Thanks, all. We've had a couple of fascinating sessions so far, so hopefully we can keep up the level of quality. We're going to change perspectives now and talk about allocations to infrastructure, taking into account listed, perhaps unlisted perspectives as well. My name's Thomas Symons. I sit in the Listed Real Assets research team at WTW, an investment advisor and allocator to institutional pension funds and other asset owners globally. And I'm joined today by Thomas van der Meij from APG, Paul Grimes from FTSE Russell, and Leonardo Anguiano from Brookfield. Let's get into it. Thomas, to what extent do you see liquidity requirements driving infrastructure allocations today?
Yeah, it's always good to ask that to a pension fund. Our horizon is pretty long, right? So we have a 30-year-plus investment horizon. Luckily, the pension scheme is still growing, so we got more inflow than outflow, so from that point, liquidity is not a hard requirement for us. It's always a nice to have, right, to build up, like, liquidity for allocation, optimization, crystallizing value, but in general, it's not a hard criterion.
Leonardo, you work in the public securities side of things. Are you seeing an increase in investor appetite given the liquidity offerings from listed infra?
Yes, but it's been a long time coming. So going back to the pitch in listed infra has been quite tough for a number of years, and if you sit here and you listen to the dynamics, the CapEx deployment, the bottlenecks that need to be resolved through investment, the regulators becoming more pragmatic, and it being a seller's market. So you're actually creating value at the investment level, whether through a grid or an IPP, and therefore creating value to shareholders. All of that bodes well, brilliantly. The story is fantastic, digitalization, you know, onshoring, whatever you want. You can really tell a story, and it's true. And if our regulators become, you know, acknowledge the need to increase, enhance the return, and that inflection point is beginning to come in a very polemic, painful, arduous manner, but it's coming.
Therefore, that bodes towards net asset growth and therefore value cash flow creation in a typical equity IRR way. The problem we have, and I do acknowledge that your chart, our charts, we all use the same chart, and we have a lot of peers. The long-term compounding return of listed is about 10. We launched a fund back in 2008, and it's around 10, and the assets have delivered that EBITDA growth, you know, the low volatility. All those things that we say infra offers are truisms, but in cash flow terms. The asset class itself, and maybe some of my competitors here may differ, but if you look at the compounding, it has been six. And it's not me or the indices.
That's not enough to attract people's attention who can either go tech or the S&P 500 or bonds at 5%. So we're kind of stuck in a bit of a conundrum that we need to go out there hard and tell a story, and for the listed asset class to start generating that, because people are backward-looking. So yes, we're getting appetite, but we're having to really push hard, and people tend to be backward-looking. Secondly, and if I may, just very quickly, I think a lot of us in the listed infra asset class strategy have perhaps become too benchmark aware, truth be told. So what they see is the benchmarks and then the performance of the various leaders just quite close to each other, and they want more divergence, and it's happening.
So I do think we have to go back to our strengths, to our origins, and take more active share, true contrarian, you know, bottom-up stock picking that allows you to generate outperformance. It's really hard, and, you know, it can become back to harm you, but I think that it's being asked for by the clients, rightly so, if they're gonna pay active managers, right? And the third point, which is where we're getting, so we're beginning to get reverse inquiries from people who are allocating from the listed portfolios. The other source that we're seeing a lot of traction is, frankly, where we've lived.
We've raised about GBP 1 billion of capital in the last two, three years from private infra managers, whose job is to love and buy infra assets in a private capacity and are very comfortable with the asset class, know it inside out. They start buying stocks on an ad hoc basis themselves. They realize it's bloody time-consuming, and it's, it's a different skill set to get them at the right time. Some can do it 'cause they have big institutions. Others are beginning to flirt with the idea to start buying from their private allocation a little bit of listed, 'cause it's very cheap relative to their, to the valuations they may have to buy on the private, and they're beginning to dip their toe. And my job is to try and hopefully convince them to give it to some of these managers in here or myself. That's...
So it's really hard, but I think we're at a really positive inflection point. At least, I, I hope so.
Okay.
But I think it's also driven on top of, like, the normal arguments in terms of valuation and attractiveness of the sector. It's the focus on ESG and especially impact.
Mm-hmm.
That is something that resonates extremely well, that if you wanna have a contribution to the world, and not only, like, a financial one, it's the impact that you can generate, is infrastructure investment. And then impact not only being environmental, I mean, we focused a lot on the panels today on clean energy, affordability, and I think that that second point, the social element, making it affordable, keeping it affordable, is crucial.
Yeah. Yeah, and, I mean, we are in quite an evolving market environment, so I'd say that the 2008 traditional infrastructure landscape has persevered to today, but we're also seeing new entrants from a sector perspective. Does that add to that return opportunity in listed infrastructure? Or indeed, do the messages of corporates with their growth pipelines cut through to investors? Thomas, let's start with you.
Yeah, no, I think it creates extra opportunities, right? And for us, so what we did last year is basically said... And I think that's also Leo's point, right? A lot of the investments are backward-looking. So we sort of, like, moved away and took a different stance, and really said we wanna have a forward-looking portfolio. i.e., we worked hard for almost a year on identifying what are the CapEx buckets needed across, like, the whole infrastructure universe, for the next 25 years, really up to 2050, to reach net zero. So instead of, like, positioning our portfolio to, like, the sectors that are big today, we'd rather, like, focus on the sectors that are gonna big tomorrow- be big tomorrow. And with that, you also touch a lot on, like, the new type of infrastructure. I mean, I think...
I like the quote that somebody once told me, is like, "Today's disruptors are tomorrow's infrastructure." But if you wanna make a return, you also need to be early in the trend. It's always hard, right? Because, I mean, we're infrastructure investors. We're focusing on cash flows. We need to have stability, visibility, so a lot of the new technology is not yet there.
Mm-hmm.
So, I mean, I think about, like, EV charging. If you would've asked me the question a decade ago, it would not have been seen as infrastructure. Today, it's only infrastructure to investors that are looking at the sector. But this is also one of the sectors, and I think that is, that is the point we raised up earlier in the, in the valuation differences, where the direct market is still quite aggressive vis-a-vis some of the valuations you see on the listed market, which obviously then create the opportunities.
I mean, if I may-
Yeah.
I think the whole listed infrastructure as an asset class and an allocation, we're seeing increasingly, and why we developed the FTSE Russell GLIO Infrastructure Series, is because we were getting inbound inquiries from asset owners, from asset allocators, about this as a segment. I think to Leo's point, there is a change. I think people are looking for stable, long-term cash flow, regulatory comfort. Yet, one of the reasons we've worked with GLIO, is because we've worked with investment managers to design an index that's actually fit for purpose and for infrastructure investors. And certainly the sort of relationship we've got with the FT is actually brings the ability to shine spotlight on the sector and the opportunities.
To, yeah, Leo's point about hugging a benchmark, I think one of the things that we've done is actually design this very differently from the competitor benchmarks. Yeah, we're looking at this from an EBITDA measure, rather than revenue, so we can turf out some things that aren't really relevant. But equally, to Thomas's point about if you start to think about decarbonization, you think about climate considerations. We don't design standard benchmarks now, such as the S&P 500 that was referenced. What we create effectively are investment strategies that you can look at, let's say, global developed index, but if you wanna look at the weighted average carbon impact to that, you can adjust your holdings to deliver much lower carbon impact to that.
So we've moved on from standard indexes now to much more solutions that are driving outcomes for investors.
Yeah. Yeah. Leo, do you find that those solutions offered by corporates are generating more excitement in terms of your opportunity set?
Yeah, so I didn't sound very enthusiastic, but I'm actually very enthused because, because it's been a long time coming, and b, the complexity of the sector is getting broader. So if you go back to the basics of what listed infra should offer, it should be purist in the sense that it really protects you on the downside, from a cash flow perspective, and that is what's intrinsically true of true infra. But if you start misunderstanding, you can, you can deviate from the core, and therefore misprice risk. So I do think that those of us, and competitors who've been around doing listed infra for enough, should be here to stay for the simple reason that you can very easily misprice it, going back to your point, unless you, you stay purist. But it's changing.
You can't just stick to the distribution grid, you have to go for the broader value chain. So I think there's something to be said. Also, to Thomas' point, the bigger institutions that have been around enough, and there's not that many of us, there's, like, whatever, 50 you say, I think there's about 20 or 30. We've been engaged with the corporates, and I think the corporates like the fact that when we buy their shares, we tend to be long-term shareholders. We tend to be somewhat informed in what they do, and we seem to be quite engaged and helping drive, you know, change. And that... And all of these teams, myself, our team included, and many others, have been building up, you know, ESG analysis and that characteristic to integrate. We don't own the companies.
We only buy, you know, we're minority investors, so we can only do so much, but I think we tend to be very engaged. So all those things means that our skill set, we add more to the client. So going back to the very basics. If the asset class, the listed shares, go back to the reflecting the true cash flow trajectory of the business, which is around that 8%-12% equity IRR, which I believe will happen, because as soon as rates normalize, if we, the active managers, generate alpha in a proper, sustainable way, through stock picking or whichever way we aim, and we're engaged with the corporates to bring about positive, I think the asset class will do really, really well. But it's been somewhat stagnant, Fraser, I'm sure you...
For a bit, right? But I think we're in a really good position, but we have to do all those things to the best of our ability, and with a, you know, consistent process that we explain to the potential clients. So, and we'll get lots of clients from different... From the traditional equity investors from Europe, who have a very strong bias towards transition and the way we behave. In the US, they're more about return.... and explaining the asset class. They're not that familiar with the asset class, 'cause there aren't that many listed infra companies, but that's beginning to change. Why?
Because utilities in the U.S., you know, as George said, their load growth has tripled because they're having to incorporate data centers through AI, and they can't figure out how to incorporate all this base load without creating distortions in the energy sector, the unintended consequence. So as that gets more complex in the U.S., they'll become more woken up to the asset class. So I'm very optimistic, but it's hard work.
Yeah.
It's really hard work to get people over the line.
In an environment where rates are higher, there's a different range of risk factors and considerations, and in a world that is perhaps becoming more domestically focused, political uncertainty, infrastructure maybe plays a larger part in a multi-asset portfolio. Thomas?
I agree. I agree. I think it's, it's gonna be more and more dominant. I think with the cash flow, predictability, stability, and also if indeed, like, inflation... I mean, I think inflation will stay high for longer, right? There are a lot of forces out there that will drive inflation up. I think the beauty of this sector is the, the offering of protection on that side. On the other hand, if rates will stabilize, even come down potentially, the attractiveness of cash flows is gonna go up, and also the defensiveness of the sector comes back into play again.
I think if you take, put that, like, as a sort of foundation, and especially, I mean, for pension capital like us, the long-term assets and liabilities that we have, and we have to manage and match, it's a great sector to be in. Then, with like, what we said in terms of, like, the impact, we are, I think, especially maybe less in the U.S., but especially Europe, and especially for us in the Netherlands, it becomes a clear topic of discussion. So you don't wanna have, like, solely returns, you wanna have sustainable returns. And sustainable, not meaning like repeat them on a yearly basis, obviously, as well, but it's mainly driven by, like, sustainable in terms of impact, ESG, and make a better living for the next generation.
However, if we see these new sectors coming into the listed infrastructure sphere, a more traditionally focused or traditionally minded perhaps client or investor might challenge you to say, "We can get these more fringe exposures through our private equity infrastructure exposure. Why should we need to tolerate this in the listed infrastructure sphere?" What would be your response to that, Leo?
They don't have to. We can go very pure or we can go very pure right now, and buy pure, regulated, pure infra at ridiculously cheap valuations, 'cause the market's inefficient. So actually, I said the universe is getting broader, but actually, we... Right now, I mean, I've got so many familiar faces, it's insane. People who play these arbitrages, these regulatory arbitrages every day of their life. Peter sitting over there. There's about different people who, the regulatory cycles, our governments are more boisterous. I mean, we're sitting here, election, the water document's coming out. There's an, you know, the Judge case yesterday, and the listed market gets confused. The volatility of our UK water, the volatility of EDPR, does not reflect the volatility of their cash flows. I mean, their stock was at an insane value before.
It went to ridiculously low, and the fundamentals are getting better and better. So in answer to your question, we can go back to core and generate compounding returns if the shares behave of 10%-15%, because we're buying rights issues, no offense, at below par. We're buying EDPR at massive—if we were to buy it, you know, we're at a massive discount to the sum-of-the-parts intrinsic value. The regulatory cycles are longer and more painful than they've been. I'm sure you agree. The water cycle is horrifically painful because polemic after polemic after polemic. I, for one, think it's fantastic because that creates more work for the active manager to generate alpha.
But explaining that to your off-taker, to your buyer, they see an asset class that's delivered 6 with more volatility than it used to have, which is not great to sell the product, but that's backward-looking. Does that make sense? So I think that the regulatory cycles will give us more and more opportunity to buy great companies at a discount to intrinsic value. If we do our job well, we'll do that well, and the asset class, the fundamentals will explain themselves, because the bottleneck is so insane. That's my point of view.
But I think that offers the opportunity, right? I think that's what Fraser once wrote, that like, I think 5% of, like, stock, infrastructure stock is held by infrastructure specialists.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of, like, the horizon, the investment horizon, that creates the opportunity if you're trading, like, on next quarter earnings instead of taking the proper view on what the infrastructure needs to deliver.
Yeah. Yeah. And, and so Paul, how, how's FTSE Russell trying to capture or at least take into account these kind of sort of varying definitions of, of what constitutes infrastructure in a, in a changing world?
So yeah, so I think it's a great, it's a great point. So as we start to look forward, and we're very much about looking forward, yeah, we've only been... I guess we're a bunch of index veterans that have been around 30-odd years, but have just started a new index franchise, shall we say. But one of the things that we're doing is that historically, you know, investment managers, research managers would use a classification system such as GICS or ICB, which are very backward-looking. They don't really take months, if not years, to update. We've built something, a Global Asset Taxonomy System. It's our own effective classification system that is very much forward-looking. It's adaptive to the changing technologies. It takes into account companies that are working, for example, renewables.
So if we think about electric or utilities, within our GATS, we've got a renewable sector. One of the things that we've done is we've designed our taxonomy system. We've then worked very closely with GLIO and a number of their sort of advisory members, to actually really design and align our taxonomy system to what actually infrastructure needs and what infrastructure as a listed class needs to focus on and invest in. So we've been very precise. We've got four main sectors and 11 sub-sectors. And it's been done really to then and designed for investment today and for the future. And it's been designed with experts working with us to do so.
So to some of the points about, yeah, at what point do you want to invest and where do you want to invest? We can look from a stock, bottom-up stock selection process, and make sure that we're getting those stocks in exactly the right classes. And the other thing as well is that sometimes, yeah, if you think about listed companies, is what is Ferrovial, right? So is it, yeah, if you look at it through revenue versus EBITDA, they're very, they're very, very different. So we use things like NLP to really look at the way in which a company reports, not in terms of both its revenues, but at, at the EBITDA level, looks at, looks at its assets, to make sure then that the actual listed securities are captured in the right taxonomy.
We've taken a very much sort of state-of-the-art and forward-looking view to try and deliver a product and an index series that's fit for purpose for the listed infrastructure investors.
Okay, great, great.
And it's been done in a very iterative way with the investors as well-
Yes, absolutely.
Which is very positive.
Yep, absolutely.
Thomas, you placed a very tempting bit of bait that I will bite on, that APG did a big piece of work forward-looking, covering the infrastructure sector, where it's looking attractive over the coming decades. Can you give us any more color as to sectors or geographies that you're particularly interested in at the moment?
Yeah. So what we noticed on this study is a couple of things that stood out, right? And it really started, like, with gross CapEx, so what is really needed? Then you get to the second point: What is addressable? I think that's... There is a big mismatch between what is out there and what is actually available for institutional investors. Not talking about listed or direct investment, pure institutional investors.
Mm-hmm.
Then I think you end up with only, like, 30% of the total CapEx that is out there. Big chunk, obviously, is what you would expect is coming from the emerging markets-
Yeah
... which is always, I mean, we invest globally. We have exposure also in emerging markets. It's always a bit more tricky. It's more risk, obviously.
Mm-hmm.
Then, the big investment opportunities is actually in the US, where you see a lot of capital is needed on the energy side, but also on the transport side. So that's where we see clear opportunities, where we also invest in. But that is more not driven by the top-down study is a bit the home bias that we always have, so Europe stays high on the list. Sector-wise, I think I tend to agree with Leo. We like the core infrastructure. We believe there's good value that you can make, and we also did a lot of studies where we actually see that also the underwriting is much more secure and predictable. Because it's hard to value the growth component, right?
I mean, put differently, it's easy to be wrong on the growth component. Where if we have the visibility, the CapEx plans are clear, the return, obviously, you have to go through regulatory cycles, but it's sort of predictable within a certain range. You can be much more accurate.
Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of the quote from earlier, that growth today is... will deliver yield tomorrow. And yet a lot of infrastructure investors like yield today. But we are perhaps seeing more of a growth environment, certainly in more of the, well, not only the fringes, but we are seeing more of a growth environment full stop in listed infrastructure. But to what extent is that enough to attract, perhaps not the specialists, but the generalists' investment appetite in an environment where there's a global equity opportunity set?
I think it's... If people actually— I don't know the answer, obviously.
Sure.
I'm hopeful it's imminent because the numbers are very compelling. So if you think about organic acceleration in CapEx because of energy transition or structural load growth, people can play all these things through tech, et cetera, et cetera, but they will make great money, but they will also, you know, hit themselves in the face at some stage. And if that organic CapEx has to basically, we've been through a process of digestion, right? It's happening, it's real, the CapEx plans have been announced. The world, as you say, with higher rates, is much less forgiving. It's just more problematic, right?
It's much more forgiving, so you need to. There's a process of digestion, whereby the balance sheets have to be right-sized, whether it's midstream in the U.S., which has been right-sizing their balance sheets for the last year, or renewables, or even distribution grids. And you have painful issuances or gradual drips, whatever it may be, because the earnings do not reflect the asset growth because of that temporary digestion. But once that's digested, then the earnings will start, or the cash flow will start reflecting the underlying net asset growth, and then we're off to the races. It's not rocket science, but you need that to happen because people are backward-looking. Much as I'd like to do sum of the parts in IRRs, nobody speaks that language in the generalist world. They need to see earnings as a proxy for cash flow.
We can measure it with the net asset growth. And then when they realize it's not 4% or 5% nominal as it used to be, but it starts being 6%, 7%, 8%, you know, nominal, maybe even more. I mean, as, I mean, your company's growing at way more, right? In the immediate future. Then they, they're buying these assets at close to replacement value, whether it's e.g., RAV of one, or a sum of the parts, the portfolio up and running and being built, not the pipeline, then I think they're off to the races. But we had to go through a lot of digestion, right? That correcting. Renewables got too expensive in 2020. They just got too, too, too, too...
You know, bid too high, so there was a three-year period of getting back to a fairer value. So I think we're there. I think we're there.
All right.
I think we're there.
I, I must admit, I've lost track of time, so I don't know if we're way beyond or have loads of time left, but maybe we will open the floor to some questions. Hopefully, that's got some brain juices going. Please, over there.
Thank you. This was an amazing panel discussion. I have a question related to one of the comments made by Leonardo on when we look at the regulatory cycles becoming more volatile and maybe more time-taking in terms of the conclusion for the next regulatory period, and how the returns would look like. Do you also factor in, or do you see any potential risks that the outcome might not be, let's say, positive, to say the least, and then the negative outcome possibly having a contagion risk on other utilities or other infrastructure assets? I'm probably referencing UK Water, and the outcome related to Thames Water.
So that's a... I mean, you're putting me in a real conundrum here, 'cause everyone, there's a lot of people here who talk about the regulatory cycles in a much more purist, balanced way than I. Remember, I'm not managing that process, I'm looking at it from the outside in, and so I can be a bit more glib with my comments. So sometimes my comments are on purpose, a little bit exaggerated to make a point. Is there a chance of regulators doing something, well, governments and regulators doing something counterproductive? Of course, there is. Of course, there is in the short term, but we've been through quite a lot of that. I'm not talking about the UK, by the way, I'm talking globally. It's not just the UK that has to... Look at Spain, Red Eléctrica, and the nominal return there.
In Mexico, my country, listed airports, you may not be familiar, but listed airports are fantastic companies, and they had a fantastic regulation, and the government wrote the regulatory return, and they just wrote it badly 'cause they just didn't have knowledge, and the stocks fell 40% when the end outcome was a better regulation, not worse. So my point is, the regulators could step up. They're also being put under more pressure than ever, in my view, by the politicians, because the UK water sewage becomes much more front-end than it ever has been. So, I mean, how many times has Ofwat or Ofgem been to the Commons and grilled to within an inch of their life? Whether it can't not affect your behavioral pattern.
It can't not, if you're being bullied that way, and I, I call it that. So of course there's a risk, but is it happening? No, the inverse is happening. Through all the noise and all the rhetoric, and I use Spain as an example, the nominal return for Red Eléctrica and distribution will go up. Maybe not enough, but it will go up quite meaningfully. Why? Because otherwise, Iberdrola and Endesa will not invest in distribution, and they have a massive bottleneck. Ditto in this country. So, and in the U.S., it's actually very interesting. The U.S. has 50 states, 50 regulators. If Illinois, where Chicago is based, and I live in Illinois, is myopic and dysfunctional, they go to Michigan, 'cause Michigan has fantastic regulations. So what will happen?
If Michigan's load growth, and they're the same, they're flat, they have wind, they're perfect for data centers, both. Illinois is dysfunctional, Michigan's perfect. Michigan will have load growth of 5%, maybe 6% for the next decade. Illinois will have 1%. Same plane. So capital, in the end, is logical and goes to where they're given a fair chance to make a return. So I think that's happening very quickly, so I'm quite sanguine in the end. I hope that helps.
I think it makes sense, driving these innovations and the 2050 targets out there. There's a lot of capital needed, and ultimately, the capital is scarce. So there will be a fight for the capital, and governments are aware that they cannot lose the institutional investor, i.e., there need to be an attractive or at least sufficient return to get that capital into the country.
Other questions, please?
Hello, thank you. Very interesting. So I'm going to ask two deliberately very provocative questions, so I apologize in advance, and don't take it personally. But firstly, Leo, I mean, you, you made the points very well. I mean, you know, people will pay 20x PE for luxury goods stocks or tech stocks making temporarily higher margins with nothing behind them. But when you've got sustainable growth for businesses like National Grid and in utilities, you know, people won't pay more than 13x PE for them. And you remain convinced that, you know, once the earnings start to grow, the stocks go up. But is there also an argument that these are community assets? If you look at National Grid's licenses or UK Water licenses, the assets are not actually owned by the company.
They're actually owned by the state with a 25-year notice period. You know, in a recession or a flight of capital, as you've seen people worry about in France, the only thing bolted down to the ground is infrastructure, domestic banks. Generalists looking at this sector, why stocks that seemingly look very cheap just get hit on random pieces of news? Because as a PM, you can hedge against interest rate movements, you can, you know, you can put on FX hedges if you invest in Brazil.
There's stuff that you can do, but you can't hedge out the risk that a politician stands up and talks, and single-handedly wipes out a lot of very good U.S. East Coast wind projects because he had personal issues in Scotland, presumably, or that Ed Miliband's behind in the polls, and he starts off a process that basically impairs a whole load of value at Centrica. How do we actually get out of this cycle?
That question... Do you start with me? Was it for all of us?
All of you.
I can. Okay. So you said luxury goods. Luxury goods deserve a high multiple because they have pricing power, they have brand, and they have no regulatory return cap. So I think pricing power. So that's technology. I don't know. I'm not very good at technology. So you said luxury goods, they absolutely deserve a high multiple. But and we will always, infra will always have a lower multiple than them 'cause we are capital intensive, so they can make a great ROIC, higher ROIC than us, and they, they're stable. However, so I do think that. So I don't. I'm not saying that our multiples will be egregiously high, nor should they be.
They shouldn't go back to 2020 levels in renewables, but they're somewhat mispriced when the current valuations, and not all, are either reflecting replacement value today, and right now, all dollars... I mean, Warren Buffett says it. He buys an insurance company, so he can put it into a US utility because you are investing at book value. So you buy the utility at a premium to book, but that gives you the option to invest CapEx at book. That is probably worth 1.3-2x book over time, if you believe the spread, right? And I'm saying right now, listed infra is really cheap. To get that ticket to buy a transmission asset in the Midwest of the USA, on the private equity side, you need to buy, pay 30x PE.
And by the way, I believe Brookfield may have done it. I don't know. But do you see what I mean? So why are they so excited? Because they gives them the ability to deploy capital at book for a perpetuity, 'cause I mean, it's almost perpetuity. We have decades of replacement cycle CapEx to resolve the bottlenecks that we need to resolve. So going back to your point, you're 100% right. The process will be noisy. I don't think it'll ever stop being noisy. It can't. Utilities have to address all their stakeholders, not just shareholders. In fact, we should be quietly important, but kind of in the back of the queue, in a sense that they have to replace them.
They're getting more sophisticated, but I think we're at an inflection point, that if we don't address these bottlenecks, all the other things that politicians promise cannot be delivered. So I think it'll always be. It'll never be clean in that regard, but I do think right now we're at very cheap valuations. I hope that helps, but I don't know the answer otherwise.
Tom?
I think just to add there, right? So if you think about, like, all of those trends and taking a longer term view, and everybody's investing in mega trends, right? Energy transition, decarbonization, digitalization. But for me, it's really hard to make like a sort of like bet. Just go through it, right? So everybody buys like Tesla or another electric car company. I think there's no monopoly for that today, right? I don't know, in 10 years from now, if Tesla will still be there, or there might be a new Tesla out there, or there might be Mercedes back on electric vehicles that's taking over market share.
So maybe in the short term, yes, I can play that trend, and I can play the cycle, but for the next 10 years, I have no clue where Tesla is. If you then go a level deeper and you think about EV charging, if you have a long-term contract there, or you have like a 10-, 20-, 30-year concession to, to, to rent or operate a spot, you sort of know that they're gonna sell the electricity, right? There's gonna be more demand, there's gonna be more charging. So I have a pretty good feeling on that side. The only thing I know for sure is, if we take the UK as example, there won't be any other National Grid there to deliver that, that electricity to the charging station, right?
So for me, if I'm able to make a risk-adjusted bet on this sector, I'd rather play that via a transmission network, which has a monopoly, which cannot be replaced, than potentially investing, like in an EV company from I don't know who's gonna be there in 10 years. I might be right, but I might be wrong.
I think from an investor's perspective, from an allocator's perspective, what does infrastructure serve in a multi-asset portfolio, right? And for many, infrastructure serves as a diversifier away from global equities. So exactly to that point, because it has different risk-return characteristics to your luxury goods companies or your big tech or whatever it might be, it's an attractive diversifier because it provides long-dated, inflation-linked cash flows from monopolistic assets that critically, for many investors, this is important, assets that have a social license to operate. And that is, for many, one of the definitions of infrastructure, that your underlying real asset has that social license to operate, and where that gets challenged, either through corporate behavior or through regulatory scrutiny, then that gets difficult.
But those are typically more idiosyncratic or kind of stock-specific instances, rather than in the whole kind of global sector, and that's why one of the attractiveness-- one of the attractive features of listed infrastructure is that you can invest globally, right? And so on a global basis, you are capturing these long-dated inflation-linked cash flows, and because they're long-dated, they are more sensitive to rate movements because they're seen as bond proxies, for right or for wrong. But if you are wanting to protect real value, and you're wanting to get an income yield, and you're wanting to diversify away from all your growthy equity stuff, then listed infrastructure is actually a really good... Well, infrastructure, and you might choose to allocate that in listed infrastructure, is a really good way to implement that in your portfolio.
And that's certainly what clients at WTW have done and continue to do. And if liquidity is becoming increasingly important to you because maybe you're a de-risking DB scheme, but you still want to have a diversified portfolio, then listed infrastructure is a quite good avenue to do that, right? And so yield is important, but also growth is important because you want to ensure that the companies that you're investing in are still investing in their networks, are still able to maintain their asset base, and are able to get a return that's commensurate from that.
That's the, that's the challenge in many jurisdictions with infrastructure market participants, is that, that sort of tripartite arrangement between the users of the infrastructure, the owners of the infrastructure, and the regulators of, of that, of that model. And sometimes that doesn't quite shake out well.
Quick follow-up. When you look at allocations to private and public infrastructure in the portfolios that you look at, clearly, it's all sensitive, but are you seeing the allocations go up as a percentage of overall portfolios? And is the total capital flowing in exceeding the total capital required by the sector? i.e., are you guys attracting enough capital to fund what Andy and Miguel are hoping to do?
So, I mean, speaking from our perspective, we're market participants in a much broader sector, right? So kind of it's difficult to say if overall all CapEx plans for all private and public infrastructure entities globally is gonna be met. I suspect the answer is probably gonna be no. As to your point, capital is scarce, right? But when we consider our portfolios, I think the inflation protection nature of infrastructure is undervalued, and I think many investors don't actually necessarily consider... generalist investors don't necessarily consider the eroding nature of higher inflation on their overall portfolios, and infrastructure can appease that. When we talk about public versus private, it depends on an investor's preferences, right?
Some will very much favor private investment because they have the governance and time horizon to be able to do that, and others just won't, right? But that, that's not to say that it's a worse outcome to invest in the listed opportunity set because you have liquidity, and you arguably have a more core opportunity set to allocate to. Don't know if you'd like to supplement those views.
No, I mean, the good thing is I'm not, not per se pitching here because we have sticky money from the pension fund, which, which makes my life easier in that sense. Having said that, and that's what we've seen, so we're managing the, the pension of, like, basically the Dutch civil servants, and the allocation towards infrastructure in that portfolio is growing. So they really recognize the benefits of infrastructure in their, or the added value of infrastructure in their overall portfolio.
In percentage terms and absolute dollars, in euros.
Yeah.
Well, any book build process for a big listed infrastructure company, the global listed infrastructure managers are only a small proportion of the book. So we haven't grown as much as we'd like, but we're seeing an inflection. The private guys have raised a lot of money, right? They raised a lot of money over a period of time. I think they've had a bit of a hiatus in the last two years, and from my understanding the reason they've had to pay high prices for assets is 'cause there's a scarcity of assets that they can buy. That's not to say there's a scarcity of infrastructure investment. We know that that's not the case, but there has been a scarcity, hence the high prices. But we're only one part of the capital market, right, Mark?
So, I don't think... I mean, I don't have an answer for you, so.
Conscious of time, and that we're keeping you from some refreshments, so thank you very much to my panelists, and thank you for your attention.