was saying, we're involved in development, construction, and operation of platforms, and again, constantly winning awards. In Macquarie Asset Management, we are still the world's largest manager of infrastructure assets and constantly growing up and down the risk curve into new sectors, into new geographies, et cetera, and expanding our relationships with investors as well. I think the other group in which we participate in infrastructure is in commodities and global markets as well, where it's less known that we operate in three different areas as a user of that infrastructure in providing services to our clients, and also as a financier of assets through our asset finance business, and then in terms of co-investing with our clients in infrastructure for the energy transition.
In a moment, you're going to hear from Ben Way and the Macquarie Asset Management team on what we are doing today in MAM and where we're looking to go. Also from Michael Silverton and his team in Macquarie Capital in terms of where they're looking to go, and then Nick O'Kane will elaborate on the things that we do in commodities and global markets as well. Before handing over to them, I wanted to touch on two things. One is a little bit of the history of the story of how we came here, which speaks to how we will progress in this sector. As you see, we started 27 years ago, so even after I joined Macquarie, we started doing advisory work in infrastructure and then moved on to arranging debt and arranging equity.
It was really when the big privatization started happening here in Australia of utilities, road assets, et cetera, and compulsory superannuation got introduced, that we started our asset management business where we saw a very good match in these long-dated liabilities that were developing, needing capital protected defensive assets with the nature of these infrastructure assets, including yield and income as well. The product sectors, product areas we were involved in gradually grew, most recently into the Green Investment Group area, but also the sectors that we operate in went from traditional utilities and transportation assets through to more social infrastructure. Today we're going more into energy transition and climate response and decarbonization and digital assets as well.
Over that time, as you can see, we've grown our assets under management from AUD 87 billion to AUD 203 billion just in the last 10 years. We've also grown the number of transactions we advise on from AUD 11 billion to AUD 105 billion in the last 10 years. Big ongoing step up, but the most interesting thing about this area is we are still early in the journey. As you can see here, there is AUD 75 trillion of infrastructure investment required out to 2040, with the largest part being in Asia, but still meaningful AUD 16 trillion each needed in North America and EMEA.
There's big public support for this, not just because of the needs for urbanization and investment in terms of infrastructure to help communities operate, but as you can see here, decarbonization and the green energy journey and also in digital infrastructure. I think as you saw from that video, with all the deep expertise and relationships we've built, we should be well positioned to keep responding to this and delivering superior return, but also growing. With that, I might hand over first to Ben Way and team to talk to you about Macquarie Asset Management, then Michael Silverton and then Nick O'Kane.
Thanks, Shemara. Infrastructure is a flagship business for Macquarie Asset Management. We've built a substantive and deep track record over the last 30 years, spanning real assets, private credit, and listed equities. Excitingly, we continue to see strong growth opportunities in infrastructure fueled by high investor demand for real assets and long-term thematics such as urbanization, energy transition, and digitalization. We'll pick up some of these in our case studies. What Shemara's last slide did is it framed just how big this opportunity is. What that means for our teams is that we have a deep pipeline of opportunities to match capital with. This is leading to some really exciting outcomes, larger funds, record deployment as we extend vintages, and also our ability to innovate by moving into new markets and new sectors.
The integration of Macquarie Asset Management and the Green Investment Group underlines how we keep evolving our business to harness capital so we can invest up and down the risk curve in terms of renewables. It will also allow us to continue to make positive investments addressing the net- zero challenge. This is just one example of many of how we can impact our communities, how we can do well and do good. Our portfolio companies are used by millions of people every day, and our active asset management approach allows us to create value while improving outcomes. The following case studies give you a further sense of MAM's infrastructure activities.
Data consumption and generation is growing rapidly. Internet traffic volumes are doubling every 3 years. During the pandemic, almost every aspect of our lives, our work, our education shifted online, making access to digital infrastructure which supports these activities incredibly important. As well as these changing patterns of data usage, we're also accessing new technologies such as smart devices, autonomous machinery, and edge computing. That means that the need for ever-increasing capacity of secure and reliable digital infrastructure is becoming critical. At Macquarie Asset Management, we've evolved our portfolios to meet this rapid pace of digitization by investing in the ownership of the assets which operate and develop it. From telecommunication towers to fiber and wireless networks to data centers, our assets reach over 110 million people every year.
Last year, we led a consortium which made an investment in Vocus Group, a fiber and network solutions business which owns and operates Australia's second-largest intercapital fiber network. We recognized an opportunity to scale and grow Vocus' unique offering by ensuring that more communities can access secure and reliable fiber optic infrastructure. Our investment has enabled Vocus to plan for over AUD 1 billion in capital expenditure over the next 5 years to expand its fiber optic infrastructure. Importantly, this new investment is going to enable the business to increase capacity on its key capital city networks by over 4 times on average, and expand capacity on its key regional networks by over 10 times. These new fiber builds are also going to enable more communities, including remote communities, to have access to critical online services such as e-health, online education, and remote working.
Fiber infrastructure also supports new technologies such as low Earth orbit satellites, smart devices, autonomous machines, and edge computing. We are so excited to continue to invest in assets such as Vocus Group, which enables the communities around us to access technology built on fiber networks.
Shipping plays an integral role in the global economy, which is particularly the case in the U.S., which is the largest consumer economy in the world. Recognizing the importance of the sector to this part of the world, we leveraged our global experience to invest in terminal infrastructure to help build out these supply chains. We've invested in a number of markets across this region, but in particular, our focus has been on the two main gateways into the U.S. consumer market. That's on the West Coast, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and on the East Coast, it's the port of New York, New Jersey. Through these two gateways, approximately half of all containerized volume flows into this market. Today, we handle over 5 million shipping containers at our terminal portfolio, which makes us the largest owner of independent container terminals in North America.
We wanna use this leadership position to continue investing in the sector. In particular, we've already spent AUD 300 million to expand capacity, electrify our equipment, and help build sustainable supply chains for the future. It's been a journey to get here, and we've made significant investments in our communities. We wanna use our established position as a market leader to respond to clients, communities, and our investments. We wanna have good health, safety, and environmental outcomes for all of our assets and all of our stakeholders.
Macquarie Capital's story in infrastructure has long been as a pioneer, driving innovation in the industry as an advisor, investor, and developer. In many ways, the genesis of the infrastructure activities we have across the group today, we're a market leader, but over the last three decades, we have continually evolved our business to remain so. Our deep relationships and networks with clients and partners, specialized expertise, and our asset creation experience provide a differentiated offering and a unique advantage. We have more than 200 specialists in infrastructure in MacCap, from advisors and investors to engineers and developers with capabilities to work at all stages of the infrastructure life cycle and differentiating us from pure play advisors, financiers, or developers. Our teams are on the ground and local, leading to very long-term relationships with partners, including corporates, co-investors, and contractors globally.
These foundations, built over many decades, position us well to support our clients and partners. Now, there are three points I wanna call out around the infrastructure opportunity for Macquarie Capital. One, we are consistently active in traditional core infrastructure, partnering with the public sector to deliver essential improvements and additional capacity. This investment need is driven in part by macro trends such as urbanization, population growth, and the energy transition, which as we know, is broader than just renewables, where we have deep expertise, but also through other activities like investing in LNG and natural gas infrastructure. We'll hear shortly about how we're partnering as lead developer with Transurban on new roads in the U.S., continuing the long heritage that began with the Australian motorways in the early 1990s.
Two, infrastructure continues to evolve. As clients expand the scope of their mandates into new areas such as social and digital infrastructure, we are well positioned to support them and to invest alongside in those areas such as Spanish fiber network business Onivia, that we will hear about shortly. Technology is also creating new business models and ways to improve infrastructure efficiency and resilience, whether it be optimizing traffic flows, productivity, or electrification. Three, there is a growing base of private capital seeking opportunities with an estimated $2 trillion of dry powder across the industry, of which infrastructure represents a meaningful and growing share, and this is unlevered dry powder. Our deep relationships with private capital providers of all types means we are well-placed to capitalize on this growing trend. These investors value our long-standing asset and deal creation expertise.
We are well-placed to match investors and partners with the right opportunities based on their risk appetite and desired exposure, whether it be a sector, region, or stage of the asset life cycle. These sponsor clients often require capital solutions or incremental capital, which we can provide from our balance sheet, from development capital to equity and credit investing. We are seeing significant opportunity across the spectrum. We also continue to work with corporate clients on both their energy transition requirements and on pathways to unlock the value of their own embedded infrastructure. Again, often leveraging our network of private capital relationships to find partnership solutions. Overall, we are very optimistic about the growth opportunities across the sector, whether it be in core infrastructure, across developed and emerging markets, within an increasingly diverse sector, and against a backdrop of private capital growth.
With that in mind, we'll now hear a couple of perspectives on how we're using our own capital and partnering with clients to deliver better infrastructure outcomes for our communities.
In order to address heavy congestion in the greater Washington, D.C. area, the state of Maryland launched this multi-billion-dollar project to replace the American Legion Bridge and develop 36 miles of new managed lane along two major interstate roads across Maryland and Virginia within the second most congested corridor in the U.S. OpLin Maryland is the largest unsolicited P3 development and also considered as a project of national significance. Macquarie, along with partner Transurban, formed a consortium called Accelerate Maryland Partners that was selected in February 2021 to develop the project with the state of Maryland. This is the first equity co-investment we are doing with Transurban, building upon decades-long relationship the two companies have in Australia.
Since our selection, the consortium has been working with the state of Maryland to undertake all the pre-development activities that are required for the project to reach financial close by the end of the year. These activities include developing our technical solutions, running a competitive procurement to select the contractors that will be working with us on the project, engaging with all the local stakeholder and local community, and arranging for the debt and equity financing for the project. Macquarie, as lead developer, equity investor, and financial advisor, has taken an active role and leadership in all of these activities. Macquarie will leverage its global expertise as developer and strong financial experience to bring significant value to the community through this project. We will fund significant critical transit infrastructure.
We will stimulate the local market by engaging with disadvantaged, minority-owned, women-owned, and veteran-owned local businesses to undertake large portion of the work. Excitingly, we are also working toward the first U.S. connected infrastructure of this scale that will provide a better user experience for the traveler, but also help the uptake of connected, automated, and electric vehicles in the region. Overall, this project will help reduce the travel time for traveler by up to 56% in rush hour and, through better traffic flow, also help cutting the greenhouse gas emissions by about 28% by 2040.
Spain is actually one of Europe's most mature fiber markets with very high fiber penetration. We saw an opportunity to create a wholesale-only fiber network. What that means in practice is that it can deliver more flexible, secure broadband for both large ISPs and small ISPs and to help them expand. 2019, we acquired a 1 million home fiber network from MasMovil, who are a fast-growing challenger network in Spain, and we branded that company as Onivia in the beginning of 2020. We then followed that up last year in 2021 by acquiring another million home fiber network to take the whole network to more than 2 million homes. This time covering more rural areas and having a genuine national footprint.
Not many infrastructure investors were able to get their heads around investing in Spain regarding the market as too competitive. We were able to show that by creating an independent wholesale-only network with long-term contracts which helps mitigate the risk, with long-term financing, we can create a core infrastructure business. Using Macquarie's expertise as a developer of infrastructure, we've identified quite a significant pipeline to further expand this network and become what we believe is the premier independent wholesale fiber network in Spain, making a real difference to both ISP customers and their end users.
I think what's interesting about this example in Spain is we created an infrastructure business not by building new fiber networks, but by taking assets that weren't being fully utilized, putting them into a new infrastructure business, and being able to show to the market that this is a proper core infrastructure like any other utility. The benefits for consumers of a wholesale-only network is ultimately more choice and better service.
Good morning, everyone. As has been demonstrated from the opening video and these previous presentations, Macquarie's expertise and involvement across the infrastructure landscape runs deep. While Macquarie Capital and Macquarie Asset Management have long played the role of advisors and investors, developers and managers of infrastructure, in our CGM business, the role we play with infrastructure is somewhat different. For us, infrastructure is integral to our business offering in that it allows us to deliver the services we provide to our customers. Put simply, we are customers of key infrastructure and active users on a day-to-day basis. This activity, in turn, facilitates key elements of our offerings to clients. As you've heard me detail on previous occasions, CGM is a client-focused business that provides four broad product offerings. Capital and financing, risk management, market access, and physical execution and logistics solutions.
We do this across three distinct business lines, commodities, financial markets, and asset finance. It is across these offerings that CGM uses infrastructure and infrastructure-related sectors to provide niche solutions that are often physical in nature to our diverse client base. How do we touch infrastructure? Firstly, in our commodities business, we use energy and transportation infrastructure to facilitate the physical movement of commodities between where they are produced and where they are consumed. From an energy perspective, we can look at the role we play across our global gas and power business, particularly in North America, where our team understands the power transmission and gas pipeline grid very well. As a result of rapidly changing supply and demand dynamics, our clients have a growing need for our services to help them source and sell their energy products.
We do this by getting gas and power from where it is produced to where it is consumed, and by understanding the implication of physical flows and the impact that they have on prices. We are well-recognized as a market leader in this industry. We are the number 4 ranked gas marketer in the region, with a large team supporting the physical movement of energy on behalf of clients such as producers, utilities, power generators, and other marketers. We lean on this expertise of our team, which is underpinned by deep fundamental analytics and a 24-hour real-time monitoring that results in a deep understanding of the network infrastructure. We physically move gas and power to find efficient paths over major interstate pipelines and power grids, which sees us enter into short and long-term leases of physical infrastructure assets.
The knowledge we have developed has allowed us to expand our offering, positioning us well to help connect increasingly global energy flows in markets like LNG. Our gas and power business has grown to be a substantial business for CGM and for Macquarie, a business that is fundamentally reliant on the infrastructure sector. In our asset finance business, we use our balance sheet to provide financing solutions for clients, usually backed by physical assets. We are currently helping clients across 40 countries acquire and deploy these physical assets. An example of this is in our shipping finance business, where we use our expertise across the shipping industry to provide financing solutions to a large number of global shipping clients. Our portfolio size now stands at over $1 billion. We'll hear more about what's driving the growth in that business from Marc Hari in just a little bit.
This embedded market knowledge inherent within the CGM teams is also demonstrated clearly in our continued funding of gas and electricity meters across the U.K. Utilizing decades of utility infrastructure experience, we have assisted in the rollout of over 10 million meters to homes and businesses in the U.K. Our team is continuing to support U.K. energy retailers as they move towards the deployment of smart meters. Finally, perhaps to a lesser extent compared to our other offerings, we also support projects that operate in infrastructure-adjacent sectors by financing solutions to enable the mobilization of capital. Recent examples here include our investment alongside other prominent financial investors in Storegga, an independent company based in St. Fergus, Scotland. Storegga is pioneering carbon storage and removal methods to assist in the transition to a net zero economy.
As a business that has been active in the global energy markets for many years, we see supporting businesses like Storegga as a key part of our energy transition journey. As you can see across the various parts of our business, given the physical nature of our client offerings, we are a significant user of infrastructure, and it is integral to the way we do business. This is something we have been doing for many years, and we are well-placed to adapt and evolve with our clients as their needs change. Now let's hear from Marc Hari, head of our shipping finance business, who will talk about how we are supporting the transportation infrastructure sector. Thank you.
With 90% of all goods being transported by sea, the maritime industry is the backbone of the global supply chain infrastructure. In 2017, Macquarie identified an opportunity to establish its shipping finance business. We observed the dislocation in the market with small to medium-sized ship owners finding it more difficult than in the past to access bank financing. That provided Macquarie with an excellent entry point into new markets, and an opportunity to apply its asset finance and transport infrastructure expertise, and to become a reliable capital provider to the maritime industry. Over the last four years, Macquarie Shipping Finance loan book has grown to more than $1 billion. The business, which specializes in providing finance to owners of commoditized ships, has now financed more than 200 vessels globally, representing a market value of more than $3 billion.
Our presence in the shipping industry today means that we're well-placed to embrace further opportunities arising out of the energy transition. We expect to see the industry's fuel source changing to carbon neutral options like ammonia and hydrogen. Through this transition, ship owners will need to rely on the global energy sector to make carbon neutral fuel sources available at scale globally and on shipyards and their suppliers to engineer the necessary ships. With the changes to ships come changes to port infrastructure, operational equipment, and bunker supply stations. This is a significant and exciting transition for which substantial amounts of capital and expertise are going to be required, for which our shipping finance team is well-positioned to support a growing group of clients.
Hopefully that has given you a good sense of our deep capability across such a broad range of sectors, geographies, and products, and some of the opportunities we're looking at. But as I said at the beginning, the most encouraging part about this sector is we are still early in the journey. Looking specifically at some of the things in terms of what's next, and starting first of all with new sectors that we're evolving into, or sectorally where we go next. There's obviously in urbanization, as I said, far more need for capital and expertise in developing countries, but also in developed countries as they upgrade infrastructure in not just utilities and transport, but social, health, education infrastructure.
There are also a couple of big new themes in terms of decarbonization, which is not gonna just impact energy, but also transportation and other sectors like agriculture, industrials. As you heard in terms of digitization, new investments required in towers, fiber optic networks, data centers, hyperscale data centers, et cetera. A lot more for our teams to respond to in terms of sectoral need for infrastructure. Also regionally, as you've seen, we're growing patiently adjacently into new geographies. Currently, we're growing a lot into Eastern Europe, in the EMEA region, and into Latin America and the Americas, and of course, throughout Asia. This will happen market by market patiently and continue to be locally led where people develop the deep expertise and understanding of what's needed, the relationships, et cetera. Lastly, in terms of new products.
You heard Ben talk about in Macquarie Asset Management, we'll gradually move into new asset classes like more in infrastructure debt and credit and real asset debt. We also will move into new sectors with the Green Investment Group coming across, and we'll also move into new products up and down the risk curve with super core funds, open-ended funds, et cetera. In Macquarie Asset Management, you heard Michael Silverton and the team talk about things we'll do there. We're not just a leading advisor growing into new countries, et cetera. In terms of our developer role, construction, development, operations now, as you heard Oliver Bradley talk about, we're looking at platforms more and putting together and investing in platforms. Lastly in CGM, again, patient, adjacent growth. You saw that last video from Marc Hari on what we're doing in shipping.
As we move to new fuels of hydrogen and ammonia, there'll be scope to finance assets in adjacent areas like bunkering and as ports evolve, et cetera. A space which may seem old hat because we've been in it for 27 years, but in Macquarie's classic approach, as you heard in the video from our clients, we are dynamic, we're adapting. The external environment keeps changing, the need keeps growing, and we are responding. Thanks to all of the team who gave you insights. It's a team we're very proud of, them plus many others. With that, I'll hand back to Sam if there are any questions on infrastructure.
Thanks, Shemara. I think we're gonna hold the questions to the end, so we'll move on to our EMEA section. For those who don't know, Paul Plewman is our Chief Executive Officer for EMEA. Before we hand to Paul and then our group heads, we'll hear a short video from our clients and staff.
Been in this business for over 20 years, and I think it's close to unrecognizable to what our business was. I think we've been through an international expansion and variations to our business model, and I think the fact that we've been able to continue to do that without any top-down edict as such has been, a testament to what you can do within Macquarie.
The fact that we've opened offices in more jurisdictions really open up almost the playground for everyone. The focus is really to lever the local knowledge of our team there whilst bringing the more global perspective on infrastructure at European level.
For the very first time, Macquarie has actually established a sales and trading operation in continental Europe. This was an opportunity for us to bring together a very wide pool of expertise and traders and specialists in order to respond to our client needs in the region.
I'm excited about the fact that Macquarie will expand further globally. They will continue to add new verticals, sector specialists to their teams.
There's a lot of energy of enthusiasm among the teams. The franchise is growing everywhere in Europe. It's really a privilege to be part of this adventure.
When they started in FIC, then services, they went into the digital space, which is for us very important because whatever business we are looking at, there's always a digital component.
We wanted an investor who not only supplied finance, but also support and help. We wanted an investor who was ambitious for growth, as we're ambitious, and Macquarie fitted that space perfectly for us.
The key strengths of Macquarie is that they are able to come up with creative and innovative deal ideas.
I was very impressed by the judgment, the tenacity of the teams across, Europe and ANZ. I think we really worked seamlessly in building that in with the collective team, particularly across time zones.
Well, I think that there are always challenges to ensure you're maintaining a market-leading proposition. It's a competitive space. The customer needs evolve, the environment changes, and so you need a partner who can work collaboratively to pick the right roadmap forward to make sure you stay with a market-leading position.
Vodafone have been a long-standing client of ours, and we saw a great opportunity to work with them to launch a new program that you know makes the life cycle of smartphones and other technology assets more sustainable. We work closely with both GIG and the Carbon Trust.
The great thing about being an investor within Macquarie is the ability to help our portfolio companies with the broader MacCap platform. For instance, we can offer advice from our finance experts, from our ESG team or other operational teams.
We found Macquarie had great expertise and understanding the market to help us make the right strategic acquisitions.
We mandated Macquarie to come and work to really help us get this transaction across the line, given Macquarie's strong cross-border credentials, as well as local stakeholder relationships.
In Macquarie Asset Management in Europe, we're partnering with clients to mobilize their capital into assets and investments that will make a real difference in terms of financial returns for our investors, and real differences in communities that will expand sustainable infrastructure provision, improve community assets, and help tackle the climate emergency.
We find Macquarie are flexible to address our needs when we have some ideas. Equally, they have quite a proactive approach to evolve their solution in the market and often bring their ideas to us.
Our experience in the European market has enabled us to develop a range of solutions for our clients. One example of this over the last 12 months was a green infrastructure debt solution, which we developed with institutional investors here in Europe. This strategy was tailored specifically to meet the increasing regulatory requirements and the increasing investor need for green solutions in the market.
They have developed a relationship of trust with a lot of parties in the market, corporates, management teams, and I think it is due to the consistent behavior in the market of being a trustworthy partner, to all the other stakeholders in our industry.
Our portfolio now is at its peak so far, and it's more diversified than ever, both across the capital structure, but also in terms of sectors.
Market has grown a lot over the past few years. Growth is accelerating recently. I think that Macquarie's with the unique skill set that we've assembled will definitely be able to capture a large part of this growth in the coming years.
I'd like to start by making a connection back to 2019. This was the last time that we profiled a business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We had two key themes. Firstly, we wanted to continue to build out a strong U.K. base, where we've been active since 1989. Secondly, we wanted to use that base to expand across the region, particularly across the rest of mainland Europe. Those themes remain central to our growth strategy for Macquarie in EMEA. As you can see, we remain very focused on the U.K. and Europe. We also have a small presence in Dubai and Johannesburg. Since we last presented 3 years ago, we've done a lot. We've grown our head count by 400 people. That growth has been biased towards Europe, as you might expect.
It has been driven by exciting opportunities for global businesses. It's also led to new offices with Dublin and Paris a key focus. This expansion in Dublin and Paris has been partly due to the U.K.'s withdrawal from the EU. As we previously mentioned, this was not a material event for the group. We carefully managed our way through the Brexit process. We established three new regulatory hubs, and we achieved a seamless transition for our clients with no major issues. Paris is now home to Macquarie Capital France, which is focused on the Macquarie advisory business. Dublin is the location for Macquarie Bank Europe, the entity that is mainly focused on the CGM activities. Lastly, Luxembourg is a hub for Macquarie Asset Management Europe, the main entity for our MAM business. We've also spent the last two years navigating the pandemic.
While there's been a strong and rapid rollout of the vaccine, we've seen our staff having to work lengthy periods of time from home. This has naturally been the case for our clients, too. We've also gone the extra mile to support clients and portfolio companies affected by the pandemic, and we've made a special effort to support our communities through our foundation and staff volunteering. I'm pleased to say that most of our offices are now cleared to return. We are well underway in a shift to a new hybrid working model, and we believe that this combines the benefit of regular office time with continued flexibility for our people. One important characteristic of this region is that we drive innovation and leadership for the group in infrastructure and the green transition.
Our MAM Real Estate and Green Investment Group businesses are led from the U.K. and soon to join forces. This cluster of expertise has been built up from a leadership in Europe in these sectors. This expertise gives us insights and relationships that we then export to other regions. It also sees us working with the likes of TotalEnergies in the U.K., France, and Korea, Iberdrola in England and Japan, and Arup in the U.K. and Australia. One final point to set the context. We have strong growth opportunities across all of our areas of expertise. This comes in two ways. Firstly, the European market is huge. It's huge. While we've pockets of formidable strength, we've lots of headroom for growth. Of course, lots of headroom for adjacencies too.
Secondly, as I come to, we have seen strong growth in almost all our markets, especially our key markets. As you'll have often heard, we generally grow through adjacencies. In this region, that's happened in four main ways. Firstly, by building up businesses that we've grown here, like power and gas trading, like infrastructure debt, and of course, infrastructure and energy principal investment. These businesses often go on to establish themselves globally. Secondly, by importing experience from around the group. We import successful businesses from outside of EMEA into EMEA, like real estate principal investing. Thirdly, by creating new companies like Corre Energy and Cero Generation, which are operationally segregated subsidiaries. Or lastly, by expanding through acquisitions. For example, Green Investment Group, the asset management business ValueInvest, Cargill physical oil trading, and a number of real estate platforms.
We've also made positive progress in the technologies and markets we're active in, with many firsts from this current year. On the energy transition side, we formed a new partnership in the Netherlands. This partnership is called HyCC and will develop an existing pipeline of 400 MW of green hydrogen electrolysis projects. This partnership will help to decarbonize energy-intensive industries. In the area of EV charging, we've also formed a new partnership. We'll provide public transport and commercial fleet operators with charging infrastructure. We've entered a number of new offshore wind markets. We've pioneered machine learning strategies in our QIS investment business. We've seen our shipping finance team pass important growth milestones. We've built a real estate and logistics capability, which was to respond to market opportunities. While we don't work to a fixed growth strategy, we are thoughtful at planning and targeting opportunities.
In 2019, we spoke about our future plans, and I'd like to spend a moment updating you on this. I'd like to demonstrate our commitment to deliver against our intentions, while at the same time remaining agile and taking opportunities as we see them. You've heard a lot already on infrastructure, and you'll soon hear case studies on fundraising, real estate, on commodities and on financial markets, on principal finance and our advisory business. You've also seen much through the year on our renewables capabilities. We were proud to showcase this business when we went to Glasgow for the COP in November. I'll add to this by drawing out some of the broader themes. Our core strength in the U.K. continues to lead us to opportunities. Importantly, these opportunities will maintain our position as one of the leading infrastructure and renewable investors here.
Across Europe, we've made significant new investments in the Nordics, Benelux, in Italy, and across Central and Eastern Europe. We've naturally invested in our own capabilities with senior appointments in our Macquarie Capital team in France, Italy, and Spain. I'm particularly proud of how we've integrated acquisitions, which now lie at the heart of our growth strategies in renewables, commodities, real estate, and public investments. Let me turn now to what is being added up to in financial performance. Firstly, we continue to see a trend of steady, sustained growth and income. We grew total income by over 300% in the decade between 2010 and 2020. This growth has continued.
While we did see some impact from COVID, which affected our income in financial years 2020 and 2021, as you can see, we've had a strong recovery in 2022 so far. The second point to note is how well balanced our businesses are across our operating groups. This gives us diversity of income across the full spectrum of our capabilities and increasing geographic diversity. Before I hand over to the global heads of our three operating groups to talk about their businesses in EMEA, I'd like to give you a sense of the opportunity that we see here. This repeats the point I made earlier about capitalizing on the growth in the markets we operate in and developing further through adjacencies. This growth opportunity is backed by strong fundamentals. Omicron has caused some recent disruption, but the region is well vaccinated.
This has allowed for a rapid bounce back of economies. They are returning quickly to the pre-pandemic levels of output. We have fortunately seen built-up demand in many key sectors. We're also well aligned to some of the fastest-growing sectors and themes in the economy, including helping companies with the transition to net zero. This is well ahead of 2050 for many sectors and companies. Growth in demand for telco and digital infrastructure. We are aligned with the changing needs for transport investment. Continuing growth in demand for gas and power. Pent-up demand for higher than average levels of M&A activity across the region. Let me now hand over to our group heads to explain how we plan to pursue these opportunities, starting with Ben, who's with me here in London.
Thanks, Paul. EMEA has been an important region for MAM for some two decades. It's the largest part of our global infrastructure platform with some $100 billion of assets under management. As Paul highlighted, we have substantial room to grow in EMEA, given the size of the market and our relative share. The good news is we are capitalizing on our heritage to grow and to innovate. We're increasingly active in private credit across infrastructure and real estate, and we're also ramping up our real estate footprint and funds business and building out our public investment strategies across equities, fixed income, and multi-asset solutions. This is allowing us to move into new markets, such as Ireland and Greece, but also allowing us to be more relevant for clients.
We're also taking our experience in things like opportunistic real estate to launch new products and invest in sectors such as logistics and build to rent. Importantly, EMEA is home to many of our key client relationships. We continue to see this pool of capital grow and support just not our platform in EMEA, but around the world. As always in MAM, we're not trying to be all things to investors or clients. Rather, we focus on areas we believe we can deliver while making sure that every investment MAM makes has a positive impact for everyone, building enduring long-term relationships. The following case studies speak to our client focus and our growing activities in the region.
For over 30 years, we've been identifying opportunities globally in real estate. The U.K. housing market is characterized by stretched affordability ratios, a persistently undersupply of quality housing, and changing tenant demands. The U.K. market for rental housing is a significantly large market. It's 5.4 million units. Less than 2% of those units are managed professionally. That's compared to the United States, where there are over 40 million. We partner with a professional management team to form Goodstone Living, which is an integrated development and investment management business focusing on U.K. rental housing. We like management teams with deep operational experience in emerging sectors that are supported by global mega trends and structural tailwinds. Those include digitalization and technology, urbanization and demographic shifts, and sustainability.
In our first 12 months of operations with Goodstone Living, we've acquired 2 development sites that were capable of delivering over 900 units in the U.K., representing a total end value of almost GBP 300 million. We have identified a further 7,000 units as a pipeline in the U.K. Goodstone Living's projects will all be built sustainably with guiding principles to create positive social value and decarbonization initiatives. We're seeking to reduce embodied carbon by 30% and operational carbon by 50% in all our communities. The creation of specialist real estate platforms is an exciting way to invest into real estate. Not only are you investing in the physical real estate, but you're helping a business grow and scale.
It's very exciting to build a business from scratch in a sector and in a market that has so much room to run.
We believe that asset managers like us who can forge long-term partnerships with asset owners across multiple investment opportunities and asset classes will just have a much better chance of success. This is particularly true here in EMEA, where we have some of the largest and most mature asset owners globally. Asset owners are looking for specialist capabilities across a range of different areas, whether that's private credit, infrastructure, real estate, equities and fixed income, and are able to bring the breadth of our platform to the table when we sit down and find out how to solve their investment challenges. We're constantly talking to our clients and finding out what their needs will be for the future, and thinking about how we can partner with them to build those solutions that will meet their needs today, but also in the years to come.
What we're increasingly seeing is that clients will come to us to help them solve their investment challenges, whether that's their decarbonization ambitions or perhaps an insurance solution that they're looking for, or even a client who wants to understand how we think about technology and innovation into the future that will shape their investment portfolios that they have going forward. In every conversation, ESG comes up. When we think about how we're able to partner with our clients and help them, particularly, for example, on their decarbonization journeys, we're thinking about the strategies that we have, the capabilities that we have that can help them. Very early on, we recognize that to be successful, we need to have trusted partnerships.
For us, everything comes back to the client and the value that we're able to add on the investments that we make on their behalf, and the positive impact that we're able to make on behalf of everyone.
As you've heard already, EMEA is a crucial region for Macquarie, as it is for CGM. We offer our full range of products, and they are, of course, capital and financing, risk management, market access, and physical execution and logistics solutions. We offer those products across our three distinct business lines, commodities, financial markets, and asset finance. Over the years, we have experienced significant growth in the region, and the office has become the birthplace of some of our most important businesses. One such business is, of course, our energy business, which we started back in 2003 when I was in the London office. EMEA has always been important for our businesses, having contributed between 25% and 30% of CGM's operating income over the last few years.
We now have more than 770 staff in the region, and that represents more than 35% of the CGM workforce globally. As we heard earlier, we recently established a European branch with an office in Paris. This new branch has increasingly become a strategic pillar for our client offering in Europe, and we've seen solid growth over a relatively short period of time. We are excited about the potential for future development in that office. Looking now across our three business lines, you can see we're very active. Starting with commodities, EMEA is a significant contributor to the group and has experienced strong growth, particularly in recent years. We provide our client offerings across most traded commodities, including energy, metals, and agricultural commodities markets. We have built a deep franchise of client relationships with some of our most successful businesses originating in this jurisdiction.
As discussed earlier, a good example of this is our global energy business, which we started in London back in 2003 before exporting some of our learnings to other regions, and has now become one of our strongest and most successful global businesses. We are a leading provider of risk management and financing services across European power, gas, and oil markets, actively trading across all liquid wholesale European hubs. As you'll hear shortly from Erik Petersson, Head of Power and Gas for EMEA, our expertise and strong market position enables us to work closely with our clients during periods of extreme volatility. An obvious example of this is what we are currently witnessing in these markets. Our clients are facing unprecedented volatility that is impacting their bottom lines. We are well-positioned to help them navigate the challenges of the current environment.
We also have a substantial offering across agricultural and soft commodities, major bulk commodities, and precious and base metals markets. We continue to develop our presence in other exciting markets, including compliance and voluntary carbon markets. Our EMEA Commodities business also houses the Commodity Investor Products business, a platform that provides institutional investors with access to enhanced returns linked to commodities through index-based risk premia strategies. We have seen this business expand more recently to include quantitative index products across all asset classes, such as equities, fixed income, and foreign exchange. Turning to our financial markets businesses. There, too, we have a full service offering across a range of products. We provide a broad range of financial products, including foreign exchange and interest rate swap hedging solutions, derivatives products, and equity and debt finance solutions to corporate and institutional clients. We are a provider of securitization solutions.
Later, you'll hear from Sarah Milne, a managing director in our FIC team. She will talk about our investment in Domivest, a Dutch buy to let mortgage provider that we helped establish back in 2017 with an equity investment and financing through a new warehouse facility. We continue to support this company as it continues to grow today. We are also active in more than 50 futures markets globally, with hubs in London and Frankfurt being a key part of this global operation. Given the size of the markets across EMEA, we continue to see significant growth opportunity for all of these businesses. Finally, the third of our business lines, asset finance, also enjoys a strong presence in EMEA. Here we deliver a diverse range of tailored finance solutions across a variety of industries and asset classes, including technology, electronics, energy, and mining.
As I've previously mentioned, we are one of the largest independent meter asset providers in the U.K., delivering more than 10 million gas and energy meters across homes and businesses. We also have more than two decades of experience providing solutions that improve accessibility and affordability of essential IT and telecoms equipment. As you heard from Marc Hari, we are now an established counterparty to the shipping sector with a U.S. $1 billion loan book. As you can see, a very strong suite of CGM businesses in EMEA, where we continue to evolve and see a lot of opportunity for growth. In terms of areas of immediate focus, we continue to see growth in adjacent markets to the businesses we currently operate in. From a medium to longer term perspective, we see significant opportunities supporting our clients through the energy transition.
Given our deep expertise and capabilities across the energy sector, we are well-placed to support our clients with their decarbonization ambitions. We will now hear from Erik on how we're supporting clients navigate the volatility in current energy markets in EMEA, and from Sarah with more on our investment in Domivest. Thank you.
Been in this business for over 20 years and, I think it's close to unrecognizable to what our business was. I think we've been through an international expansion and variations to our business model, and I think the fact that we've been able to continue to do that without any top-down edict as such has been, testament to what you can do within Macquarie.
The fact that we've opened offices in more jurisdictions really opens up almost the playground for everyone. The focus is really to leverage the local knowledge of our team there while bringing the more global perspective of infrastructure at European level.
For the very first time, Macquarie has actually established a sales and trading operation in continental Europe. This was an opportunity for us to bring together a very wide pool of expertise and traders and specialists in order to respond to our client needs in the region.
I'm excited about the fact that Macquarie will expand further globally.
That they will continue to add new verticals, sector specialists to their teams.
There's a lot of energy of enthusiasm among the teams. The franchise is growing everywhere in Europe, so it's really a privilege to be part of this adventure.
Well, they started in FIC, then services, they went into the digital space, which is for us very important because whatever business we are looking at, there's always a digital component.
We wanted an investor who not only supplied finance, but also support and help. We wanted an investor who was ambitious for growth, as we're ambitious, and Macquarie fitted that space perfectly for us.
The key strengths of Macquarie is that they are able to come up with creative and innovative deal ideas.
I was very impressed by the judgment, the tenacity of the teams across, Europe and ANZ. I think we really worked seamlessly in building that in with the collective team, particularly across time zones.
Well, I think that there are always challenges to ensure you're maintaining a market-leading proposition. It's a competitive space. The customer needs evolve, the environment changes, and so you need a partner who can work collaboratively to pick the right roadmap forward to make sure you stay with a market-leading position.
Vodafone have been a long-standing client of ours, and we saw a great opportunity to work with them to launch a new program that you know makes the life cycle of smartphones and other technology assets more sustainable. We work closely with both GIG and the Carbon Trust.
The great thing about being an investor within Macquarie is the ability to help our portfolio companies with the broader MacCap platform. For instance, we can offer advice from our finance experts, from our ESG team or other operational teams.
We found Macquarie had great expertise and understanding the market to help us make the right strategic acquisitions.
We mandated Macquarie to come and work to really help us get this transaction across the line, given Macquarie's strong cross-border credentials as well as local stakeholder relationships.
In Macquarie Asset Management in Europe, we're partnering with clients to mobilize their capital into assets and investments that will make a real difference in terms of financial returns for our investors, and real differences in communities that will expand sustainable infrastructure provision, improve community assets, and help tackle the climate emergency.
We find Macquarie are flexible to address our needs when we have some ideas, but equally, they have quite a proactive approach to evolve their solution in the market and often bring their ideas to us.
Our experience in the European market has enabled us to develop a range of solutions for our clients. One example of this over the last twelve months was a green infrastructure debt solution, which we developed with institutional investors here in Europe. This strategy was tailored specifically to meet the increasing regulatory requirements and the increasing investor need for green solutions in the market.
They have developed a relationship of trust with a lot of parties in the market, corporates, management teams, and I think it is due to the consistent behavior in the market of being a trustworthy partner to all the other stakeholders in our industry.
Our portfolio now is at its peak so far, and it's more diversified than ever, both across the capital structure, but also in terms of sectors.
Market has grown a lot over the past few years. Growth is accelerating recently. I think that Macquarie's, with the unique skill set that we've assembled, will definitely be able to capture a large part of this growth in the coming years.
I'd like to start by making a connection back to 2019. This was the last time that we profiled a business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We had two key themes. Firstly, we wanted to continue to build out a strong U.K. base, where we've been active since 1989. Secondly, we wanted to use that base to expand across the region, particularly across the rest of mainland Europe. Those themes remain central to our growth strategy for Macquarie in EMEA. As you can see, we remain very focused on the U.K. and Europe. We also have a small presence in Dubai and Johannesburg. Since we last presented 3 years ago, we've done a lot. We've grown our head count by 400 people. That growth has been biased towards Europe, as you might expect.
It has been driven by exciting opportunities to grow our businesses. It's also led to new offices in Dublin and Paris as a key focus. This expansion in Dublin and Paris has been partly due to the U.K.'s withdrawal from the EU. As we previously mentioned, this was not a material event for the group. We carefully managed our way through the Brexit process. We established three new regulatory hubs, and we achieved a seamless transition for our clients with no major issues. Paris is now home to Macquarie Capital France, which is focused on the Macquarie advisory business. Dublin is the location for Macquarie Bank Europe, the entity that is mainly focused on the CGM activities. Lastly, Luxembourg is a hub for Macquarie Asset Management Europe, the main entity for our MAM business. We've also spent the last two years navigating the pandemic.
While there's been a strong and rapid rollout of the vaccine, we've seen our staff having to work lengthy periods of time from home. This has naturally been the case for our clients, too. We've also gone the extra mile to support clients and portfolio companies affected by the pandemic, and we've made a special effort to support our communities through our foundation and staff volunteering. I'm pleased to say that most of our offices are now cleared to return. We are well underway in a shift to a new hybrid working model. We believe that this combines the benefit of regular office time with continued flexibility for our people. One important characteristic of this region is that we drive innovation and leadership for the group in infrastructure and the green transition.
Our MAM real estate and green investment group businesses are led from the U.K. and soon to join forces. This cluster of expertise has been built up from a leadership in Europe in these sectors. This expertise gives us insights and relationships that we then export to other regions, and it also sees us working with the likes of TotalEnergies in the U.K., France, and Korea, Iberdrola in England and Japan, and Arup in the U.K. and Australia. One final point to set the context. We have strong growth opportunities across all of our areas of expertise. This comes in two ways. Firstly, the European market is huge. It's huge. While we've pockets of formidable strength, we've lots of headroom for growth, and of course, lots of headroom for adjacencies too.
Secondly, as I come to, we have seen strong growth in almost all our markets, especially our key markets. As you'll have often heard, we generally grow through adjacencies. In this region, that's happened in four main ways. Firstly, by building up businesses that we've grown here, like power and gas trading, like infrastructure debt, and of course, infrastructure and energy principal investment. These businesses often go on to establish themselves globally. Secondly, by importing experience from around the group. We import successful businesses from outside of EMEA into EMEA, like real estate principal investing. Thirdly, by creating new companies like Corre Energy and Cero Generation, which are operationally segregated subsidiaries. Lastly, by expanding through acquisitions. For example, Green Investment Group, the asset management business ValueInvest, Cargill physical oil trading, and a number of real estate platforms.
We've also made positive progress in the technologies and markets we're active in, with many firsts from this current year. On the energy transition side, we formed a new partnership in the Netherlands. This partnership is called HyCC, and it will develop an existing pipeline of 400 MW of green hydrogen electrolysis projects. This partnership will help to decarbonize energy-intensive industries. In the area of EV charging, we've also formed a new partnership. We'll provide public transport and commercial fleet operators with charging infrastructure. We've entered a number of new offshore wind markets. We've pioneered machine learning strategies in our QIS investment business. We've seen our shipping finance team pass important growth milestones, and we've built our real estate and logistics capability, which was to respond to market opportunities. While we don't work to a fixed growth strategy, we are thoughtful at planning and targeting opportunities.
In 2019, we spoke about our future plans, and I'd like to spend a moment updating you on this. I'd like to demonstrate our commitment to deliver against our intentions, while at the same time remaining agile and taking opportunities as we see them. You've heard a lot already on infrastructure, and you'll soon hear case studies on fundraising, real estate, on commodities, and on financial markets, on principal finance, and our advisory business. You've also seen much through the year on our renewables capabilities. We were proud to showcase this business when we went to Glasgow for the COP in November. I'll add to this by drawing out some of the broader themes. Our core strength in the U.K. continues to lead us to opportunities. Importantly, these opportunities will maintain our position as one of the leading infrastructure and renewable investors here.
Across Europe, we've made significant new investments in the Nordics, Benelux, in Italy, and across Central and Eastern Europe. We've naturally invested in our own capabilities with senior appointments in our Macquarie Capital team in France, Italy, and Spain. I'm particularly proud of how we've integrated acquisitions, which now lie at the heart of our growth strategies in renewables, commodities, real estate, and public investments. Let me turn now to what is being added up to in financial performance. Firstly, we continue to see a trend of steady, sustained growth in income. We grew total income by over 300% in the decade between 2010 and 2020. This growth has continued.
While we did see some impact from COVID, which affected our income in financial years 2020 and 2021, as you can see, we've had a strong recovery in 2022 so far. The second point to note is how well balanced our businesses are across our operating groups. This gives us diversity of income across the full spectrum of our capabilities and increasing geographic diversity. Before I hand over to the global heads of our three operating groups to talk about their businesses in EMEA, I'd like to give you a sense of the opportunity that we see here. This repeats the point I made earlier about capitalizing on the growth in the markets we operate in and developing further through adjacencies. This growth opportunity is backed by strong fundamentals. Omicron has caused some recent disruption, but the region is well vaccinated.
This has allowed for a rapid bounce back of economies. They are returning quickly to the pre-pandemic levels of output. We have fortunately seen built-up demand in many key sectors. We're also well aligned to some of the fastest-growing sectors and themes in the economy, including helping companies with the transition to net zero. This is well ahead of 2050 for many sectors and companies. The growth in demand for telco and digital infrastructure. We are aligned with the changing needs for transport investment, continuing growth in demand for gas and power, and pent-up demand for higher than average levels of M&A activity across the region. Let me now hand over to our group heads to explain how we plan to pursue these opportunities, starting with Ben, who's with me here in London.
Thanks, Paul. EMEA has been an important region for MAM for some two decades. It's the largest part of our global infrastructure platform with some $100 billion of assets under management. As Paul highlighted, we have substantial room to grow in EMEA, given the size of the market and our relative share. The good news is we are capitalizing on our heritage to grow and to innovate. We're increasingly active in private credit across infrastructure and real estate, and we're also ramping up our real estate footprint and funds business and building out our public investment strategies across equities, fixed income, and multi-asset solutions. This is allowing us to move into new markets, such as Ireland and Greece, but also allowing us to be more relevant for clients.
We're also taking our experience in things like opportunistic real estate to launch new products and invest in sectors such as logistics and build to rent. Importantly, EMEA is home to many of our key client relationships. We continue to see this pool of capital grow and support just not our platform in EMEA, but around the world. As always in MAM, we're not trying to be all things to investors or clients. Rather, we focus on areas we believe we can deliver while making sure that every investment MAM makes has a positive impact for everyone, building enduring long-term relationships. The following case studies speak to our client focus and our growing activities in the region.
For over 30 years, we've been identifying opportunities globally in real estate. The U.K. housing market is characterized by stressed affordability ratios, a persistently under supply of quality housing, and changing tenant demands. The U.K. market for rental housing is a significantly large market. It's 5.4 million units. Less than 2% of those units are managed professionally. That's compared to the United States, where there are over 40 million. We partner with a professional management team to form Goodstone Living, which is an integrated development and investment management business focusing on U.K. rental housing. We like management teams with deep operational experience in emerging sectors that are supported by global megatrends and structural tailwinds. Those include digitalization and technology, urbanization and demographic shifts, and sustainability.
In our first 12 months of operations with Goodstone Living, we've acquired 2 development sites that were capable of delivering over 900 units in the U.K., representing a total end value of almost GBP 300 million. We have identified a further 7,000 units as a pipeline in the U.K. Goodstone Living's projects will all be built sustainably with guiding principles to create positive social value and decarbonization initiatives. We're seeking to reduce embodied carbon by 30% and operational carbon by 50% in all our communities. The creation of specialist real estate platforms is an exciting way to invest into real estate. Not only are you investing in the physical real estate, but you're helping a business grow and scale.
It's very exciting to build a business from scratch in a sector and in a market that has so much room to run.
We believe that asset managers like us who can forge long-term partnerships with asset owners across multiple investment opportunities and asset classes will just have a much better chance of success. This is particularly true here in EMEA, where we have some of the largest and most mature asset owners globally. Asset owners are looking for specialist capabilities across a range of different areas, whether that's private credit, infrastructure, real estate, equities and fixed income, and able to bring the breadth of our platform to the table when we sit down and find out how to solve their investment challenges. We're constantly talking to our clients and finding out what their needs will be for the future, and thinking about how we can partner with them to build those solutions that will meet their needs today, but also in the years to come.
What we're increasingly seeing is that clients will come to us to help them solve their investment challenges, whether that's their decarbonization ambitions or perhaps an insurance solution that they're looking for, or even a client who wants to understand how we think about technology and innovation into the future that will shape their investment portfolios that they have going forward. In every conversation, ESG comes up. When we think about how we're able to partner with our clients and help them, particularly, for example, on their decarbonization journeys, we're thinking about the strategies that we have, the capabilities that we have that can help them. Very early on, we recognize that to be successful, we need to have trusted partnerships.
For us, everything comes back to the client and the value that we're able to add on the investments that we make on their behalf, and the positive impact that we're able to make on behalf of everyone.
As you've heard already, EMEA is a crucial region for Macquarie, as it is for CGM. We offer our full range of products, and they of course are capital and financing, risk management, market access, and physical execution and logistics solutions. We offer those products across our three distinct business lines, commodities, financial markets, and asset finance. Over the years, we've experienced significant growth in the region, and the office has become the birthplace of some of our most important businesses. One such business is, of course, our energy business, which we started back in 2003 when I was in the London office. EMEA has always been important for our businesses, having contributed between 25% and 30% of CGM's operating income over the last few years.
We now have more than 770 staff in region, and that represents more than 35% of the CGM workforce globally. As we heard earlier, we recently established a European branch with an office in Paris. This new branch has increasingly become a strategic pillar for our client offering in Europe, and we have seen solid growth over a relatively short period of time. We are excited about the potential for future development in that office. Looking now across our three business lines, you can see we're very active. Starting with commodities, EMEA is a significant contributor to the group and has experienced strong growth, particularly in recent years. We provide our client offerings across most traded commodities, including energy, metals, and agricultural commodities markets. We have built a deep franchise of client relationships with some of our most successful businesses originating in this jurisdiction.
As discussed earlier, a good example of this is our global energy business, which we started in London back in 2003 before exporting some of our learnings to other regions, and has now become one of our strongest and most successful global businesses. We are a leading provider of risk management and financing services across European power, gas, and oil markets, actively trading across all liquid wholesale European hubs. As you'll hear shortly from Erik Petersson, Head of Power and Gas for EMEA, our expertise and strong market position enables us to work closely with our clients during periods of extreme volatility. An obvious example of this is what we are currently witnessing in these markets. Our clients are facing unprecedented volatility that is impacting their bottom lines. We are well-positioned to help them navigate the challenges of the current environment.
We also have a substantial offering across agricultural and soft commodities, major bulk commodities, and precious and base metals markets. We continue to develop our presence in other exciting markets, including compliance and voluntary carbon markets. Our EMEA Commodities business also houses the Commodity Investor Products business, a platform that provides institutional investors with access to enhanced returns linked to commodities through index-based risk premia strategies. We have seen this business expand more recently to include quantitative index products across all asset classes, such as equities, fixed income, and foreign exchange. Turning to our financial markets businesses. There, too, we have a full service offering across a range of products. We provide a broad range of financial products, including foreign exchange and interest rate swap hedging solutions, derivatives products, and equity and debt finance solutions to corporate and institutional clients. We are a provider of securitization solutions.
Later, you'll hear from Sarah Milne, a Managing Director in our FIC team. She will talk about our investment in Domivest, a Dutch buy-to-let mortgage provider that we helped establish back in 2017 with an equity investment and financing through a new warehouse facility. We continue to support this company as it continues to grow today. We are also active in more than 50 futures markets globally, with hubs in London and Frankfurt being a key part of this global operation. Given the size of the markets across EMEA, we continue to see significant growth opportunity for all of these businesses. Finally, the third of our business lines, asset finance, also enjoys a strong presence in EMEA. Here, we deliver a diverse range of tailored finance solutions across a variety of industries and asset classes, including technology, electronics, energy, and mining.
As I've previously mentioned, we are one of the largest independent meter asset providers in the U.K., delivering more than 10 million gas and energy meters across homes and businesses. We also have more than two decades of experience providing solutions that improve accessibility and affordability of essential IT and telecoms equipment. As you heard from Marc Hari, we are now an established counterparty to the shipping sector with a $1 billion loan book. As you can see, a very strong suite of CGM businesses in EMEA, where we continue to evolve and see a lot of opportunity for growth. In terms of areas of immediate focus, we continue to see growth in adjacent markets to the businesses we currently operate in. From a medium to longer term perspective, we see significant opportunities supporting our clients through the energy transition.
Given our deep expertise and capabilities across the energy sector, we are well-placed to support our clients with their decarbonization ambitions. We will now hear from Erik on how we're supporting clients navigate the volatility in current energy markets in EMEA, and from Sarah with more on our investment in Domivest. Thank you.
2021 was a year without parallel in energy markets with incredible volatility created by geopolitical factors, and particularly Russian gas supplies, as well as strong demand as some economies are coming out of the pandemic. Gas prices at the beginning of 2021 were around EUR 20/MWh, and during December, they reached EUR 180/MWh. We had a one-day move in excess of EUR 60/MWh. Three times the price that we had at the beginning of the year, which is really unprecedented.
Coming into the summer of 2021, we had low gas storage levels in Europe, and that, combined with the tightness in supply from Russia, created particularly low inventories of gas storage levels across Europe, and that created some of the price volatility that we saw in December. Something which is unique about Macquarie's offering in the European energy markets is our ability to combine financial expertise with physical logistics. In a recent example, we helped a European utility to manage their price exposure in their LNG contract, where they're purchasing gas from the U.S. and shipping it to their demand center here in Europe. We've been active for over a decade now in EMEA gas and power, and as a result, have forged some really deep relationships.
We've continued to reliably and consistently service our customers, and that is something that I think they've really appreciated, particularly through this period of extreme volatility. That's enabled our clients to continue to provide their business operations to supply gas and power to households, to keep the lights on and ultimately provide energy at the lowest cost possible to all of us.
We were able to use our expertise from the U.K. buy to let market, and apply a lot of that to the Dutch sector. They have an emerging private rental sector for the very first time, and that's as a result of certain demographic changes. It's also regulation whereby you now need a much higher deposit to buy a house than you did versus 10 years ago. Further, there's less government money going into the social housing sector. You have demand from tenants, you have demand from landlords to go and invest in properties to rent out. Really Domivest are fulfilling that role in a way that banks are not. We noticed this opportunity. We funded them. We gave them some equity capital.
We lent them a senior warehouse line to the loans that they were lending, and they've now done nearly AUD 2 billion of lending. They have issued four securitizations, and it's really a success story for that company. They're highly profit making, and they're leading the market now in buy-to-let in Holland. For the first time in the Netherlands, consumers have a lender who is truly focused on their needs. The banks, they've got very large owner-occupied businesses. They don't need to focus on this sector. The non-banks are taking over, and they are very specialist at what they do. We're now at the stage where Domivest are able to look at more innovative products. They can be a bit more adventurous.
Most of our key investors in the ABS markets are looking for ESG bonds to purchase, and we are looking for ways to fill that gap by offering innovative products which incentivize the landlords to make energy efficient upgrades to their properties through offering them better mortgage rates for doing so.
EMEA has never been more active for Macquarie Capital than it is now. Building from our long history and looking ahead to an exciting future. We are an integrated advisory, capital markets and principal investing team, creating opportunities for our clients and the balance sheet across a range of very clearly defined sectors. We differentiate ourselves by our depth of sector insight, focusing where we have differentiated ideas and connecting into our global teams on cross-border opportunities, including in areas such as technology and infrastructure. In particular, we work in a very agile way with private equity clients, helping them to unlock opportunities, as you'll hear in the example of working with Carlyle on their recent take private of Schaltbau in Germany, a technology provider in the infrastructure sector. The private capital trend I spoke about earlier is also a significant factor across many sectors in Europe.
The strong alignment of our business with private equity clients is a positive driver for Macquarie Capital in the region, as we provide integrated solutions, such as combining our advice with our private credit capabilities, deploying a significant amount in the first three quarters of FY 2022. Turning to look at growth, we see significant opportunities, and the two I wanna call out are regional expansion and principal deployment. In recent years, we have successfully expanded beyond our long-standing core markets in the U.K. and Germany into the rest of continental Europe. This expansion has already started to generate meaningful opportunities in connecting new markets like France, Spain and Benelux with our broader capabilities. The opportunity is very significant. The global M&A market has reached over $5 trillion of deal value in 2021, and Europe was approximately one quarter of that.
At Macquarie, we're still at a relatively early stage of our progress with lots of room to grow geographically. With approximately $1 trillion of sponsor-based M&A activity globally, our strong alignment with this client base creates a significant opportunity in Europe and beyond. Likewise, in principal investing, there continue to be attractive opportunities to deploy capital alongside clients across both debt and equity, including into tech-enabled businesses, as is the case with education technology provider, Tes Global, that we'll hear about in a moment. Principal opportunities like Tes come about because of our commitment to building deep expertise in active subsectors, developing long-term relationships and supporting clients and management teams with flexible capital.
All of the opportunities I've covered today come together because of the close cooperation of our teams on the ground, working together with our global colleagues. This network effect from connecting across regions, sectors, and products is real, and it's this agile, boutique-like culture of collaboration and teamwork across a global platform that allows us to continue to attract talent at all levels and deliver the best outcomes for clients and shareholders. I'm excited by the opportunity in Europe, and we look set to benefit from our recent investments in geographic and coverage expansion over the coming years as we grow our market position. Now you'll hear from a couple of colleagues sharing examples of how we're helping clients further their strategic objectives.
The opportunity was a company called Schaltbau, and they're active in providing components and technological solutions for the railway transportation, as well as for energy storage systems or for safe autonomous driving. The company was founded in 1929 in Germany and has a global presence now and is well-known for its track record of innovation and technological expertise. Macquarie Capital acted as exclusive financial advisor to Carlyle, which is a global private equity house, on the friendly public takeover of Schaltbau in 2021. Over the past years, we have established bespoke and specialist know-how in public takeovers in Germany, and based on that, we were delighted to support Carlyle in this transaction.
We have been working for Carlyle for more than a decade and putting together and combining this relationship that we have with Carlyle, with our sector expertise as well as our German public M&A knowledge, we could facilitate a very swift and efficient project execution. Going forward, Carlyle will work together with the management team of Schaltbau, providing support and resources in accelerating the organic growth of the company, as well as putting more investments into R&D and innovation. M&A is a global business. We are interacting with global private equity houses. We are interacting with global industrial companies, and that's why having this global reach is an important factor in doing M&A business.
For us, Schaltbau was a very high profile public to private transaction, supporting our role as one of the leading M&A houses in Germany, as well as the expansion of Macquarie's continental European capabilities on behalf of our clients.
TES was founded over 100 years ago as an education periodical. It is now a leading education software business, offering predominantly staff and recruitment solutions, as well as pupil and data management and compliance tools. It supports over 13 million teachers across 17,000 schools in over 117 countries across the globe. Macquarie Capital Principal Finance provided the acquisition financing for Onex Corporation to acquire TES from Providence Equity Partners. We were chosen as a partner by Onex due to, one, our deep expertise in education software and two, because of the flexibility of our balance sheet, which allowed them to acquire this in a fast and efficient manner.
Education software have long been a core area of focus for us, and we've invested close to AUD 3 billion across 31 transactions over the last decade in the space. Through our close working relationship with Onex, we believe that they will deliver together with TES better educational outcomes for students and teachers. We see education software as a continued area for future growth, as there's still a lot of white space in the way schools and educators operate, and more and more opportunities to deliver digital content and parent interaction.
Thanks, Michael. I hope that gives you a good sense of the businesses we have in EMEA. I'd like to turn to some of the themes that we believe will shape the next phase of growth and activity in the region. These themes are incredibly exciting for us. They're also well aligned to what you've already heard in infrastructure. The key message here is one that I mentioned at the start. The businesses here are already making a large contribution to Macquarie, but our presence here is small relative to the opportunity in front of us. Our markets are growing. We have a strong existing expertise and relationship in place, and we've room to grow across all parts of our business. In this region, the market fundamentals are strong and government ambition is high, but it is reliant on private capital for delivery.
We are very well placed through market-leading capabilities in asset management, in principal investment, and in advisory. We're also well advanced in extending the geographical reach and impact of these capabilities. We're looking forward to bringing strong regional hubs of cross-group capabilities in cities like Paris, Milan, and beyond. We've added important senior hires who will help accelerate our growth in new markets, and we aim to broaden and improve the products we bring to our clients. Let me give you a few examples. In our CGM business, we're already creating new opportunities in areas like mobility, carbon projects, and recycling. Our investors will have access to broader opportunities as we combine GIG with MAM. The opportunity of the transition goes well beyond renewable energy generation. Across Europe, many of our largest companies have made commitments to achieve net-zero emissions.
The most energy-intensive companies often lead the way in this. We believe that we can be a partner to them in that effort. For some, like oil and gas, this will require a significant company transformation. For others, like chemical and refiners, the transition will create opportunities and risks that we can help them manage. We're already working across the operating groups to make sure that we're bringing together all of our capabilities. We want to bring together all of our capabilities to meet these rapidly evolving client needs. I hope that gives you a good overview of Macquarie and EMEA. It's been an unusual and challenging two years, but it really does feel like we've come through it well. I'm proud of the team we have here. I'm proud of the resilience and the commitment to deliver in our clients and our purpose.
We are ready to get back to a new normal and harness the optimism and energy that we see building in our clients and communities. Thank you. I'll hand back to Sam for the Q&A now.
Thanks very much, Paul. We have gone over our allotted time, but we probably have time for one or two questions. I'll hand over to Chorus Call.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your first question is from Brian Johnson from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
I had a few questions, if I may, so I'll make them pretty quick. The first one is, when we have a look at the commodities and global markets business, I think it's now starting to be appreciated that in the U.S., your long transportation, long storage, long volatility, it was interesting in the presentation today, we can see the thing about physically shipping gas from the U.S. to basically Europe. I'm just wondering if someone can just explain to us how we should be thinking of the European commodities and global markets business with regards to this spike that we've seen in gas prices, then I've got a few others.
Sure. Maybe Nick and Paul. Paul, maybe you want to start and then hand over to Nick.
Thanks, Brian, for the question. Generally, the business is fairly well-positioned for that volatility. We're very mindful of the spikes and the need to be positioned, but also that we can help our clients in terms of servicing those needs when they need those products and prices. It's a different type of structured market to the U.S. Nick would probably be best to comment on the comparison between the two.
Maybe Nick, if you want to.
Thanks, Paul. Look, I think a good way to think about the business in EMEA is the focus on servicing the utility customer base there. With the volatility that we saw, and Eric touched on this a little bit in his presentation, that the customers were experiencing some significant challenges just trying to navigate that volatility, and we were able to provide basic risk management and supply services to them. The market is probably less fragmented than the U.S. market, but still, the customers have fairly significant requirements to manage their exposure.
We find we're doing a lot of work with our customers, trying to help them manage those macro themes that they're dealing with at the moment. It's about helping them manage the volatility more than anything else.
Just the next one, if I may. Could I just get a feeling, just with Green Investment Group now being transferred into MAM and Europe perhaps being much more kind of transition to renewable energy perhaps than most places in the world? Can we just get a feeling for the investor demand for the products that you manufacture in the new funds in Europe and whether that is actually in fact correct?
Thanks, Brian. Might go to Ben on that one.
Sorry, Brian. Just to double-check, your question is, Do we think there's a demand for products specifically for Europe or from European investors?
I'm more interested in the investments from Europe.
Look, I think the demand for real assets, particularly assets that relate to energy transition, is very strong around the world. I wouldn't say that European investors are more, have a bigger appetite than other regions in the world. I think that's just a general theme for investors. I think the really exciting thing for us about integrating GIG is that it allows us to do more on probably traditional renewables, but also look at those technologies and sources of renewable energy and things that will facilitate energy transition that will become mainstream over time. That's what we talked about before, about being able to invest up and down the risk curve.
I think there is just generally, a large appetite for investors, who see both the need to catalyze capital to address things like net zero, but also the fact that, there's a huge gap in capital, and so that creates a very large opportunity. I think there's just general enthusiasm for that, and hopefully we'll see more and more capital come in that, so it allows us to address those issues and deliver good returns.
Okay, just a final one from me. Just on Brexit, I can see that you've transferred the operations from basically U.K. onto the continent. Are there any opportunities that Brexit has created within the U.K.?
Thanks, Brian. Maybe one for Paul.
I don't think there's any opportunities within the U.K. Like, it has been a fairly smooth move to get people across to Europe to continue that business, and we're quite excited about the new opportunities we're finding by having people on the ground. The U.K. business remains very strong. I wouldn't say it's because of Brexit, it just remains very strong for us.
Thank you very much. Okay, thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Andrei Stadnik from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. I wanted to ask two questions. One is just around the green funds or the private markets asset management business will be driving going forward. Do you think the green funds can attract higher or better pricing for Macquarie?
Hand that over to Ben Way.
Thanks for that question. Is that higher pricing in terms of fees? Is that the question?
In terms of fees.
In terms of fees. Right. Okay. Look, I think generally speaking, the market, whether you're looking at a general infrastructure fund or a specific renewables fund, would price broadly the same as what we're seeing today. I don't think there'll be a huge difference. I think what you will see is the fact that there's a lot of capital looking to be deployed in that space. I think it will be more a scale game over time than a pricing game. I think generally speaking, for most alternate managers, fees are broadly the same. And that's because that's where investors are at, and that's where the umbrella of pricing is basically set in the industry. I think it's much more about trying to get over time scale.
I do think within that there is probably an opportunity to do perhaps some higher returning funds. We're certainly looking at the moment that allows us to really invest in those newer technologies. I think as Shemara touched on before, there is a very big appetite for traditional renewables all around the world. That's creating quite significant price competition. What that does, obviously it means is that, lower returning capital is more efficient in chasing that. I think we probably just need to be, quite sober about the point about there's not likely to be any additional uptick in the fee loads for those particular funds.
Thank you. Can I ask my second question around the structural change towards greener renewable energy around the world? Do you think that this actual change, which, could be 10 or 20 years, do you think that actually creates an environment where we'll see structurally higher volatility in energy commodity markets around the world while this change takes place, and no one's actually quite sure where the mix should end up ultimately?
Look, I'd like Shemara to answer that in the first instance.
Yes, of course. Yeah, look, there has to be a massive transition, and we are going to have to have a whole new sources of energy developed, particularly in, at the moment, we're dependent on wind and solar for renewable, and they're intermittent sources, so we need firming solutions for that. That is going to cause change and in some cases disruption. We of course have been advocating an orderly transition so that communities can come through this and deliver what we need. The need is quite urgent for the transition. We are finding lots of opportunities for our teams to add value by developing these new areas, but also to help the legacy areas in that transition and try to minimize the disruption.
I think some of the volatility we're seeing at the moment is partly contributed to by the transition to renewable in energy markets, I mean, because of the intermittency of wind and solar and lower volumes of wind in the last little while. Other factors have driven it, I think in the short term, like as I said, the surge in goods demand, the issues going on with Russia and, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and the implications that the gas market is then having for the oil market and other energy markets, plus a little bit of cold weather in the U.S. I think there is going to be huge structural change and it's a big opportunity for us to respond.
Whether that creates volatility, it will some, but at the moment the volatility we're seeing is being driven by many other factors as well, I think. I don't know if others want to comment, Sam, or you think that might cover it.
That's probably fine. Yep.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andrei.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Dobson.
Great. Thank you. Look, I'd just like to say thank you to our investors and analysts for their ongoing interest and support. And I'd also like to thank all our presenters today, including those who are in unfavorable time zones. Thank you very much, and we look forward to catching up soon.