Good afternoon, and welcome to Brookfield's 2024 Listed Affiliates Investor Day. I'm Alan Fleming, Head of Investor Relations for Brookfield Business Partners, and on behalf of the leadership team at Brookfield, thank you for joining us, both here in Toronto and online. We have a great afternoon planned, and we'll get things started with a fireside chat between our CEO, Bruce Flatt, and Andy Willis, a columnist from The Globe and Mail. We'll then move to our presentations from our listed affiliates, beginning with Brookfield Business Partners. After a short break, we'll hear from Brookfield Renewable Partners and then Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. Following the day's presentations, we'll be hosting a reception for our investors here attending in person. We'll also leave time for questions at the end of each session.
For those in the room, we ask that you just raise your hand and wait for the mic, and for those online, you can submit your question in the box at the bottom of your screen. So let's get to a few housekeeping items before getting started. As always, we'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and in talking about new initiatives in our financial and operating performance, for Brookfield companies presenting today, we may make forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. law. These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They're subject to known and unknown risks, and future events may differ materially from such statements.
For further information on these risks and their potential impacts on our companies, please review our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the U.S., which are available on our respective websites. And with that, I'd like to invite Bruce and Andy to the stage.
Thank you very much, Alan, and I look forward to this fireside chat with Bruce. Just by way of explanation, as Alan mentioned, I am a columnist at The Globe and Mail. I've been covering Brookfield for longer than I care to admit, since the 1980 s. But I also had the unique opportunity to work at Brookfield with Bruce for six years. I joined in communications as the global financial crisis was playing out and spent six wonderful years. Like most of you in this room, I am a shareholder, a very happy shareholder, and I look forward to hearing Bruce's take on how the world's unfolding and the prospects for Brookfield.
I gotta say, as someone who did work with Bruce for a number of years, Bruce comes into the office every morning excited about something. Bruce always finds opportunities in even the toughest markets, and we saw some pretty tough markets. Right now has got to be a pretty exciting time, Bruce. Interest rates are falling. Inflation is in check for now, at least. Do you wanna just start out by sort of talking about your overall view of the landscape right now in an environment with falling rates?
Yeah, I'd start off by saying that sometimes the ideas I come in with in the morning, they aren't very good. They, sometimes they're good ones, sometimes really good ones, sometimes not so good. Luckily, I have lots of people around to get rid of the bad, bad ideas I have.
You were always open to hearing that something was a bad idea. That is very true.
First, I'll start off by saying thanks for joining, and thanks for being here and your interest in Brookfield. Look, I think if I encapsulate the last five years, COVID happened, money flooded the markets, the Fed had to cool the system. All that was three and a half years of brutal conditions, sometimes good, sometimes bad. They were just very volatile. Right now, we know the table's set, and we know what's happening, and that's really good. We have a slowdown in the economy. Inflation's basically stopped going up, and it's come down in most places in the world, and the rest will be done soon.
Central banks are decreasing rates everywhere, but in particular in the United States, and rates are coming off 150- 200 basis points, and that has already, since the words of Powell in November of 2023, since that day, liquidity has been coming back to the markets, in the CLO markets, in the banking market, in the private credit markets, in CMBS, RMBS, CLOs. Across the board, money's been coming back in, and that just leads to transaction activity. Transaction activity leads to money going back to institutions, and once institutions have more money and the confidence, 'cause they got more money back, they can put more money back out. That starts business back up again, and it's been...
Look, we had a really good few years because we were in a very good position, because of the structure and many of you here. But a lot didn't, but all that's starting back. And so I'd just say we're at the cusp of... It doesn't seem like we're at the start of a recovery, but because it was up and down and up and down, but we did have a recession, technically.
Yeah
... and we certainly had one in everyone's mind. It looks like we're gonna have a soft landing, and then things are gonna start back. So I'd say we have a lot of tailwinds behind us, especially in businesses that are relatively interest sensitive, and therefore it should be a pretty good few years in front of us.
And when you think about the structure of Brookfield, I mean, first of all, you hit a big milestone. You have a trillion dollars in assets, and you've also spent the last couple of years expanding the platform, so, you know, insurance and private credit with the Oaktree transaction. Do you just wanna talk a little bit about how you think about growth at Brookfield, and, you know, especially moving forward, how the firm will evolve and grow?
Look, we've always been growing, and it's good to grow because it allows expansion and new opportunities for your people in an organization, right, in the most basic sense, and you saw that firsthand.
Yeah.
But, I'd just say our grow-- You shouldn't grow for the sake of growth, but our strategy has been put people on the ground in countries we wanna operate in, and we're there. We have people in 30 countries, and we can actually... Someone calls this afternoon, we can have people in their office in 30 countries in the world, local people, and they can actionably invest in an opportunity. Have access to more money than others, therefore, it allows us to do things that most other people can't. And, and in some things, that doesn't matter. In investing, it does, because it just allows us to do transactions, which most other people can't do. There's never no competition, but it just eliminates a lot of the competition around the edges.
Third, just to have more operational teams to be able to both do better with what we own and do better with what we buy. I think that's the one piece which we've spent a long, long time, and we got it originally from our investment roots, just being in these businesses. That's given us a special ability to just expand and grow and do things that a lot of other people might not be as comfortable investing in.
Can I, can I get you to talk about those roots for a minute? Because for the... I think most of you would know the, the Brookfield story, but the, the company was born out of Brazil as an owner and operator of hydroelectric power assets. They built the original electrical system in São Paulo. So as, as a company, you started out as owner-operators and then became an asset manager over time. Do you wanna just talk a little bit about how that influences the way Brookfield invests?
You know, I'd just say that it... Look, today in our investment management business, we're not, we're similar to others, except we're different because we try to act and invest like we're, it's our money.
Yeah.
And a lot of it is our money off the balance sheets of the companies and, our investment in those businesses, and many of you invested with us. But that just, I'd say it makes us, I think just the DNA is different because we started not off as an investment manager. We started as we just ran these businesses ourselves, and the way we think of it today is, do we wanna buy that asset? And if we do, does it fit in a fund? And if we do, we're buying it with somebody. Which partners are coming with us?
Right.
And whether it's our private vehicles or one of our listed vehicles with our private vehicle, we're just trying to earn proper returns in the things we know how to earn proper returns on. And we're bringing somebody's money into it, and that's it. It's just... We're the same as others, but we're just a little bit different, and I think it gives us in an environment like now, where... Look, when money's free-
Right
... you can buy almost anything and earn a return.
Yeah.
When money's not free, you have to work hard, and our operating teams allow us to excel when you need to work hard, and I think that's the difference.
Does it also affect the kind of businesses you're able to buy because you've got the operating expertise to take a broken business and fix it, or a broken balance sheet probably is a better expression and fix it?
Yeah, look, we try to buy great businesses or assets and optimize them, and the easiest money's always made when you have a great, great business, and it's clouded-
Right
... by a bad capital structure. That's the easiest way to make money: to buy a great, great business that somebody misfinanced or a great asset that somebody misfinanced because then you don't have to do the hard work.
Right.
Our operating teams like to do stuff and keep busy, but what's really fun is when you can just buy something, strip the capital structure off, and you have great assets. But I would say where our operating teams actually allow us to excel is investing is never easy, and you sometimes make mistakes on the way in.
Right.
Or things change in the environment around you, and you have to be agile to be able to get the returns and to work around the edges. Usually when you get into something, and you have to be agile, if you're more agile than the competitor, you will win.
Right.
So even though we may have made a mistake starting off, and once in a while we do, being agile with our operating teams allows us to excel even where we, we didn't make the best investment decision going in because something happened.
Right.
And so that I think that's the real difference of the operating teams that we have.
You also talked a lot in your quarterly shareholder letters. You talk about themes that Brookfield's working on across the entire organization. Right now, one of the big themes is around decarbonization. You've got deglobalization. You've got these big, the three Ds of themes. Do you wanna just talk a little bit about how you're thinking right now in terms of really large picture economic change and how Brookfield is positioning itself?
Yeah, so, look, and when I said the tailwinds are behind us, tailwinds are macro behind us, but there's also what we do is invest in businesses which have are the backbone of the global economy-
Right
... in many different ways, and try to optimize those assets over the longer term, and right now, between what's going on with Decarbonization, and really just simply take that, that is just have less carbon within the global energy systems and some other things. What's going on with Digitalization, which is the build-out of cloud and data centers for artificial intelligence, and on Deglobalization, just the movement of capacity from, simply put, from Asia to developed markets, back to developed markets. Those three areas are almost incomprehensible amounts of money will be invested into them in the next 25 years.
Public money can't do it. Governments just can't afford it.
Governments are all strapped. They don't have any more money. Whatever they're spending today is all stacking debt on top of debt, but private enterprise, these are all themes where you can make very good returns, and our counterparties, you know, for example, in the artificial intelligence data center, green power area, are the global titans of technology, and so the counterparties we're transacting with are the best credit in the world, and therefore, even though the sums are big, the sums of money are big, the opportunity is really good, and so this is all being pushed not by governments, it's being pushed by global corporations.
They just need capital to be able to do it, because even though these companies are extremely large, trillion-dollar-plus market caps, the amount of money, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions, the amount of money that's required is even more than what they can fund off their own balance sheets. So they need solutions, private solutions like us, and others like us, to be able to provide money to them.
One of the things that I've seen with Brookfield recently, and I'm thinking about some of the transactions you tried in Australia, is that you're going where the emissions are. You're buying power producers that still have a coal component in their structure, and then helping them with the transition to net zero. Do you want to just talk a little bit more about, like, the role that Brookfield is going to play in the energy transition?
Look, the thing that, for our investors, I would just focus on the fact that, the returns out of transition and renewables are very good today. So we can both, do good and do well. We can make, very good returns, and we can decarbonize the world. And most of that is because the last 15 years, the cost of solar and wind globally have come down to be the lowest cost bulk electricity in the world, in most, virtually every single country. So if you were gonna build a thermal, capacity plant or you're gonna build a renewable plant, the lowest cost is renewable, so you should build renewable. 15 years ago, it used to be the opposite.
Yeah, you need a subsidy.
And that's changed dramatically, and therefore, we can go into transactions where either we're just building renewables or we're shutting down capacity and delivering renewables to the customer base, like the one you described, and we'll continue to look at those around the world. But it's, these are 20-plus year trends.
Right.
We're not talking two years. Like, cycles come and go within, used to be seven years, maybe we're down to three years, I don't know what it is, but cycles come and go. But these are, these are secular trends of investment, which are gonna be around for a very, very long time, and we're at the center of them or one of the few that can invest in these type of assets globally.
You know, one of the fun parts of working at Brookfield is most of the senior staff eat lunch each day in the same lunchroom. Bruce has always been a part of this and will occasionally share some war stories. Bruce, I remember one war story you told was around the first renewable-
Okay.
-power asset you ever bought.
I think we can stop now about war stories.
Bruce was part of a team that bought a hydroelectric dam in... Was it Quebec? You'll fill in the details. What Brookfield forgot to ask for was the reservoir behind the dam be full when we took possession. So between the time that the transaction was structured and the time that we actually closed, the old owner ran the reservoir down, produced a lot of power, made a lot of money, and then Brookfield had to sit there and wait for months to start generating cash flow while the reservoir refilled. I tell that story not to embarrass Bruce, but just to say that there's a lot of learning that goes on with... and a lot of replication that goes on in the investments you make.
Do you wanna just talk a little bit about the way that the organization learns and the lessons you learn?
I totally, totally forgot that story. I know why I totally forgot the story, because that actually is true. The purchase and sale contract didn't have a clause that said, "You shall leave the water at average levels," and literally, the owner drained it, drained the ponds.
Yeah. A mistake you only make once.
Yeah. So yes, I would say, look, our investment process, what we do is we buy businesses and assets that are the backbone of the global economy. They have some similar characteristics. They generate cash flow. You know, different assets perform differently, and some of them act differently, but they're very similar, and over time, it's a repeatable process that gives you a moat.
Yeah
People know, people know that if they have a solar plant that needs money, they'll come to us.
Yeah.
We know to put that clause in the contract. We know there's, like, so as you make small mistakes along the way, that gets embedded into the culture, and that's really what the value is of a business like ours. It's the people you have, our 2,500 people in the investment management business, and it's the learnings you have over decades and decades, which is why we try to bring lots of young people along early, but keep the oldsters around. When you get older, you wanna stay around, so you gotta say that.
Gotta keep busy.
Keep the oldsters around, because there's a lot of embedded knowledge within the system.
Yeah.
I'd say that endures. The benefit comes out in many things you do, 'cause it's really repeatable. Like, we've bought, I don't know how many renewable investments we've made in 30 years, probably-
Hundreds.
Hundreds and hundreds.
Yeah. Yeah.
You get better at it.
Yeah. One of the other things I recognize as a veteran of Brookfield is that back when I was working at the firm, and this is a few years ago, we talked a lot about what AI may mean for the business. Well, now, you know, obviously Brookfield was ahead of the curve on that, because now AI is in the headlines just about every day. Do you wanna talk a little bit about, you know, how the firm uses AI and how you're thinking about AI as a business opportunity?
Look, the simple story is there's a massive pipeline of projects being developed around the world to bring AI on from green power to data centers to compute capacity and that whole chain of activities, and we're involved in virtually every leg of it, and it is going to grow and grow and grow. So that, that's for our renewable power and our infrastructure business. And it will be very significant to those businesses going forward, and I think there'll be excellent returns because we're at the leading edge of it. On top of that, and I would put it this way, I think the simplest way to just think about artificial intelligence is it's just the using computers or technology to advance systems and processes you have in your business.
It's clear to us that advanced robotics are. We're soon at the stage where robotics can change a lot of different processes, and we're in the early stage of it in many of our industrial businesses and our operating businesses, to be able to use artificial intelligence to change those processes. What it means is you're gonna make margins, you're gonna expand margins dramatically over time. Now, there's an investment to it-
Right.
-but the investment up front of money will bring... Look, we're possibly in a phase of one of the greatest investment booms in the history ever-
Right
-between those three themes, leading to among the greatest amount of productivity advances we've ever seen within a 20-year period. You think of what happened with computers, with the iPhone, with all the different things that you think of productivity. I think they will pale in comparison to what... Because it's really advanced, it's advanced manufacturing and services that's gonna benefit dramatically, and this is huge amounts of margin that can drop to the bottom line. Those that embrace it will win, and those that don't may fall behind.
But we're also seeing some of the key players in that space look to companies like Brookfield for support. I'm thinking specifically of Intel needing to build chips to, you know, obviously to power the computers for AI. They partnered with Brookfield on factories. Do you wanna just talk a little bit about the opportunities you see with some of these-
Yeah
-massive, massive global companies?
I would just put it in the category of these. I put them and others in the category of the amounts of money needed to advance chip production, data center production, green power, compute capacity, and all those really lead up to compute capacity are so large that they can't fund it themselves. None of the companies can.
’Cause the Intel investment, for those who’ve forgotten, is a $15 billion dollar-
$30 billion.
30 billion.
We're half, they're half.
Sorry. Yeah.
And so it's large, but these sums are small compared to what's going to come soon as the build-out of this grows. And this is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of trillions of dollars, and it's gonna be big.
It's gonna be incredibly exciting. But always have to-- In any Brookfield conversation, gotta talk a little bit about real estate. It's been a volatile market since the pandemic. There's been a little bit of uncertainty. It feels, though, now like we're entering what I would refer to as a more normal phase. Do you wanna just talk a little bit about the outlook for real estate investment?
Yeah. Look, the short story is, in one minute or less, is, fundamentals actually are pretty good globally. Fundamentals are pretty good in most asset classes. Fundamentals in office are strong, in high-quality office, in good cities. And, as always, but even more pronounced today, assets which don't meet the future, are being put out of business.
Yeah.
That's even more today than it ever was, and there's a stat in New York. I think the top 40% of buildings are virtually 100% full, and the bottom 30% of buildings have 90% of the vacancy.
You see-
So it just shows you that barbell in office, but. I'd say the story that's all sort of last year's story. The story right now is, the markets have turned, spreads are coming down, cap rates are gonna cap rates never went up. There was just no trades.
Right.
And now you're gonna see trades at probably a little bit higher than what they were in the bottom. You would have bought in the bottom of the market, but they didn't really go down that much, and therefore, they don't have to go up that much. But you're now gonna start real estate trading on good properties.
Right.
And that's healthy, and with interest rates coming down, you're gonna see transaction activity come back, and we're in the next phase, which is a recovery of real estate globally, and we're 18 months into it, and it'll take us another 24 months to see the full fruits of it, including all the interest rate cuts you're gonna see over the next while.
I talked a moment ago about Intel. I was asking you about that transaction. There was another big agreement earlier this year. You're working on a global renewable energy framework with Microsoft. Do you just wanna talk a little bit about how, you know, how Brookfield is supporting that sort of initiative? Like, what exactly you're up to with Microsoft and the opportunity that those kind of businesses represent?
I don't wanna steal the thunder from our renewable people who are coming up later. But,
Ah, steal the thunder.
But I would just say. Look, I think this is indicative of what's gonna happen in the future. We partnered with Microsoft to build them $12 billion, circa $12-$14 billion of power plants, most of it in North America. I think this will be replicated with them and possibly others elsewhere in the world. And this just shows you, it's not government.
No.
100% of our capacity 20 years ago used to be given to governments. In fact, 10 years ago, it used to be given to governments or government-related entities. Virtually 100% of it is contracted to corporate counterparties today. So this is not a push. The push isn't happening from government, it's a pull from corporates because they need power. You probably saw, you may have written about it, but Three Mile Island-
Yeah, they restarted.
They're gonna restart.
They're gonna restart Three Mile Island. Nuclear is-
You know, you wouldn't have thought, you wouldn't have thought of that before. And when we bought Westinghouse, six years ago, I know we had a huge debate, or we did have a huge debate around nuclear. We convinced ourself that even in a blowdown scenario, you know, just to the risks of downside, we would be fine, and if nuclear power came back, we could have a really good time. And it seems like it's better than we imagined. But there's a lot of this going on, and Microsoft's just the first of a number of those type of transactions.
Yeah. No, I look at that Westinghouse deal with the support now of Cameco. I mean, you've got one of the major players in the uranium market and positioned for a boom market. Can you talk a little bit about the whole infrastructure super cycle? I mean, there obviously needs to be renewal on infrastructure around the world. And, again, we talked a moment ago about the fact that public funds just can't pay for these sorts of projects.
You know, I would say, we used to. When we started in the infrastructure business 25 years ago, Sam and I would talk about it, and we always thought it was gonna be infrastructure coming from governments. We're gonna buy stuff from governments or build stuff for governments.
Yeah, privatization.
Yeah.
It always made sense, and they never happened.
It sort of happens, but what's really happening is the backbone of the global economy shifts.
Right.
And, the new stuff is all being built by private enterprise and by companies, and the old is either being... Once in a while, it gets privatized, but the big, big money that's needed today, is in things that government isn't funding. And, therefore, I don't think the cycle is even larger than we ever imagined, and the investment, that's gonna happen is larger than we ever imagined, but it's just different. And, I know some of you have seen this slide we sometimes use. 50% of the things that we own today, were not investable asset classes 20 years ago. 50% of the things we have today on our balance sheet were not an investable asset class. That's an amazing stat. So we always think, like, we invest in the backbone of the global economy-
Yeah.
We always think it stays the same, but it doesn't. It evolves, it changes, and you have to change with it.
So that, that 50%, that's data centers. That's,
Solar wasn't an investable asset class. Wind plants weren't in business. You can go through the list. All the different types of infrastructure around digital towers and data centers and everything behind your phone didn't exist 20 years ago. And that's a huge change in the landscape.
There's also the shift in Brookfield over the last few years has been this global shift. India, we were in India, Brookfield was in India for a number of years, then started investing. Australia has been a big build-out for the better part of a couple of decades. When you think... I started out by saying, what gets you excited these days? When you look at Brookfield's global presence, what regions are most exciting to you these days?
Look, I would say 50, just because of where we come from, and our money's in U.S. dollars, largely, that we invest for people, and because the GDP of the United States is largest in the world, and the entrepreneurialism is the biggest, half of our money always goes to the U.S.
Right.
And I don't think that's gonna change, and it may even be this time through, it may even be more right now, because the AI build-out, the decarbonization build-out, and the stress from interest rates all are the most acute in the United States. Therefore, and if you're gonna invest in the world-
The risk/reward ratio in the States is pretty good.
Yeah, I would say the, it's the lowest risk in the biggest market, therefore, go to the United States, and we take no currency risks-
Yeah
-by investing in the United States. But it's the other 50% that always changes.
Yeah.
Today, we're doing a lot in India. We're doing quite a bit in Australia and in Asia, more broadly, and quite a bit in Europe. Europe's a slower market, but there's always opportunities in a big market like that to put money to work.
I'm conscious that this is your meeting, and much as I enjoy talking to Bruce, so I'd love to open it up if I could. Are there any questions? Yes, from... And there's a microphone coming. We've just got a couple of minutes left.
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for the talk. This has been great. The one question or area I'd be interested in hearing about is Japan. We read a lot about, you know, Japan's open for business, and you know, in terms of themes, you mentioned AI, India. But any thoughts on Japan and how Brookfield's approaching that region of the world, and how that may look for investors?
Japan is one of the largest GDPs in the world. It's always been a relatively closed market. We've been there 10 years. I think for 10 years. We've even had people on the ground for 10 years in Japan. It's not our biggest business. I think there will be many more opportunities going forward as the economy and the businesses in Japan can continue to open up. We have a number of great partnerships with Japanese institutions, both in the country and outside, and I think there'll be a lot of opportunity going forward. But it hasn't been our biggest market in Asia, but it definitely has the potential to be, just given the scale and size of the country.
I think we probably have some advantages from where we come from in operating in Japan versus some others.
With that, I am going to say thank you to Bruce, and thank you to the audience for helping out with some questions. It is always great to hear from you. I come away from talks like this excited about prospects for the company. Thanks very much, Bruce, and enjoy the afternoon.
Anuj Ranjan.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. You know, I was just thinking, while I was sitting on the side, that while I've been on the stage before at this event, it's actually my first time today as CEO of BBU, and I'm very lucky because today happens to be our two-year high stock price. So, can't ask for a better day to be on stage. Let's just hope it stays that way by the end of my presentation. Very pleased to be here today to talk to you about BBU. I'm gonna start by telling you a little bit about the business and the opportunities we see for BBU. I have my colleagues with me here today as well.
Katie Zorbas, who's a managing director at BBU, is gonna come up after me and interview or moderate a panel with Adrian Letts, who's our Global Head of Business Operations, and Pat McHugh, who's the CEO of Scientific Games, one of our largest operations. After that, we'll follow up with Jaspreet Dehl, our CFO, who's going to talk to you about why BBU is such a great investment opportunity at this time. But I'd like to start actually with a question, which is what is BBU? What do you get when you buy a share of BBU? And many might think you get a collection of great businesses, advanced industrials, leading essential services. That's true. That's part of the story.
Some would say you're getting an operational capability that knows how to increase margins and drive additional cash flow, which my colleagues will speak about later. And sure, that's part of what you're getting when you buy a share as well. Some might say it's our investment pipeline, the fact that our next GrafTech, our next Westinghouse, our next Clarios, is being searched for by our investment team. But what you're really getting, I think, is an engine, and it's an engine that is built on the back of our global private equity business, of Brookfield's global private equity business, that knows how to source incredible opportunities, buy them for value, make them better and increase their cash flows, and actually exit these businesses when their value creation plans are mature enough to recycle capital, return it to investors or redeploy it.
And that engine, is quite exceptional, and we've been at it for a very long time. Brookfield's private equity business actually has a 25-year history. We've been doing this since 2001, and, in that time, we've generated a gross IRR of 27%. We've returned nearly $40 billion to investors and partners, and, on the investments that we've actually sold and realized, we've made a three times multiple on that invested capital. When we launched BBU in 2016, it was really to give the public markets access to this private equity strategy to participate in what we've been able to do so well for our institutional partners around the world.
That's really doing the same thing that we've been doing for 25 years, the playbook that we've created to both invest and create value, doing it on a repeatable basis again and again. We really just do two things. We're value investors, and you've heard this throughout. You've heard it earlier from Bruce. Gonna hear it later, I'm sure, from some of my colleagues who'll present. We try to find great businesses, but we try to buy them for value. And how we do that is often by looking at situations that might be a bit complex, situations like Westinghouse, for example. We might look at businesses that are perhaps misunderstood at the time, businesses like Clarios, or we might look at other businesses where the public markets don't really fully ascribe them their true value for whatever reason, businesses like Network International.
Now, we buy these businesses, and we employ an operations team, led by Adrian, who you'll meet later, of 30 business operations folks around the world, paired with our 200-strong investment team around the world, to actually go and make these businesses better, doing the same things, using the same playbook that applies to every business, no matter what sector it is or what country in the world it is. We have, as Bruce outlined earlier, those 30 offices on the ground with real deep operational capability and boots on the ground to employ these value creation initiatives. Now, for BBU, investing alongside our global private equity business, we've deployed about $9 billion since our inception.
These have all been deployed into great, high-quality businesses, businesses that we've, over that same period of time, been able to enhance and improve their underlying financial performance pretty substantially. Now, as a result of that strategy in BBU today, we own some incredible businesses that are actually exceptional value compounders. What do I mean by a compounder? What we mean are businesses that are market leaders. That means they are price setters, not takers, including in inflationary environments like we've been for the last couple of years. It also includes businesses that provide essential products and services, and these products and services are those that are needed even if you're in a recession, like we've been in some parts of the world, including Europe, in more recent times.
It also includes businesses that generate high margins and have a great moat and barriers to entry, allowing us to generate substantial cash flows, like one of the businesses we own today named Sagen, which many in this room would be, I'm sure, quite familiar with. Sagen's a business we bought about four years ago. It's been in business since nineteen ninety-five, providing mortgage insurance to Canadian homebuyers. As all of you in this room, I'm sure know, if you buy a home and you have less than a 20% down payment, then you need mortgage insurance for that balance, and Sagen is the largest private insurer in the space. If you think about essential product or service, this defines it, being essential to Canadian banks.
When we bought the business, it had a 12% return on equity. Our teams that I spoke about earlier went and really dug into the business and improved it over the time, that short time that we've owned it, just four years, improving the ROEs to about 20% today, which is very sustainable and is very stable and likely to grow. As a result, we generate about $350 million today of cash distributions, again, likely growing over our future hold period. When you take all that combined in Sagen, and this is what we mean by a compounder, we've been able to return 85% of our invested capital to date. By the end of the year, we'll have returned all of it, and we still own the business and will continue to generate substantial cash flow.
Another business that we own that's a great compounder, as we describe it, is Clarios. This business is truly unmatched scale, produces one in every three car batteries, so one in every three cars on the road is powered by a Clarios battery. It's four times bigger than its next biggest competitor, and again, truly unmatched scale. The interesting thing that's happening in this business is there's a shift in technology to more advanced AGM or absorbent glass mat batteries, used for more, I'd say, complicated and advanced vehicles, including electric vehicles. This new channel or this new product is actually twice as profitable as the current battery that makes up the majority of what Clarios is producing. Today, about 30% of the batteries we sell are the older technology. That will go to about...
Sorry, 30% are the newer technology, which will go to 50% by 2028. So you can imagine what's gonna happen to our margins. They're only gonna grow. As a result, today, after even investing in further growth in the business, we generate about $700 million of cash distributions, and that will only increase. If you look at Clarios also over the time that we've held it, about $2.6 billion of cumulative free cash flow has been generated, which is about 90% of our total invested capital to date. We've used most of that capital to pay down debt, but as a result, today we're sitting on a business that generates strong 20% free cash flow yields, growing to 30% over the coming years.
Now, I've described a few of these businesses, and I could have gone into more detail on many more, but I'd say this compounding value of these businesses that I've described, two of them we've only owned for about four years, it's just getting started in BBU. The reason is that out of that $9 billion that we invested since our inception, half of that, or $4.5 billion, has only been invested within the last three years. Our value creation plans in those businesses, those 12 companies that we've bought over the last three years, we've only just started to scratch the surface. Now, we haven't been throwing money out to buy businesses over the last three years. These were all bought very well. We paid an average 10 times multiple on these 12 companies versus 15 times in the market comparables.
And our value creation estimates today of about $500 million of run rate EBITDA improvements, these are not fully factored in because these businesses have only been owned, in many cases, for one or two years. We've just started the journey that I've outlined to you that we've already completed with Clarios and Sagen. We're just starting that journey on 12 businesses. Now, if you think about that $500 million of EBITDA that we are going to add in our existing businesses, what does that mean for BBU? Well, at a 10-15 times multiple, it means $5-$7.5 billion of additional value to BBU.
And again, I want to reinforce that that is if we do nothing else than execute our value creation plans on just the businesses we've bought within the last three years, when our hope is we will do much, much more. This all comes together and fuels what I earlier referred to as our compounding engine or our private equity engine that you're really owning when you buy a share of BBU. This flywheel of being able to buy businesses for value, exceptional businesses for value, execute on our operational improvements, increasing margins and free cash flow, using that free cash flow, which compounds upon itself within these businesses, but also exiting at the right time certain businesses to generate proceeds which we can either use to pay down debt, return to shareholders, or buy more businesses.
That whole engine and recycling of capital is really what we think BBU represents. And look, the proof is always in the pudding. At BBU alone, since its inception, we have exited 20 businesses in that time. We've generated $6 billion of proceeds. We only spent $2 billion to acquire those businesses, so generating a three times multiple of capital or a 30% IRR. Now, with that, I'd like to turn it over now to my colleagues, Katie, Adrian, and Pat, who are gonna come and speak about the real hard work, which is the value creation that we do to these businesses to make them that much better. Thank you.
Thank you, Anuj, and thank you both for being here today. We wanted to have a discussion today around the importance of our operational approach and how our business operations team really create value within our portfolio companies. Now, our entire investment team within private equity truly has an operations-first mentality. But it's our business operations team, comprised of about 30-35 people, who are really the driving force behind turning that $500 million that Anuj just talked about into reality. So we're really lucky to have Adrian here with us today, who leads that business operations team for us, as well as Pat, the CEO of Scientific Games, here to share their insights with us. So let's start with a couple of brief intros. Pat, I'm gonna turn it over to you first.
Just elaborate a little bit on your background, and give us a little bit of an overview on Scientific Games.
Sure. Thanks, Katie. Good to be here with you and Adrian. I'm Pat McHugh, CEO of Scientific Games. I've been in the lottery industry for more than two decades now. Most of my background was in operations technology, became the group CEO in 2019. Scientific Games is a leader in providing games, technology, analytics, and services to government-sponsored lotteries around the world. It's probably helpful to know that the industry exists to generate funding for social programs for good causes. As an industry, we generate over $100 billion annually to programs like education, programs for senior citizens, for environmental causes, and that's what really drives the industry. So we're a trusted leader in the industry. We have a global reach, serving 140 lotteries across 50 countries.
What drives demand for our products and services is this constant growth need by governments for funding those social causes, especially during when governments are facing financial challenges. So we work with stakeholders to meet the funding needs of those programs by driving performance of their lotteries.
Perfect. Thanks. And Adrian, you joined Brookfield Business Partners in 2022, so a couple of years ago now. Tell us a little bit about what led you to Brookfield, and also elaborate for us on what the role of business operations professional really entails within private equity.
Thank you so much, Katie. So yeah, I joined about two years ago. Most recently, prior to Brookfield, I led a PE-backed retail energy company, which we rapidly scaled from 500,000 customers to 5 million customers in three years. P rior to that, I was part of the global leadership team at a leading retailer, and I led the transformation of digital and e-commerce for that business, growing it from 10% to 20% as part of the total revenue. Today, I lead a team of 30 people globally, and I think what's important is the team I lead are true operators. Many, like myself, are former CEOs or COOs or CCOs in businesses and have a true understanding of actually what it takes to create value.
And so look, I think the value that I can bring is having sat on the other side of the table. H aving seen what a private equity investor is looking for, and how you drive a value creation plan, and what it actually means to bring that to life.
Knowing that you have that kind of unique vantage point, having been a CEO in industry, but also now running our business operations team, what is it you think that truly differentiates our approach from many of our peers?
Look, and Bruce made this comment. For us, we were operators long before we were asset managers. And I think that is pervasive in the culture that we have. In many organizations, business operations team is seen as a consulting team, an in-house consulting team to opine on a value creation plan and perhaps be dropped in if things aren't going the way that they should. For us, it's very different. Having people who really understand what it takes to lead, having people who understand what it takes to manage change in a lot of large organization and the impact that has on everybody within the organization, I think is a true differentiator that we're able to bring to bear in deploying our value creation plans and generating value.
Perfect. And, Pat, let's maybe just bring that to life with a real-life example. Give us your perspective on the partnership at Scientific Games. It's been a little over two years now since we acquired the business. We carved it out from a publicly listed entity. What has been the biggest change for you, with that change in ownership?
Well, the relationship's been great, and it's been very effective in growing the business. You know, I've been with the company for a long time, and I can tell you that is the relationship with Brookfield has created the most productive time in our history. We're much more focused on growth investment. We've streamlined business decisions. And to Adrian's point, when we ask for help, we get help, not overhead, which is incredibly important for us. Anytime we've needed assistance from Brookfield, they've been able to provide relationships or operational experience that's really added value.
And Pat, elaborate on that partnership a little bit more in terms of how it actually works in practical terms with your management team working alongside-
Yeah, sure.
-our operating team.
So I think common values in culture are really important. You know, our team is passionate about the business. We're very hands-on. We wanna win, we wanna grow, and the Brookfield culture very much aligns with that, like Adrian was, you know, talking about. So from a, you know, from an execution standpoint, we are in constant, you know, communications and collaboration on the business. Have very clear short-term and long-term goals, and we're very focused on execution. And I've seen firsthand what Adrian was talking about as far as this hands-on operational approach. So right from the start, when we did our carve out, Brookfield immediately assigned full-time operational support to us, people in HR, finance, you know, enterprise systems.
We worked as one team, executed all the carve-out activities from our parent company flawlessly, and were able to keep the team focused on commercial execution without any hiccups, and then even, you know, another great example is coming out of COVID, navigating the challenges we had post-COVID, which were, you know, cost input inflation, supply chain or availability issues on electronic components, for example. We worked with Brookfield's operations teams to have very, very specific, strategic, targeted objectives to navigate those well, and I can also tell you that the level of sophistication that the Brookfield team brought to those initiatives really raised the bar on performance of our team as well.
Perfect. And Adrian, let's dive a little bit deeper into value creation. Anuj talked about our established playbook, which we've developed over time, over the last number of years, really institutionalizing that knowledge. And it's something that we apply across sectors, across geographies. No matter what type of business it is, it's kind of the same playbook that we use. Can you comment a little bit on what those specific levers are and the different work streams we're actually using to create value?
So look, I think the first statement to make is that we get involved very early on. We participate as the business operations team in due diligence, and really work hand in glove with our investment partners to think through what the value creation plan is going to be. You know, we really try and start quickly and get out of the gate early. So formulating that plan pre-acquisition is very, very important. And to your point, we don't try and look at everything. We look through broadly a couple of different lenses, whether that be the organizational structure of the business, is it optimum?
Thinking through revenue opportunities like pricing, and share of wallet, thinking through the operating model and the SG&A of a business, and then, you know, capital, and capital efficiency, whether that be working capital or how you deploy capital in a business is very, very important. But what we'll do is then isolate down to four or five things, and really focus on where we think we can bring the most value. And we leverage the expertise within the team. So you're talking about CEOs who have done this sort of thing themselves, Chief Commercial Officers who've really thought through pricing, and share of wallet, and then operating professionals who've led transformation in factory footprints. And bringing those to bear, as a plan is really important.
But actually, the most important thing is working very closely with the management team to really align on what it is that we're gonna go after, and then how are we gonna sequence it? A smaller number of initiatives at any point in time is easier to execute, and making sure that we're aligned with the leadership teams of the companies is critical. But Pat, why don't you elaborate a little bit more on that, in terms of what we've done with Scientific Games?
Yeah, that absolutely. To that point, we worked with Brookfield to really simplify down to four key strategic growth pillars for us, and that the entire organization is focused around that. First one is expansion of our existing products and services into existing contracts. That's anchored with what we call Scientific Games Enhanced Partnership, where the lotteries outsource game category managed services. We've, we can prove that we've outperformed, significantly outperformed the market. So it creates value for our lottery customers to fund those beneficiary programs and then turn value for us. Second, second strategic pillar is expansion into new markets, new territories. Great examples of that are our omni-channel solutions that we recently won, U.K. National Lottery, New Zealand National Lottery, Brazil.
Third strategic pillar, growth pillar, is operational efficiencies, where we are relentless on driving margin improvement through reducing input costs, optimizing our product mix, and making sure that we have strategic initiatives for operational efficiencies across the business. The fourth pillar is iLottery, which is the adoption of digital sales and programs by government lotteries. In the U.S., we're still in the infancy in that. There's only 12 lotteries in the U.S. that have enabled or enacted internet sales of lottery products. We think that all lotteries will go there eventually, latest being Massachusetts, which just passed legislation this year. We think that the digital market, that expansion, can eclipse our retail market while also driving our retail products. What we've seen with...
In that pillar is with when lotteries adopt iLottery, they not only see huge growth from digital engagement, but that omni-channel experience drives performance across the business. So we're well positioned through our relationships, our experience in games and technology. We're already operating some of the largest iLottery programs in the world. And we're investing in new technologies like AI to drive, to leverage the use of data and engagement across digital channels into consumers.
Great, and I want to stay on that theme, digitization, automation, AI. Andy and Bruce talked about it, earlier. Adrian, as we think about it within private equity, we think about the risks and opportunities across the portfolio. Just elaborate on that for us, but also, comment on how those things may make its way into our playbook of value creation.
So look, and it's been commented by Pat and Bruce and others, we definitely think AI is going to be a big opportunity, but also a risk. And so we look at this from a perspective of how can it accelerate the value creation plans that we have with our portfolio companies, but equally, what are the risks that it presents? And we've been exploring it for quite a long time with our portfolio companies and the team, and we've set up a value creation office specifically focused on AI to really make sure that we're leveraging best practice market understanding and applying it in the best possible way we can.
We've seen some great results, whether it be Everise, where we have AI listening to the calls that the agents are handling and prompting them on how to better support the consumer that's calling in. We're using AI in Clarios to do predictive maintenance, to really optimize factory performance, reduce scrap, reduce downtime. And then in Sagen, which Anuj referred to earlier, we have years of proprietary housing data, which we're using to great effect to better understand risk and better underwrite customers. And it's definitely going to help us think through that value creation playbook that I talked about and really drive the efficiency and speed at which we can execute in our portfolio companies. But equally, there's a risk.
And so the other thing that we're constantly doing with people such as Pat, is just really trying to understand how the landscape within which our portfolio companies operate could change. What's the disruption? What could happen? What could throw off the value creation plan, that we've mapped out? And thinking through that, is really important. But bringing it back to the operations team, ultimately, AI is a tool, and the human judgment that we can bring to the table, in conjunction with our leadership teams is really, I think, how we're gonna harness this the best.
Perfect. And we're less than a minute left, so I'm gonna wrap it up with our last question. It would be great to hear from you both, just as we look to the future, what excites you most about the business, specifically at Scientific Games, but then also more broadly within Brookfield PE and panel? Pass it to you.
Sure. You know, as I said before, we're in growth mode. Our value proposition about driving profits for our customers that are helped funding these beneficiary programs and outperforming the market, that is driving performance for us really is the momentum that's got us going. I'm very excited about these omni-channel solutions. We're integrating retail and digital in that space. We've been winning consistently, and we have this an all-time peak in business development opportunity. We have, you know, more than a dozen very large scale opportunities in progress now that could generate $100 million in incremental EBITDA. So it's a combination of the momentum we've had so far in the business, this huge pipeline of opportunities really makes us excited about the growth going forward.
Excellent.
For me, I'll keep it simple. We have great companies, we're building and continue to build and have some really great people globally, on the ground, in the regions that we operate, supporting our companies, and look, we've created a huge amount of value, as Anuj illustrated already, and I'm super excited about the future and the things that we can continue to do.
Excellent. So a lot of exciting things happening in the business. Hopefully, this helped bring our approach to life for everyone. Thank you both for that. And now we're gonna pass it over to Jaspreet to tie it all together and talk about BBU performance and the go-forward outlook.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. I want to leave you with four key messages today. The first is that our business is performing very well, and our financial results are very strong. The second is that we're building value in the business every day, and this value will translate to strong and growing cash flows. Third, as we execute on the operational plans that we have across our businesses, we're very well positioned to generate significant proceeds, and finally, despite being at a two-year high, there's tremendous upside potential in BBU as we continue to compound value, so we've had an excellent year and made really good progress on a lot of initiatives. We achieved record EBITDA margins of 20% this year, completed nine monetizations, and generated $2.2 billion of proceeds.
We own some really high-quality businesses today, and we were able to take advantage of the credit markets and refinance about 50% of our debt at really favorable rates. And despite crosswinds in the operating environment, our business performance has continued to improve. Same-store EBITDA increased 6% year-over-year, and margins improved by 100 basis points. And this solid performance is building on a longer-term track record of very strong financial results. Since 2019, so this is a five-year track record, adjusted EBITDA has grown at an annualized rate of 19%, and over the same time frame, EBITDA margins have increased by 1000 basis points. So it hasn't just been about increasing the size and scale of our business, it's also been about increasing profitability. And in addition to the strong financial results, the execution of our operational plans is building value every day.
As the interest rate environment normalizes, those will be great tailwinds for our business. Adrian and Pat talked about the operational capabilities that we have within BBU, but we're also focused on building value within Scientific Games, and Pat specifically talked to you about the initiatives that we have underway. Similarly, we're building value in all of our businesses. We've got detailed operational plans and things that we wanna do across all of our businesses, and this is gonna continue to drive EBITDA growth. We expect over the next three to five years, this execution is gonna grow EBITDA from $2.3 billion today to $2.8 billion. This, in turn, is gonna improve EBITDA margins by 500 basis points. At the same time, interest rates are coming down.
The three-month SOFR curve, if you look forward two years, is expected to be 200 basis points below where it is today, and that is great for BBU. A 100 basis points reduction in base rates should decrease our annual interest cost by about $40 million. Now, we have a vast majority of our debt hedged today, and over the next two years, a lot of these hedges are gonna roll off. And as they roll off, this $40 million is gonna continue to increase. Our disciplined approach to financing has served us really well, and we've benefited from having strong access to capital. We refinanced $25 billion of debt over the last 12 months, and we've been able to extend our maturities and give our businesses more flexibility. And we've done that while decreasing the weighted average rate on this debt by 50 basis points.
Now, all of this debt, just as a reminder, is non-recourse to BBU, and there's no cross-collateralization of this debt across our operations. So stepping back, what does this mean? We're gonna continue to increase the performance in our business. Lower interest rates are gonna be tailwinds. Today, we're generating about $500 million of free cash flow, and free cash flow is just our adjusted FFO, excluding gains and maintenance CapEx. And as we continue to execute, we expect this is gonna grow to $800 million. Now, we've got a choice on what we do with this cash. We can invest it in our existing operations, we can use it to delever, or we can use this cash to continue to grow our overall business. And beyond what we're doing to improve our existing operations, we've also demonstrated the ability to crystallize very strong returns.
We've been quite active over the last year, and we've generated $2 billion of proceeds from monetization of assets. In some cases, like our business Everise, we were able to create a substantial amount of value over a short period of time. This allowed us to sell half of the business, generate two times the equity that we had invested in the business, and we're continuing to hold the balance of our interest to participate in the upside. And in some other cases, it's taken us longer. Hammerstone is a business that we'd owned for a long time through pretty challenging market environments, and this year, we closed the sale of that business, realizing 2.6 times our original equity and a 14% IRR. In addition to Everise and Hammerstone, we monetized 7 other investments, generating an overall return on those investments of 22%.
We did all of this amidst a very challenging backdrop. The market environment for realizations is now improving, especially as interest rates decrease, and this will provide us with a lot of optionality. In the past, we've sold a lot of our businesses to strategic buyers or to sponsors, and we'll continue to do that. As IPO markets open, we have the optionality of listing some of our businesses, which we think would make great public companies. There's also a lot of businesses where we're continuing to increase EBITDA and cash flows. We can sell minority interests in these businesses, or we can prudently up-finance these businesses and produce distributions for BBU.
Then there's always a few businesses that generate a lot of free cash flow, and we can keep these businesses for the long term, generating a very good return on our equity. Over the next two years, we're targeting to generate $2 billion of proceeds through our capital recycling initiatives. This will enhance our already strong balance sheet, as well as give us... add to the $1.5 billion of liquidity that we have available in the business to fund our growth. Our priority today is to pay down our corporate borrowings, but we will continue to invest in strategic acquisitions to grow our business, as well as reinvest in our existing operations to generate incremental returns.
We're also focused on diversifying our investor base, and we'll opportunistically buy back our units, where buying back the units is gonna enhance the intrinsic value per unit for all of our business. So let's put all of that together. We've made significant progress over the last few years. We've grown the EBITDA in the business. We've enhanced margins by over 1000 basis points. We own really high-quality businesses today that generate substantial free cash flow. And we're building an excellent track record as a public company. We've generated $6 billion from monetizing businesses, a 30% IRR. And the future looks really bright, too. We've got a lot of operational plans underway that should generate an additional $500 million of EBITDA. Our cash flow should continue to grow, and we expect it will be 60% higher over the next three to five years.
As we generate additional proceeds in the business, it'll help keep the flywheel of our business turning. All of this puts us in an exceptional position to continue to compound value for our shareholders. As an investor, BBU represents an incredible, incredibly compelling investment opportunity. Today, our stock is trading at about $22, and over the long term, we expect, as we continue to execute on our plan, the upside is almost four times. This implies a very reasonable 10-11 times multiple on our EBITDA. Anuj talked about this. That's more in line with where we like to buy companies, not where we like to monetize our assets. With that, I'll hand it back to you, Anuj, for our Q&A. Thank you.
Thanks, Jaspreet. So again, we want to leave you with just a few things, and those are really that we've built an engine here, and what you're getting in BBU is an engine that knows how to buy businesses well. Those businesses generate a lot of cash flow. Our operating teams know how to make those businesses better, and that cash flow compounds upon itself, and at the right time in a business's maturity, we will seek to exit businesses and recycle that capital, and that engine we've been working as a private equity group at Brookfield for 25 years, and as BBU for many years, and we will continue to do the same thing that has made us successful doing this all throughout. I'll now turn it over to Q&A, and I think we have just a couple of minutes to take some questions.
I have an iPad here for anyone who might submit it online, but we'll start with anyone in the audience if... I see one down there.
Hi, Nick Priebe with CIBC Capital Markets. So Jaspreet had a slide, there, that showed the current value today at being more than two times, the current share price. I just wanted to talk about that discount to NAV, and maybe actions that could be taken to narrow that discount over time. So we've seen some anecdotal evidence of LP interest transacting in the secondaries market at much narrower NAV discounts than where the BBU shares trade. Would you ever contemplate the sale of a portion of your LP interest in order to finance a buyback to arb that spread between where public and private markets trade? Like, is that a trade that you would ever or have ever contemplated?
Look, I'd say, and I'll start, and then Jaspreet, still got her mic, she can always add in. I'd say, look, all options are open for us. We are actively monetizing businesses. What I prefer to do is take businesses that have totally matured to their value creation plans, are ready for us to exit, and exit the entire business or part of that business in the market, and then use those proceeds to, you know, both pay down corporate debt, as Jaspreet said, depending on where the stock is trading, if it's still at the same place, we'd look to do buybacks opportunistically, and of course, recycle them in new investments as and when we see fit. So very specifically, that's one option of selling a slice in a secondary trade, I'll call it.
But also, some of our businesses are sort of ripe for monetization today, businesses like Clarios, where we've done quite a bit, and the growth prospects are still very, very strong. Okay. I'll take one here from... This one here, from the iPad. So, you spoke about targeting two billion of proceeds from your capital recycling over the next couple of years. What are you seeing in terms of the transaction environment? And do you need the IPO markets to be open in order to achieve your target? So I would just say, while, yes, of course, a conducive public markets would be helpful in continuing to exit businesses and, and realize proceeds for BBU, we've actually been able to, including in this year, sell quite a few businesses privately.
And these include businesses like Greenergy, businesses like Hammerstone, businesses like Everise, where through private trades, we've realized quite a bit of proceeds, quite a bit of cash at BBU. So the IPO markets being strong is great, and it acts as a great advantage for some of our businesses, like we did with GrafTech. It's also a good alternative, but it's not the thing we're betting on in order to and to get those realizations. So with that, I think we're out of time. Just say the stock price is still up, so we've done a good job. It was all Jaspreet, and it's really good because our Executive Chairman, actually the founder of BBU and our former CEO, Cyrus Madon, still very active in businesses here, and he's a big shareholder at BBU.
I know he wouldn't be happy if we let him down. So thank you, everybody. Thank you for your time. I think we're on to a break.
Please welcome Chief Executive Officer, Brookfield Renewable Partners, Connor Teskey.
Good afternoon. My name is Connor Teskey. I'm the CEO of Brookfield Renewable Partners. Thank you for being here, and thank you for your interest in our business. Today, we're going to provide an overview of our platform, but in particular, our business model, which we feel in the last 12 months has been firing on all cylinders, not only driving success in the past, but positioning us for future growth. Then, Hannah will explain how we are able to enhance the value of renewables businesses when we can acquire them and integrate them into our global network. Next, Ignacio will speak about our approach to capital deployment, and in particular, how we can source attractive value entry points for new investments across market cycles, as well as opportunistically recycle capital into accretive growth.
And lastly, Wyatt will speak to our financial position as well as the outlook for our business. The last 12 months have been the best in the history of Brookfield Renewable. Yes, we've had very significant market tailwinds, but there's a few dynamics unique to our business that we feel have driven that performance. We've positioned ourselves to capture the growing demand for clean energy from corporates, particularly tech companies. In the last few years, we've invested a significant amount of capital at very attractive value entry points, even when markets were a bit uncertain. Today, those investment decisions are aging very well. We've significantly enhanced our capital recycling activities, solidifying the final component of our value creation and self-funding business model. Equally important to everything we have done is what we haven't done.
We've never compromised on our investment discipline, and we've avoided the segments of the renewables markets that are seeing headwinds or write-downs today. And this is showing up in our performance. We've delivered another record year of financials. In the same year, we've set record amounts of deployment into growth, as well as raising record proceeds from asset sales at very attractive returns. And we've done all of this while maintaining the strength of our balance sheet, that continues to have one of the highest credit ratings in the sector. And this has allowed us to continue a financial trajectory of delivering double-digit FFO per unit growth, a trajectory we've been on for more than a decade. And it's that earnings growth that supports our dividend.
We raise our dividend every year, and over a long period of time, we've consistently delivered dividend increases within our 5%-9% annual increase target range, a target we remain committed to today. Our ability to continue to deliver that financial growth is more secure today than ever before. This year, we will bring online, through COD into cash generation state, seven gigawatts of new renewable power capacity. That's up from five gigawatts last year. It's a number that's gonna grow to north of eight gigawatts next year. These high-returning development dollars ensure that each year, we are bringing online an incremental $70 million worth of FFO to BEP, purely from organic growth initiatives.
That doesn't even begin to talk about our growth through M&A, where in the last three years, we've averaged just shy of $10 billion annually of deployment into growth via inorganic means, and while that scale is exciting, what's most exciting to us is our ability to continue to secure attractive value entry points on those investments, even as our business has scaled, and what this means is we have delivered four years of unprecedented growth and value creation within our business as we've captured the market tailwinds and the increasing demand for our product.... We expect this growth to not only continue, but to accelerate going forward as those tailwinds remain robust, and we have an increasingly larger platform and leadership position to continue to grow from.
Today, we have an unmatched global renewables platform with a leading market position in every major power market around the world and every major clean energy technology. We can service our clients in ways that few can, and given the scale of our business, we can recycle individual assets or platforms without ever compromising our global capabilities. Our scale allows us to pursue the largest and most attractive opportunities whenever, wherever they arise, and we can pursue growth either through organic development or through M&A, whichever is most attractive. And while the vast majority of our business continues to be focused on renewables, we have made select investments in other decarbonization technologies that will be future growth avenues for our business.
While it's exciting to talk about that level of growth, we feel the thing that has defined our business for the last 12 months is the strategy and discipline around which we have executed. Today, we are increasingly the partner of choice within the renewable power space. That's not just as a corporate contracting counterparty or as an investment partner in a JV, but increasingly, that's as a counterparty when we look to sell assets. Platforms sold out of Brookfield Renewable are viewed as high quality. They'll perform for the next buyer, and we're seeing that in the valuations we receive.
We've consciously positioned ourselves to capture a disproportionate amount of growth of the growing demand for clean energy from the tech companies, while at the same time, we've strategically expanded into new renewable power classes that are growing very quickly and will be critical to the future of global electricity grids, like nuclear, batteries, and biofuels. And again, we will highlight this point. Equally important to what we have done is what we haven't done. We've never compromised our balance sheet, and we've never compromised our investment discipline. We've avoided investments that required taking uncontrollable development risk, and we've never invested in things if the risk-adjusted returns didn't make sense, even if they were viewed as high growth. And where that shows up today is we have zero exposure to the subsegments of renewables that are seeing headwinds and write-downs.
Rather, we've chosen to stay patient in these sectors, and we'll look to invest at scale in the highest quality businesses when the value entry points come to a reasonable level. So let's dive into some of these dynamics a bit more specifically. We are better positioned than at any point in our history to meet the increasing clean energy demands for our clients. We have more projects at a greater scale and more geographies across more asset classes than ever before. Put very simply, we can offer more solutions to a greater number of customers. And this is important because the demand just continues to grow. The demand for renewables around the world has been growing consistently due to a number of factors. Renewables are the cheapest form of bulk electricity production in every major market around the world. Decarbonization trends continue to accelerate.
Renewables can be part of the solution around energy security, as you don't need to import the sun, and you don't need to import the wind. We're seeing growing demand due to the broader electrification of industrials and transportation and real estate around the world. All of these dynamics have been multiplied in recent years due to the significant increase in demand for clean power, driven by the tech industry. Today, it is the demand from the techs and renewables' low-cost position that are the biggest drivers of growth. Why is that? It's because today, the sourcing of power is the bottleneck on the critical path to growth for the largest and fastest-growing companies around the world, the large tech companies.
To grow your cloud and AI business, you need more data centers, and in order to get your data centers permitted and built, you need to bring a power solution. And the power solution of choice is renewables, because it is the cheapest, and it is the cleanest. And while we, by no means, predicted the AI revolution, our strategy within our business has positioned us well to capture this growth. For years, we've been investing in the highest quality renewable developers and the most advanced pipelines in core markets around the world. This has allowed us to service those large tech companies at a geographic reach and at a scale that few can match. As a result, we've captured more of that business.
It's allowed us to grow quickly and invest more into those development capabilities and assets, creating a virtuous cycle and a business position that it is very difficult for others to match. Today, over 90% of our development pipeline is in the ten largest data center markets around the world, and perhaps even more important than ownership of those assets is our ability to pair those wind and solar projects with batteries and nuclear and hydro to provide clean energy solutions that are unique to our customers. Here, we feel we're only scratching the surface. Across our global book, only about 30% of our contracted output is with corporates and industrials. That's despite approximately 90% or greater of PPAs signed in the last 12 months being direct corporate offtake.
We expect that 30% to increase to 50% in the next five years, and this is not just forecasting into the future. We're already seeing this within our business, as demonstrated by our ability to execute that global framework agreement with Microsoft, where we'll build 11 gigawatts for them over the next five years to support the growth in their AI business. So switching gears for a second, another dynamic of our business model that has really come to light this year is our ability, in the same time period, to deploy capital at very attractive value entry points, while at the same time, monetize assets at great returns, and in doing so, generate premium returns within our platform.
Today, around the world, there are tremendous investment opportunities for those that can build out renewable development platforms and those that can allocate capital across geographies, asset classes, and the development spectrum. And given the capital requirements to build renewables around the world, those that can invest at scale continue to find a lot of opportunities to invest in high-quality businesses at attractive value entry points. This is emblematic in our transaction to acquire Neoen, one of the leading global renewable power development companies. But it's not just about a single transaction or a single headline. Whether it was Deriva or OnPath or X-Elio or a number of other transactions we've executed over the last few years, we continue to find very attractive opportunities to put capital to work where we can drive value with our scale and our operating capabilities.
But at the exact same time, there is a very robust bid for high-quality, de-risk, cash-generative renewables assets, in particular, those that have a growth angle to them. And the opportunity to capitalize on that dynamic lends itself to those that have the balance sheet and the liquidity to execute successful sales processes. Notably, waiting until after a business plan has been complete, and being patient to wait until there's supportive market conditions. And while we've been talking about this dynamic all year, it's nice to finally back it up with some transactions. In the last week alone, we have signed three large deals, the monetization of First Hydro, Saeta Yield, and Shepherds Flat. Collectively, year to date, we have raised over $2 billion of equity proceeds from asset monetizations.
That's almost $1 billion net to BEP, and the investment returns on that capital is almost 25% IRRs, almost double our corporate targets. And given the ongoing additional asset sales processes that we are executing, the bids we are seeing in the market, and the number of assets within our portfolio that will be ready for sale in the short term, we expect to continue to deliver more results like this going forward. And the benefit is not purely monetary. Increasingly, through these transactions, we are executing in partnership with the largest and fastest-growing renewables companies around the world. This creates future opportunities for collaboration, business development, and doing additional similar transactions going forward. Which brings us to the last point we wanted to highlight.
While we continue to deploy more and more capital to capture this fantastic growth opportunity, we continue to have a unique self-funding model with a number of accretive value levers that don't exist in everyone else's business. It starts with our balance sheet. Today, we have a strong investment-grade credit rating. We focus on long-duration, asset-level, non-recourse, fixed-rate debt, and we have almost $4.5 billion of liquidity and no near-term maturities. This ensures that we are well-positioned to capture any new growth opportunities, should they arise. But in addition, we have other unique and accretive funding levers within our business. In just the last two months, we've signed two new long-term corporate PPAs against two of our hydro assets in North America. The increased revenues under these new contracts will create a $500 million up-financing opportunity.
Similarly, as mentioned, we're dramatically increasing our capital recycling initiatives, selling assets to lower cost of capital buyers that can be reinvested at accretive levels into new growth. The joy of these two funding levers is they give us access to large-scale capital at a lower cost than the target returns we expect to make on new deployment. And this can be paired with our ongoing ability to target the largest and most attractive investment opportunities around the world by partnering alongside institutional capital, allowing us to pursue transactions where we see less competition. So given our business model, the tailwinds in our sector, the leadership position we have, and the discipline we continue to execute with...
Again, as we have done in the past, we are increasing our growth targets going forward, now targeting $8-$9 billion of equity deployment into growth over the next five years. And with that, I will hand it over to Hannah.
Thanks, Connor. My name is Hannah Labbé. I'm Senior Vice President here at Brookfield Renewable and Head of Global Procurement, and I'm here to talk to you today about our value creation capabilities. We talk a lot about scale. However, our effective approach of taking that scale and leveraging it to drive value within our businesses is really what sets us apart. Our market-leading footprint of differentiated capabilities enables us to deliver value creation around the globe. Our approach is simple, it's effective, but it's incredibly difficult to replicate. It comes from many years as an owner-operator, taking those lessons learned, bringing them up to the global team, and then replicating those good ideas and best practices around the world.
Our procurement capabilities leave us as a multibillion-dollar buyer of large equipment, allowing us to use our economies of scale, not just on price, but on terms and other things as well. Our commercial relationships with the largest power buyers in the world make us a large market participant in negotiating PPAs. Our financing strategy. In this capital-intensive industry, we take financing strategies that we've applied in one business, and we're able to replicate those around the globe. We have operating and development best practices that are second to none, taking them from one business up and around the world to another. Our scale and breadth of technical capabilities. We have technical team of engineers, who, during the M&A process, see the asset through to due diligence, provide support when needed during operations, and then support our M&A team upon divestiture as well in maximizing that value.
And then last but not least is the Brookfield ecosystem. Leveraging the Brookfield ecosystem allows us to gain insight into deals and into directions that we would not be able to without that knowledge. And then we tie that back to these businesses using a regional asset management structure. Our asset management leaders are in the businesses, in the local, regional groups. They know their businesses, and they know what value creation levers to pull to deliver the best results. They also know what capabilities are available in our global team that they can pull down to the local businesses to maximize that value. I wanted to share for a moment one of the biggest conversations I have with portfolio company CEOs a couple of months after we close.
The conversation usually goes something like this: "The Brookfield deal team sold a big game about value creation, and I was reticent to believe that you were really gonna be able to deliver on the results that you were promising during the deal process." But what's interesting is what comes next, because every single time, that feedback from CEOs is different, and I think that's what truly shows our value creation capabilities. Whether it's scale procurement, resolving an issue with a PPA, increasing operational capabilities, hedging. Across the board, we're able to deliver value to those businesses, not just by having these capabilities in the global team, but by having a regional asset management team who understands the capabilities and is able to curate that and pull it down to those businesses when it will drive the most value.
Our global procurement strategy is repeatable, and it's a key pillar in delivering our strong risk-adjusted returns. Through equipment optimization, we've taken $60 million of equipment and reallocated it in the last year alone, freeing up capital in one business and enabling development pipeline to materialize in others. I think we can all agree that it's been a turbulent few years in supply chain and trade policy, from tariffs to delays, shipping issues, more tariffs. Many of these businesses, while they're able to navigate some of these issues on their own, our scale and our reach, looking at what's happening in one region and identifying that as a headwind in another, is something they would not be able to do on their own. Strategic supply contracts are one of the key pillars to our procurement approach.
Leveraging our scale to negotiate large commercial agreements with vendors, and then delivering those to our portfolio company businesses on a curated approach and helping them save money on their contracting time. In development, time is money. We need to deliver on time, and these key strategic procurement contracts and the strong supplier relationships that we manage at the corporate global level really provide us huge aftermarket benefits and a preferred status with many of our vendors. Most interestingly, I think, in the last year, is the curated customer relationships. Meeting the needs of the largest corporates on a global basis and tailoring our growth strategy and our development pipeline to their needs. Eight out of the 10 largest global buyers of clean power are Brookfield Renewable customers.
Connor talked a little bit earlier about our Microsoft deal, and what set us apart during that deal is what continues to allow us to deliver to these other PPA corporate holders as well. Bruce mentioned a little while ago that when we compare ten years ago, let's say, to today, and we look at PPA off-takers, 85% of the PPA off-takers we signed contracts with in the last year were corporates and not governments. We signed 12 terawatt-hours of PPAs in the past year. When we think about how we deliver those high-quality results to customers focused on decarbonization, and then we take that scale, demand, and visibility on growth, and we deliver that back down to our businesses to give them an additional growth avenues. X-Elio, who we acquired in 2019, and we stepped up our investment in 2023.
Their development pipeline has grown fourfold under the Brookfield banner, and they've tripled their annual commissioning rate. Standard Solar, a $1 billion acquisition in 2022, not only have we doubled their development pipeline and grown their commissioning rate 25% in the two years in which we've owned them, but we also took a novel financing strategy that was first of its kind when we rolled it out at Luminace, another similar business in the U.S. of ours, and we replicated that approach quickly with Standard Solar to give them additional access to capital for their growth. Then Avaada , a $400 million investment in India that we made just last year. Their development pipeline grew from 7- 13 gigawatts in the past year, and they've put 600 megawatts of clean, renewable assets into the ground in that same period of time.
We're constantly taking these best practices that we get from around the world and implementing them into other regions. For example, we'll see a headwind in one market, that will be a leading indicator in another. We're able to use that information. So much like I talked about the Standard Solar example in financing, in high voltage equipment, that has become the largest constraint to timely delivery of renewable projects around the world. And when we saw that trend building in the U.S., we anticipated that that was gonna grow around the world, and managed to get ahead of those high voltage lead time jumps. Shepherds Flat, that Connor mentioned a moment ago, at the time we did the wind repower at Shepherds Flat, that was one of the world's largest wind repowers. More than three hundred wind turbines across 50 acres. This is a massive construction project.
In the next few years, there are more than 200 gigawatts of wind repowers that are gonna be needed as we have a number of large renewable assets coming offline. Additionally, in First Hydro, we took our 100-plus-year history as an owner-operator, and we used that to underwrite the First Hydro investment, and then to also support the team upon our recent divestiture. We wanted to take a moment to highlight our Deriva acquisition last year, specifically because of the nature of the carve-out required. Deriva came from Duke Energy Renewables and was incredibly integrated with that business. Most of the back office functions and some of the front office ones were provided by the Duke parent. And while executing on these first-year deliverables, we completed the carve-out in six months, far ahead of schedule. It's near complete at this point in time.
But at the same time as doing that and building up an entire standalone business, we have closed a number of large procurement contracts at or below underwriting. We've optimized the capital structure, completing over $400 million of financing year to date, which we expect to grow to $1 billion by the end of the year. And we commissioned 650 megawatts of new capacity. In closing, what we do when we buy these businesses is we execute on the largest value creation levers that are identified by our regional teams. We unlock those by delivering them quickly and at scale, and we enable that value creation across a number of work streams. And with that, I'll pass to Ignacio..
Hello, everyone. My name is Ignacio Paz-Ares. I look after our renewables and transition business in Europe, and today I'm going to speak about our growth strategy, which we believe is one of our strongest competitive advantages and one that we've been building over time as investors in the decarbonization space. Connor and Hannah have been very clear about the huge opportunity that is ahead of us, so I'll try not to be repetitive, but what I will say is that to be able to capture a big portion of that opportunity, you need to be very well equipped. The good news is that our business today is in a really strong position from that perspective.
As you know, we've grown BEP into one of the largest renewable power businesses globally over the last decades, and in parallel to that, journey, we have also developed a strong set of skills and capabilities around development, operations, and M&A that today differentiate our business. So starting with operations, today, we operate 34 gigawatts of renewable power assets with over 5,000 operating employees, including some of the largest and the most strategic renewable power assets globally. On development, we're also experienced builders. We've been doing development forever, but over the last years, we have ramped up our development activities, with our pipeline reaching 200 gigawatts. 2024 is also gonna be another record year with 7 gigawatts of new capacity coming online.
And then lastly, on acquisitions, the way we see M&A is as a tool to supplement both operations and development by bringing new assets to operate and new projects to develop and build. On this space, we've also been increasingly active in the recent years to take advantage to the market opportunity we're seeing, our access to capital and our expertise. And the result of all of this has been over $30 billion of equity deployed into different acquisitions since 2020. For the rest of this section, we will focus on development and M&A as the two main avenues we have to grow, both organically and inorganically. I will start with development, and I'll try to be brief here, as Hannah covered most of it.
But to summarize all what we have been saying around this topic, we believe that there are four key elements to the pipeline position that we own today. The first one is the scale of our pipeline. As I just said, our pipeline has reached 200 gigawatts, and this is key to become a relevant supplier of clean energy in the market to meet the growing demand that we've talked about. Second one, diversification. Our pipeline is very well diversified across all of our different markets where we operate and across the lowest-cost technologies. Third is the status. 65 gigawatts out of those 200 are in an advanced stage and will become operational over the next six years. And finally, location is also very important.
Our pipeline is strategically located in the regions where the largest buyers of clean power are looking to secure capacity, and this has been key for partnerships like the Microsoft one. Now, moving to M&A, the first thing to highlight is our global network of over 150 investment professionals. All of these are local people with on-the-ground presence across all of the different power markets where we operate in. And most of them have been with us for a number of years and are very familiar with our value investing approach and our strong focus on downside protection. So the combination of having a global business with on-the-ground presence, capital at scale, and the flexibility to structure different transactions, is what prevents us from missing any relevant opportunities in the market.
But more importantly, it positions us as the first partner of choice for many counterparts when there's a large capital requirement, and this is how we can access all of the different bilateral deals we have been executing over the past years. All of this sounds very obvious, but building this ecosystem takes time, resources, and a lot of effort, and it's not something that is easy to replicate. And this is why, at the beginning, we said that we believe this is a true and durable competitive advantage that will continue to be key for the success of our business going forward. We just spoke about our M&A network, but the scale of our capital is at least as important.
We've always said that this is one of the keys to the success of our growth strategy, so I believe it's important to spend a minute explaining what this means. As you know, some of the strongest returns we've achieved come from our largest investments, where, one, we have been able to acquire market-leading platforms, and two, we've done it with limited competition. And the reason for this dynamic is pretty simple. Not everyone in the market can write multibillion-dollar checks in a timely manner with very limited financing conditionality. And the way BEP can access these large deals is by a structure where it invests alongside Brookfield's private funds. As you know, BEP only contributes around 20% of the equity in any new investment that we make.
But on top of being able to access to larger transactions through this structure, BEP gets two additional benefits. One is greater diversification, as it invests across a larger number of transactions with the same amount of capital. And second, it's greater expertise by owning a larger number of leading platforms that can share knowledge and best practices between each other. The best example or way to illustrate this is our recent acquisition of Neoen. And for context, this has been the largest investment our renewables group has done to date, with $10 billion of enterprise value. And when it comes to the business, there are really five things we liked about it. The first one is Neoen's leadership position in three core high-value renewable markets, like France, the Nordics, and Australia, where BEP had limited exposure prior to Neoen.
Second, the fact that the business comes with a portfolio of eight gigawatts of existing assets that provide significant downside protection to our investment. Next, is the quality of their advanced development pipeline, with 10-20 gigawatts of projects that already have land and interconnection secured, which is something very unique. Continuing with the team, not only we have been able to prove that they're very aligned with our culture and with our investment approach, but they have a very strong track record of consistently hitting and exceeding their targets. And as part of this transaction, they will be investing a huge, a significant amount of their wealth alongside us, which gives us additional comfort on their commitment. And then last but not least, is the leadership position Neoen has in battery storage.
They own one of the largest portfolios of batteries globally, with almost two gigawatts of capacity, and they have been first movers in a technology that we believe is at an inflection point. And the reason why I say that is twofold. First, battery costs have come down by 20%-30% over the last year, while at the same time, the demand for storage products has continued to increase, as more and more renewables penetrate the different power grids. And then second, we're also starting to see an opportunity in the market to de-risk the new build of batteries by signing capacity or tolling agreements that provide significant cash flow visibility for the future. This is something that was not available one or two years ago, and we believe will continue to evolve.
When it comes to the execution of the transaction, I think the background is also interesting. Neoen is a business that we have been following since its IPO back in 2018, and at the same time, we've been developing a strong relationship with its majority shareholder. This has allowed us not only to be well-positioned when Neoen had to consider different options, given their capital intensive nature of their growth, but also be in a strong position to move fast and have an early chat with their majority shareholder. And as part of those discussions, we were able to offer him two things that we understand were very unique.
One was a full exit with no requirement for him to stay invested, and second, there was no financing condition with Brookfield backstopping the whole transaction. We're very excited with this opportunity, and going forward, the plan is gonna be simple. We're going, we're gonna continue growing the business with around two gigawatts of new capacity coming online every year. And we actually think there's a real chance of outperforming that plan by supporting the business with the economies of scale of our broader, Brookfield Renewable franchise in areas like procurement, PPAs, financing, and so on. The last message in this section, which is an important one, is that not only we have been very focused on deploying capital at strong returns, but also in selling de-risked assets.
And to be clear, we always underwrite our investments on a hold-to-maturity basis, as we wanna be very comfortable of owning any of our assets in the long term through many different cycles. As you know, downside protection is very important to us. However, in practice, once a renewables asset has been de-risked, we know it can easily attract buyers with lower cost of capital than ours, and this gives us a lot of optionality to rotate assets that compress returns and reinvest that capital into new, higher return growth to continue compounding it more efficiently. A great example of this is the sale of Saeta Yield in Spain that was announced earlier today. We acquired Saeta back in 2018, and it's a great case study of value creation through many areas of the business.
We have rationalized the cost structure, we've optimized the capital structure, we have grown through highly accretive M&A bolt-on acquisitions, and we've even built an internal development function to add organic growth to the business. After implementing all of these initiatives and de-risking the business, we believe this is what has allowed us to execute a successful exit, which gives us two clear benefits that we try to replicate on all of our different investments, regardless of the asset class and regardless of the business plan. First, we de-risk the investment through our ownership. Second, once it's de-risked, we rotate it and crystallize a strong return, and third, we raise additional proceeds to continue funding more accretive growth that's available to us today, like, for instance, Neoen.
I hope that with that it was helpful to understand our growth strategy, and I'll pass it to Wyatt to discuss our financial position. Thank you.
Thank you, Ignacio. Good afternoon, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Wyatt Hartley, and I'm the Chief Financial Officer of the Renewable Group here at Brookfield. And today, I have two very simple messages that I want you to take away. First, our balance sheet is as strong as ever, and we have what we believe is one of the most sustainable funding models in our sector. And second, we are as confident as ever that we will achieve our target FFO per unit growth over the next five years and beyond. Starting with the strength of our balance sheet, underpinning all of this is our strong BBB+ investment grade rating, which is one of the strongest ratings in the sector.
In addition, the vast majority of our borrowings are project-level, non-recourse, long-duration debt, which translates well on a maturity basis, with an average remaining term of over 12 years, and no material near-term maturities. As Connor mentioned, our liquidity is as strong as ever, with $4.4 billion available, providing significant financial flexibility to take advantages of the opportunities, the growth opportunities Connor and Ignacio highlighted. Also, as I mentioned, we have a sustainable funding model with access to flexible and diverse sources of capital to fund our growth. When we finance our business, our focus is to prudently source our lowest cost of capital. What this means is we maximize corporate debt, preferred equity, and unutilized debt capacity at our existing assets, but all while maintaining our strong investment-grade ratings.
It also means capital recycling will continue to be an important part of our funding strategy, where demand for our assets, as Connor mentioned, Connor and Ignacio mentioned, remains robust. As I highlighted, we have significant unutilized debt capacity across our assets, primarily our hydros. Whereas we continue to lock in long-term contracts and benefit from the incremental cash flows that that generates, we are also meaningfully increasing their financing capacity. As Connor discussed, an example was where we recently signed power purchase agreements at two hydro facilities with utility offtakes. Both contracts represent an attractive premium to current prices, which translates to meaningful additional FFO. But as importantly, given the duration of the contracts and the quality of the counterparties, we are in process of raising an additional $500 million of non-recourse investment-grade debt at very attractive rates.
We redeploy this capital into growth at our target returns, which generates significant additional FFO for the business. Given the remaining hydro capacity we have available for recontracting across our fleet over the next five years, we expect this to be a material funding lever for our business going forward. We are ramping up our capital recycling activities while continuing to generate excellent value. As both Connor and Ignacio highlighted, capital recycling is not only a valuable part of our funding strategy, but it is also a critical way that we create value through a full-cycle investment strategy. Furthermore, when we redeploy these proceeds into higher-yielding opportunities, it translates into additional FFO.
For example, with the proceeds we have generated over the past four years from these activities, we have created over $100 million of annual FFO by selling assets at an average FFO yield of 8% and reinvesting those proceeds at an average FFO yield of 15%. As you can see, with this significant ramp-up in these activities, we expect our FFO to benefit meaningfully from our asset rotation program going forward. Moving next to the quality of our cash flows. Simply put, we believe we generate the highest quality cash flows in the sector. This comes from our largely perpetual and dispatchable asset base, our highly contracted profile that has an average duration of 13 years, with 70% of our contracts indexed to inflation.
And finally, as we have grown our business, we have also significantly de-risked our cash flows by increasing the diversity of our portfolio. Our current business is diversified across multiple markets and technologies, such that no single market represents more than 10% of our business. And the tailwinds we are seeing across all of our growth levers continue to strengthen. Meaning, as I stand here today, our outlook to achieve FFO per unit growth in excess of 10% over the next five years is increasingly secure. Further, as we look out over the next decade, we have increasing visibility that we've secured each of the building blocks driving our growth. The first is inflation, which, given, as I said previously, 70% of our contracts are indexed to inflation. With significant operating margins, our cash flows benefit in an inflationary environment.
With an average contract duration of 13 years, we are positioned to benefit from FFO growth over the long term. On the back of growing electricity demand, led by the power needs from data centers and AI, the demand for base load or dispatchable carbon-free generation provided by our hydros continues to strengthen. As an example, this year alone, we have secured contracts that will generate almost $50 million of additional annual FFO for our business. Looking forward over the next five years, we have 6,000 gigawatt hours per year of generation that is rolling off contracts. Given the increasingly constructive all-in pricing environment I mentioned, which includes the grid stabilizing features and renewable energy credits that we sell from our dispatchable hydro assets, we are seeing almost $100 million of additional potential upside to annual FFO.
And as we look out over the next decade, we have an additional almost 5,000 gigawatt hours per year of generation that is well positioned to benefit as well. And as you have heard throughout our presentation today, we continue to ramp up our development activities. As I discussed last year, we take a de-risked approach to development that generates attractive risk-adjusted returns while delivering projects on time and on budget. And with our 65,000-megawatt advanced stage pipeline, which means we have effectively secured site control, permitting, and grid interconnection positions, our development activities have increased. And we expect to achieve an annual run rate of 10,000 megawatts of projects commissioned within the next three years, which translates to $350 million of annual net FFO by 2029.
With agreements like our partnership with Microsoft, we have increasing visibility on our ability to deliver, at least at this level, over the long term. And finally, as both Connor and Ignacio touched on, we are deploying capital into M&A at record levels into highly accretive transactions. So bringing this all together, with the additional tailwinds in our business and our highly sustainable funding model, we are highly confident that all roads lead to growth at our most historic rate over the next five years and beyond. So with that, I'll turn it back to Connor for key takeaways.
So I think we've run a little bit over, so we'll keep this quick. Today, we have a larger market growth opportunity than at any point in our history, and we feel that we have both the business model and the strategy to capitalize on that growth. And as a result, we are more confident than ever that we should not only meet but exceed our financial growth targets over the next five and ten years. And given where we're at with time, I'll suggest that we only take one question, but the team is around and will be available to answer any questions after the final presentation. Any Q&A from the audience?
Hey, Connor. Everyone's been talking about AI data center demands, so I thought I'd stick with that theme. So obviously, I think we've heard about how demand is outstripping supply, and I think we're also hearing that data center demand, they just want power from any source, including fossil fuels. So from Brookfield's perspective, like, obviously, you're focused on renewable energy, and you, you're obviously involved in nuclear as well. But if renewables does not, if renewables is not the solution for them, is there a role for Brookfield to play going forward?
So we'd come at this from two different directions. You're absolutely correct. The power demands required by the tech sector are immense, and they are looking to secure as much power as they possibly can. But they in looking to source as much power as they can, they will first fill their boots with as much renewables as is available, and that's because it's the cheapest. this is... That dynamic is not driven by decarbonization trends. They will take as much as the cheapest source of power before turning to other alternatives. And therefore, are we going to see growth in other forms of power generation in the coming years, particularly in data center-heavy markets like the United States?
The answer is absolutely yes, but turning to alternatives to renewables will only be done after the renewable opportunity is completely exhausted because it is the cheapest and the cleanest alternatives. We do think this will be a major driver of nuclear over the next five to 10 years, and we're thrilled to have exposure to that growth. And we do think this will drive increased use of gas generation in the United States for at least the next five to 10 years as well. With that, thank you, everyone, and we will hand it over to infrastructure.
Everyone. I'll start off with a little bit of good news. We're in the home stretch here. So we appreciate your attention so far, and I think the saying goes, "Saving the best for last." So I'm flattered that we were asked to present third in this agenda. Now, throughout the presentation today, you can see our agenda. You're gonna hear about three key themes that I want to flag for you as we go through our presentation. The first is that we have created significant amounts of value for our shareholders in the last year, and we're gonna highlight the areas in which we have done that. The second is how prevalent the theme of digitalization has been, not only in increasing the value of our existing businesses, but providing very exciting growth opportunities in the years ahead.
Third, that we're extremely excited about the outlook for our business. In fact, it's probably the most excited I've seen the leadership team here in the decade that I've been with the group. I'll start our presentation off, as we always do, with a year in review. I'm happy to report that we have started off 2024 in an excellent fashion, and we are on track to achieve all of our strategic priorities that we set out for us this time last year. Now, before jumping into those priorities, I think we can distill a successful year for Brookfield Infrastructure into three critical elements. The first is how we operate the 46 businesses that we own, and how we operate them well in a given year. The second is our ability to recycle capital at accretive valuations.
And third, is the ability to redeploy that capital into growth initiatives. Let's go through each of these in succession, starting with our results. Now, in spite of a higher rate environment, we have again proven that owning high-quality infrastructure assets is a strategy for all market environments. Our ability to compound revenues further again this year as a result of inflation indexation across our business, combined with increasing volumes across the vast majority of our networks, and the $1 billion of CapEx that we've commissioned into rate base or earnings in the last 12 months, have driven strong organic growth. This, combined with several years of above average deployment in the last two years, has positioned us to grow top line FFO by 11% and per unit constant currency FFO by 10% for this year.
This strong financial performance allowed us to increase the distribution by 6%, and marks the 15th consecutive year that we've increased our distribution within or above our target range. As a reminder, our target range is, over the long term, to provide distribution increases of 5%- 9% annually, but doing that while maintaining a conservative payout ratio and a strong balance sheet. The capital markets allowed us to even enhance the balance sheet we have going into the year, and we've been extremely active on refinancings and opportunistic restructurings of our capital structure. In fact, as you can see, we've sourced over $8 billion of refinancing activities on a net-to-gross basis alone in 2024. We've done that to source capital for new acquisitions or follow-on investments.
We've done it to extend maturities, we've done it to right-size capital structures, and we've also done it to reprice transactions to lower our cost of capital. Doing these transactions reinforces the strength of our balance sheet, where today I'm happy to report that, again, we are underpinned by two BBB , BBB plus credit ratings. 80% of our debt is long-duration, fixed rate, and most importantly, we have seven years to maturity at the asset level and 15 years to maturity on average at the corporate level. Never before has this long duration, fixed rate philosophy that we instill, been more important than it has been in the last two years, as we've been able to withstand a rising rate environment while opportunistically taking advantage of the lowest credit spreads we've seen in several years.
Now, shifting focus to our second priority, our ability to recycle capital. Last year, we set out a target for ourselves to source $2 billion of capital recycling proceeds in 2024. To date, we have secured 90% of that target. We've done it through a variety of techniques. We've partially monetized businesses. We've carved out assets from larger portfolios, and we, as I said, we've rightsized capital structures. Now, in the third quarter alone, we secured $1.2 billion of total proceeds, or $400 million on a net-to-BIP basis, of capital recycling proceeds across two transactions. The first is the monetization of our natural gas transmission pipelines in Mexico. Last month, we signed the definitive agreement to sell the first of those two pipelines, and crystallized an IRR on this project of 22% for us.
We've now shifted our focus to signing the second pipeline, which we expect in the coming month, and both of these transactions are expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year, generating approximately $150 million of proceeds net to BIP. The second transaction we completed was just two weeks ago with the recapitalization of our North American gas storage platform, Rockpoint. Through the transaction, we raised $1.2 billion in the capital markets to push out our maturity seven years and refinance the business after the re-rating of this company in the last 12 months.
This recapitalization allowed us to distribute $800 million, or $300 million on a net-to-BIP basis, which, interestingly enough, represents the total invested capital that it took to buy these businesses over the last decade, and brings our realized multiple of our capital to two and a half times. The best part is we still own the leading independent natural gas storage platform in North America that generates roughly $330 million of EBITDA in the next 12 months. Now, one of the unique features of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners is the various avenues we have at our ability to grow. I can summarize them into three. Through our existing operating platforms, we can complete tuck-in or follow-on investments.
We can use one of the 46 different businesses to secure follow-on capital projects within them, or we can complete large-scale M&A. Last year, we were extremely successful on the large-scale M&A, so this year we thought we'd focus on where we've been the most active, and that's around follow-on and tuck-ons, tuck-ins, and the embedded organic growth in our business. Starting with our tuck-ins, we've completed seven transactions to start the year, totaling an enterprise value of over $7 billion. I'll highlight two of them for you today. The first is the acquisition of 40 data centers out of bankruptcy from Cyxtera. This multifaceted transaction combined the underlying real estate with 10 existing sites that we already owned to form a leading U.S. colocation retail data center platform. We have 300 megawatts of operating capability across high demand areas in North America.
This transaction now has an enterprise value of over $4 billion, and did not require any new equity from BIP to complete the transaction. The second exciting deal that we've completed, and which closed just two weeks ago, was the acquisition of 76,000 towers in India through a follow-on investment. In January, we secured a $2 billion transaction to acquire these towers, which will be completed as a follow-on to our existing platform, Summit Digitel. Now, pro forma this transaction, we are one of the leading tower operators globally, and we have now over 250,000 of them in the country. We were excited by this deal as it brought a few things to us. First, it deepened our customer relationships with our existing and provided new ones.
Secondly, it allowed us to acquire a perpetual asset base in the country, and most importantly, because of our decisiveness and ability to move quickly, we were able to acquire at deep value, at roughly just below six times EBITDA. Now, the circumstances that led to each of these transactions were truly unique, but the one common thread that they do have is that all of them are expected to generate outsized returns for us. This is because we already have an operating platform in place and know these assets extremely well. In fact, we expect to generate above 20% returns on these follow-ons, and most importantly, we expect them to contribute $150 million on an annual basis to our FFO. The second element of our growth that I highlighted was our organic growth.
Today, we have a record level of backlog within our system, and that's, those are projects that we expect to complete just in the next three years alone. Now we have, as I said, $8 billion of projects that are secured and under construction. This is diversified across our four segments, but as you can see, heavily weighted to data, given the sheer volume of growth that we expect and our customers are demanding from our assets. Now, why we like these businesses and these follow-on projects is because they provide some of the best risk-adjusted returns that we can find. Why are they the best risk-adjusted returns? Well, on a risk basis, we have a team, we have a business, and we know it well.
And on a return basis, we can lock in our cash flows at the timing of the project because we sign a revenue framework agreement, a construction contract, and any interest rate hedges needed at the same time, giving us highly visible future cash flow growth. Now, as you can see, we're extremely excited at the start of the year for our business. And now for the next 20 minutes or so, we're gonna showcase and dive a bit further into the areas in which we've unlocked value for you as shareholders in the last nine months. Shortly, Scott Peak will come up and talk a little bit about how digitalization has not only impacted the value of our existing platforms, but also the investment opportunity ahead of us and what lies ahead for Brookfield Infrastructure Partners.
And now I'll invite Alexandra Cohl, a Managing Director and Head of Acquisition Financing for the Infrastructure Group, up, who will share a little bit about how we've created value through our capital markets philosophy, and how we've evolved our philosophy with the market to consistently lower our cost of capital for our shareholders. Thank you very much. And Alex, please come up.
Thanks, David, and good afternoon. I'm excited to speak to you today about our differentiated access to debt capital and the best-in-class structuring and execution capabilities we bring to financing our business. Now, our access to debt capital is unparalleled. We have immense scale and breadth, and this alone sets us apart, but we also place an enormous value on relationships. We have long-standing relationships with countless banking partners, as well as the largest and most sophisticated institutional investors, and then, these relationships have been strengthened over several decades of being a trusted and consistent borrower. Our unmatched access to capital is complemented by an ever-expanding universe of financing options, and this creates an opportunity for us to flex our muscles in new markets and deliver value for our shareholders.
Just to put this in context, the universe of non-bank financing options has grown about threefold since our inception in 2008. At the same time, we've consistently demonstrated that we can deliver market-leading results in terms of pricing and terms across each of these markets, and this is an important competitive advantage. As the financing options have evolved, so have we. Our capital structure today reflects the diversification of our underlying business. We tailor each financing to the specific investment, and then we select the financing market that best balances cost, execution, and flexibility, while also meeting our risk management objectives. I'll now touch on most of these markets, and I'll start with our largest. The corporate bond market is our largest source of capital, and we're very active in this market.
This year alone, we've issued over $5 billion to capitalize on the low spread environment, with spreads remaining near post-crisis tights for much of the year. And this includes a recent issuance at our U.S. Semiconductor Foundry investment. In Q2, we raised almost $4 billion with an average tenor of about 10 years, and it spreads well inside of underwriting. The issuance saw peak demand at a remarkable $25 billion and was allocated to about 200 investors. So in just 18 months, we built a large and liquid bond program for this investment. And we'll turn now to the bank market, where we have existing lending relationships with about 150 global banks. Now, bank lending continues to provide not only an important conduit to various capital markets, but it's also a permanent capital structure.
Now on the latter, these are not short-term bridge facilities, but instead large-scale and broadly syndicated facilities with tenors of up to seven years. Our proven track record allows us to negotiate bespoke structures, but also achieve differentiated economic outcomes at the same time. The leveraged loan market is roughly a $1.5 trillion market, and we see annual issuance of up to $600 billion. But despite this depth, it's only about 6% of our total debt profile, and we have about $7.7 billion outstanding. What do we like about this market? It provides covenant- lite and highly flexible structures that can be achieved at very attractive pricing for high-quality issuers, and we certainly take advantage of this.
But we do so in the deepest and most liquid parts of the market to achieve the appropriate balance between accretion as well as ongoing access to capital. At our North American rail operation, we raised $2.7 billion this year at a spread of 200 basis points for seven years. Now, this is a credit spread more often seen in the investment-grade market and among the tightest to be achieved in the TLB space. So a real testament to our ability to deliver market-leading results. And lastly, an interesting and also very borrower-friendly feature of the TLB market is the ability to reprice existing loans. Now, the feasibility of this depends on market conditions, but 2024 provided a unique opportunity for us to either refinance or reprice every single TLB we have outstanding.
Across four loans, we generated $30 million in annual interest savings by reducing credit spreads by 50-75 basis points, and this is for the remaining 6-7 years on these loans. So these are great results, and again, they're better than the market. The last market I'll speak about is the securitization market, and this has grown for infrastructure assets, and our use of the market reflects this. We first used a securitization structure back in 2019 at Enercare, with a AAA-rated structure to recapitalize the business. And now if you fast-forward to today, we have multiple ABS financings outstanding, and this represents about 8% of our total debt. These are strong investment-grade financings that are generally supported by a highly contracted and diversified profile. They have strong counterparties and typically have an essential or valuable asset.
And now just to highlight the market growth. Given the proliferation of demand for data center capacity and the vast capital required to deliver this, it's no surprise that financing options are expanding, and the ABS market is now a key capital source for many large data center operators. And this can be illustrated by our ABS issuances at Compass, our North American hyperscale data center platform. We completed two issuances this year, totaling $1.1 billion, and these were primarily rated AA A. And I should highlight that Compass is the only data center issuer with ABS notes rated higher than A+ . So this checks all of the boxes. It was very highly rated, it has an attractive cost of capital, and it offers a scalable program with increasing market depth.
Now, to sum up our approach, the discipline that we employ insulates us from adverse market conditions, and what does this mean for us? It means we can avoid accessing the market for extended periods of time, enabling us to avoid periods of volatility, and on the other hand, it primes us to be opportunistic to add value through capital markets, and it generates a unique profile. We don't have any material capital markets maturities before 2026. Our weighted average debt maturity profile is eight years, and 80% of our debt is either fixed rate or hedged to a fixed rate, and it also means we're insulated from interest rate volatility. The table on this slide highlights that we don't have any meaningful maturities exposed to higher rates.
In fact, if we were to restrike the cost of debt of these maturities at current rates, the impact is negligible, and rates are coming down. Now, to conclude, I want to leave you with the following takeaways. First, our scale and track record provides differentiated access to capital. We're well-positioned to manage through periods of volatility, and we've a proven ability to employ a proactive and opportunistic model to deliver value through capital structure. Thank you, and I'll now turn it over to Scott Peak, Co-President of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners.
Okay, welcome, everyone. Well, I guess we're now halfway through the last session, and it's late in the day, so if you're still here, I assume you share at least some of our passion for infrastructure, so thank you for being here. I'll spend the next 10 minutes sharing our perspectives on the evolving topic of digitalization. It is a theme we continue to be very excited about, and we're excited because we are already observing the significant value creation potential that digitalization presents for our business, and we're still just in the early innings. So I'll start with three key messages to frame our discussion. The first is that digitalization demand growth has broad implications across our business. We did not see it all coming. This means that many of the businesses that we own today have higher demand than we assumed when we acquired them.
They're more valuable than we thought. The second is that there's trillions of dollars required for the future of digitalization. Some of this capital will be spent on established areas of data infrastructure we all know well, but others is going to be spent on new and emerging categories, such as those for artificial intelligence. And third, the digitalization investment opportunity set is deeper than we thought. There's a vast market and a long runway, and this means we can be selective and cherry-pick only the opportunities that have the best risk-adjusted returns. So what's been fascinating for us to watch, and if you bear with me for a little bit of a metaphor here, is digitalization's favorable domino effect across our business. Let's start with the first domino, which is power.
The left chart illustrates an increasing power trend, which is the most advanced AI chips have approximately five times the amount of power demand versus chips for non-AI workloads, and as more workloads shift to AI, and as more data centers are built, thousands more, over the rest of the remainder of the decade, we're gonna see that combination result in total U.S. data center power demand tripling by 2030 , which then begs the question, which is, where is that power supply going to come from, well, renewables will continue to play a growing and growing role. We see also nuclear playing a large role as well, but natural gas-fired power plants are forecast to represent approximately 60% of that supply, and that natural gas, which will be heading to these new power plants, will create volume demand in our midstream assets.
These are our pipelines, our processing facilities, and our LNG assets. And the power that is created from those facilities, whether it's from gas or otherwise, will run across our transmission lines, through our utilities, into our data centers, and that data will then go across our fiber optic lines and across our towers to the end users. You see the domino effect now. And these same five sectors represent more than 60% of BIP's FFO, and each is a substantial business for us, which has been built over many years. For example, we have tens of thousands of pipelines. We tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines and fiber optics. We have hundreds of thousands of towers. We have millions of utility, fiber, and smart meter customers, and we have six leading data center platforms on five continents.
Many of our sectors rival even the largest strategics in these sectors. So I, I started with our assets that we own are more valuable than we thought, and so let's go to two case studies. The first is perhaps a bit more intuitive, as it's our retail colocation portfolio Dave alluded to, called CenterSquare. It's 50 data centers in Tier 1 North American markets. And the second, perhaps, is a little less intuitive for you, which is our natural gas storage platform called Rockpoint. It's the largest independent natural gas storage complex in North America. Starting with CenterSquare, it's a story where the right pieces have come together at the right time. In 2018 , we carved out a business from AT&T called Evoque. It included a portfolio of high-quality data centers with a solid book of contracts. However, the business was subscale, and it had high G&A.
But both of those fit very well with our active asset management toolkit. And then last year, we saw an opportunity to acquire Cyxtera at a very steep discount. And Cyxtera had that classic story of good assets with a bad balance sheet, so we conditioned our acquisition on fixing the balance sheet and acquiring a majority of the underlying real estate. And in the process, we recognized significant synergies. We used the data demand tailwinds to secure an excellent book of contracts, and we achieved all of this without investing any additional equity. In sum, we increased EBITDA fivefold to $400 million with strong contracts. And so for a platform, we historically would have underwritten in line with BIP's stated returns of mid-teens and two- to two-and-a-half-times multiple of our money.
We now expect well north of a 20% return and multiples higher of a return of our capital. Shifting to the less counterintuitive of the case studies, Rockpoint. Between 2012 and 2016, we patiently built a gas storage platform on a value basis. This business is essential to balance regional gas supplies for utilities and for power producers, and over the last decade, we've restructured the balance sheet, we've opportunistically recycled capital, and like CenterSquare, we used the data-driven power demand environment to secure an excellent portfolio of contracts. And so now we've tripled Rockpoint's annual EBITDA to over $300 million. We've already exceeded our underwriting expectations on this investment.
We've already pulled out more than two and a half times our equity, and we have a look-through to an exit of, again, well over our 20% return in multiples of our invested capital. So let's now look forward together, and while there continues to be ample opportunities in the established infrastructure categories, whether it be fiber, towers, or data centers, new digitalization categories are emerging. If you listen to BIP's second quarter earnings call, you would have heard Sam identify AI infrastructure as the likely term for this asset class, which facilitates high compute operations such as AI. Historically, infrastructure perimeter ended at the rack in a data center. Now, with AI infrastructure, it captures a broader AI ecosystem. As we do with everything across Brookfield, we pay attention where there is a very large capital need.
You can see lots of examples of that in the news. Three examples here. The estimated CapEx, largely related to AI hardware for only the five leading tech companies, is gonna exceed $400 billion, and that's just this year. So imagine once you start expanding the number of the sample set and the timeline, you get to the trillions very quickly. Or when a $2 trillion market cap company like Amazon says that AI infrastructure will be a very, very large business for them, that says something. Or when Oracle, this month, came out and said they forecast the number of data centers just they own is gonna increase by ten times or more. So we're clearly excited about what's ahead, but since some of these topics we're discussing are new, it's a good time to pause and revisit our ground rules just so there's no misperceptions.
I think as Bruce said at the start, our investments, we always follow the backbone of the economy. We're following the digital backbone of the economy, and so what that means is periodically, new investments will be required, and we will periodically evaluate them. But our disciplined investment approach and risk management remains consistent. We have a very long list of prerequisites for any investment we make, not to mention any investment we make in infrastructure. So this page is not comprehensive, but any investment we make will be essential to society, essential to the backbone of the economy. It will have predictable cash flows with creditworthy counterparties. It will have limited to no technological risk, and we will clear our minimum stated risk-adjusted returns. If we're now in an AI era, if you will, let's put that in a bit of historical context.
Let's just remember, it was new when we invested in fiber back in 2015. It was new when we invested in colocation data centers back in 2018, and it was certainly new when we established the first-of-a-kind semiconductor foundry partnership with Intel in 2022. Each asset class at the time appeared new, and we consistently applied our investment criteria. AI infrastructure will be no different, so what is the next new for us, well, we're gonna follow the money. The capital needs estimated to be over $6 trillion over the next three to five years, and over $8 trillion longer term.
Over the next three years, the focus is largely for us gonna be on contract manufacturing, compute as a service, and that's where a more bundled approach is taken for what was typically outside the data center and inside the data center as a single contract, and for the energy and cooling infrastructure which supports this. In longer term, when the frameworks are ready for infrastructure, it'll be autonomous transportation, robotics, and beyond. Why is Brookfield positioned to enjoy significant market share and a long runway of new opportunities ahead? This is simply just a natural extension of our business today, and we genuinely are uniquely positioned. We are a proven corporate partner of choice, whether it be Brookfield Infrastructure or the Brookfield ecosystem more broadly. We have a leading platform of scale in each of the subsectors that is relevant for digitalization.
We have significant capital. We can move quickly. We have established ourselves with a trusted reputation and a critical custodian of essential assets, and not to mention, the Brookfield ecosystem is very powerful. Our renewable business is the single largest provider of green power to the large tech corporates. Our real estate business leases to all the same players, whether it be in our premier office buildings, our warehouses, or our science parks, and not to mention, we're one of the largest owner-operators of data centers around the world. So what does this all mean for BIP in conclusion? I think the first one is the majority of our assets benefit from the digitalization tailwinds. They should achieve risk-adjusted returns above our original underwriting. They're worth more than we thought they were worth.
The vast investment opportunity set ahead enables us to pursue only the best risk-adjusted return opportunities, and thereby achieve returns on these opportunities that are above our stated targets. Thank you for your attention. I hope you now share some of our excitement of digitalization and what's ahead for Brookfield Infrastructure. The tailwind for our business have never been better. I'll now hand the stage over to our CEO, Sam Pollock. Thank you.
Thank you, Scott, and hi, everyone. The good news is I got lots of great things to tell you about BIP, and you're only ten minutes away from getting refreshments. So sit back and relax. For my part of the presentation, I'm gonna provide an outlook on our business, and I'm gonna frame it in the following way. First, I'm gonna reflect on BIP's long-term performance. I'm gonna then describe how the position, business is positioned and why we're excited for the future. And then I'm gonna end on some thoughts of why we think this is a good entry point, for investors coming into BIP. So, you know, our success has come from executing a strategy focused on compounding value over the long term.
And so to set the stage for where we're going, we thought it'd be useful to talk a bit about where we've come from. When we spun BIP out of BAM, back in 2008 , at that time, we had five businesses, and our market capitalization was around $500 million. Since that time, we've grown distributions for 15 consecutive years. We've returned over $10 billion to investors in the form of distributions, and we've provided investors a 15% compounded annual return. Now, to contextualize this, if you purchased 100 BIP units at BIP's inception, that would have cost you around $1,900 or $19 per unit.
If you held on to those units today, you would own about 225 BIP units that'd be worth approximately $7,600, and that captures the two stock splits that we've had. You'd also have about 25 BIP C units, which are worth over $1,000, and that captures the spin out of BIP C, and you would have received distributions of nearly $4,000. So in aggregate, that represents about 6.6 times your initial capital, and if you'd reinvested your dividends back in the stock, it would be about nine times your money. So we're pretty proud of that track record, but we think looking ahead, things should be even better. And that's because our business is positioned extremely well, in fact, maybe better than it ever has been. And there's probably three primary reasons for that.
So the first has to do with industry trends, which in the infrastructure sector, remain very, very strong. Second, our base business is generating record results. And lastly, we see tremendous growth organically as well as through asset rotation. I know you've heard that a few times today. So as I just mentioned, industry trends, you know, are strong, and there's probably several factors behind that. First, I think it's no exaggeration to say that the need for infrastructure investment has never been greater than it is today. The digitalization, deglobalization, decarbonization, you know, the three Ds that we talked about a few times, that's been a driving force behind, you know, massive infrastructure investment, what we call the super cycle. And then the market opportunity has only gotten larger, you know, given the capital inflows arising from AI, which Scott just talked about.
The punchline, the punchline is that we think the world needs about $100 trillion in the next 15 years alone, just to maintain, upgrade, and build new infrastructure. In addition to that, as many of you are aware, inflation is a tailwind for our business, and while inflation is moderating, it's still higher than it has been, and there's always the potential that it could stay high for a lot longer, and then furthermore, and Bruce touched on this a bit earlier, interest rates are falling. At the same time, the demand for infrastructure assets by institutional investors is growing, and those two factors alone are gonna drive higher valuations for high-quality assets, like the types that we own in BIP. So now turning to our base business.
You know, year after year, you know, not only has our business remained, you know, highly resilient, it's delivered excellent results, and it's only gotten better. Now, in short, if you look at all our headline metrics, they've all been trending in a positive way. So since 2008, we've been able to increase our FFO per share at a CAGR of about 9%. We've reduced our payout ratio by 8%, while at the same time growing dividends, and we've maintained a highly contracted and regulated business and increased the amount of our revenues that are linked to inflation. All great for our business. And we've done all that, achieved great performance while reducing risk through asset diversification. In 2018, we had 30 businesses, and about 5 of them generated about 10% each of our FFO.
Today, we've exposure to about 50% more businesses at around 45, and those are all diversified across eight different subsegments, and only about two of those businesses generate FFO of 10% of our total FFO. Okay, now, here's, you know, where I think things get exciting, and Dave talked a bit about this, and I'm going to expand a bit more on it, but this is about growth. Embedded within our existing business is a record backlog of organic growth projects. As we touched on earlier, in the second quarter, we reported a record backlog of nearly $8 billion worth of projects to be built just, you know, over just the next three years.
However, what gets lost in that calculation or that reported backlog figures is the fact that we have tons of projects that are still being baked in the oven. You know, that's, I guess, what we would term our shadow backlog. And so our shadow backlog basically means those projects that fall just outside of that three-year timeframe, or those that we are, you know, highly confident will eventually get to reach our backlog, but today just haven't reached a financial investment decision. And so, today, that shadow backlog represents about $4 billion or maybe even a bit more than $4 billion, and is growing every single year.
And the reason that number has grown so much over the last couple of years is because of all those platform businesses we've been telling you about that we've bought over the last number of years. There's one other area that we want to talk about in particular, and this is in our backlog and shadow backlog, and this relates to our data center developers. So from a cash flow and financial reporting perspective, we are going to start seeing meaningful contributions coming from our world-class data center developers, particularly our North American, European businesses, Compass and Data4. Now, you may recall that we've invested about $1 billion into these businesses, but up to now, these businesses have only been yielding around 2% in our of FFO into our results. And that's largely due to the fact that these businesses are largely just under development.
However, the return potential is enormous over the next five years as we deliver those projects. Our plan over those next five years is to sell down around 1.7 gigawatts of stabilized sites in order to crystallize the approximately 400 basis points of developer premium embedded in those sites. At current valuations, that represents over $700 million in gains at our share, at BIP share. If you translate that onto sort of how that would look on an annual basis, that represents about $125 million of additional FFO, about 5% of what we produce today, if we sold it on an even basis.
It might be a little lumpy, but that's what that developer engine is gonna start to produce over the next couple of years, and it should do that for many years to come. The last area of significant growth in front of us will come from asset rotation. Now, asset rotation has been a key feature of our Brookfield Infrastructure playbook. Over the last 16 years, we've sold over 30 businesses, generating proceeds of $9 billion, and we've generated an IRR of 23%. Not quite PE-like, but pretty darn close. Our playbook involves buying great businesses where we see strong downside protection, creating value by applying our operating expertise, and utilizing appropriate capital structures to bring down our cost to capital. Then, like our other sister companies mentioned, we sell mature and de-risked businesses at accretive valuations.
So here, we'll put some numbers to it. The near-term opportunity, as you can see on this slide, to crystallize value, is quite large. Our plan is to monetize a number of businesses to generate $5-$6 billion of proceeds in just the next two years. At current valuations, these asset sales are expected to generate great results, and we think they'll achieve IRRs at around 20% and multiple capitals of over two and a half times. The expected proceeds also represent over two times the current IFRS value that we have them on our balance sheet. And then the proceeds from these monetizations are gonna be reinvested back into our business. A large portion will go into our organic growth backlog that I already talked about, as well as the pipeline of new investment opportunities that we're able to source.
And in addition to opportunities that, you know, exist in our existing segments, we see added opportunities coming from AI infrastructure that Scott just spoke about, as well as new industrial carve-outs and potentially electric and gas utilities, given the explosive growth in the power of demand for power. Okay, so I'm gonna wrap up my results and tell you a little bit about why I think right now is historically a good time for investors to come into BIP. So first, just gonna talk about value from a relative perspective. You know, we think Brookfield Infrastructure Partners offers exceptional value when you compare it to the broader utility sector, as you can see on this chart, which, you know, compares BIP to the benchmark index.
We provide an approximately 200 basis points higher dividend yield than most utilities, and that's coupled with a dividend growth target that's around 5-9% that we've always achieved, and that's always exceeded the historical sector average of 4%. The second consideration is that BIP is trading at a very attractive entry point compared to its historic trading levels. And to illustrate this, as you can see on the chart, we're currently trading at about a 14 times price to FFO multiple, which is well below our historic levels. Okay. So that basically concludes our presentation. I hope you took from today that we're having another great year, and that the outlook is exciting.
And then maybe to sum up, I thought I'd go back to some terms we've used in previous investor days, and I'd sum it up this way: Our growtility is intact and better than ever. And whether you think there is a soft or hard landing, lower or higher rates, or Harris or Trump, BIP is the stock to take you comfortably through all cycles and all seasons. Thank you. While we may have a little time from the renewable group, who went way over, we don't have too much time. I know you want to get out there to drinks, but I can take one or two questions, and happy to take questions outside. Cherilyn?
Thank you. Cherilyn Radbourne with TD Cowen. To the extent that digitalization has increased the value of your existing asset base, maybe in places that would be you know, not as intuitive, like the midstream assets, does that make you think differently about capital recycling? In other words, are there, are there assets that you now think you need to hold forever or maybe just sell a, a stake in and kind of need from a scale perspective, to have an overall ecosystem?
That's a good question, 'cause I think we always struggle with whether or not our timing is right on divestitures. Yeah, when we buy an asset, you know, we have a plan of the types of things that we want to execute, and usually, when we've done all those, we think that's the time to exit. What happens in between is sometimes the market might value our assets more than what we think or maybe it doesn't. We are at that point where there have been a few developments that have made us rethink the value of some of our businesses. Frankly, all we do is, you know, we, you know, make a decision on, from a risk perspective, do we think we'll capture that and it makes sense to hold it a bit longer?
And frankly, I'd say we did that with PD Ports, where we thought about selling that a couple years ago. We just didn't think we saw the value that we should get for that trophy asset, and we held onto it for a bit longer, and we'll probably sell it next year. There are always a few assets like that, and so I won't go through every asset where we're doing that today, but that is part of the analysis that we go through every year when we think about what to sell or what not to sell. Maybe we'll take one more question.
Hi, Stephanie Ma from Morgan Stanley. You talked a lot about the vast opportunities, but curious, any constraints you see at this point from fundraising, capital raising perspective? Maybe it's deploying at scale, or maybe it's just the supply and build just needs to match the demand. Thanks.
So the short answer is no, don't see too many constraints. You know, we've been in a fortunate position where we raised our fund last year, that, you know, BIP invests alongside. And given our brand and maybe good timing, you know, we were able to raise $28 billion, so we have, you know, a huge fund available to us. BIP has many sources of capital. I think the biggest challenge this past year, while we maybe have not done as much M&A, is frankly, there just wasn't that many great businesses for sale, which was an unusual year in that regard. What I can tell you is things changed dramatically, probably mid-summer.
All of a sudden, you know, we have seen different corporates, different managers come out with high-quality assets looking to monetize them. And so today, our pipeline is probably as big as it's been in probably two years. And I think we're quite excited about the opportunities to deploy capital in the next couple quarters. Okay, I know everyone's... Oh, okay, we got one more. We'll do one more question, and then we'll go for refreshments.
Probably last question, but you know, I was an insider with a good two, three hundred companies in my career, and consistently, over 40 years, I've known Brookfield quite well, and always ranked Brookfield in the top ten percentile, and a very, very well-run company. But if you look at your stock price the last two years, you guys got hammered. BIP, BEP, BAM, hammered, and probably unjustifiably so. But you're among the best-run companies, and certainly among the most respected, with just excellent governance, and I think other things equal.
The interest rate cycle, the interest rate cycle now coming your way. I think you can look forward to very, at least the next two, three years. I think they are gonna be very, very thrilling for you, 'cause I think you're gonna do very well over the next two years with finally the interest rate cycle going your way, and you are so interest rate cycle sensitive. So congratulations. I think you're in for two good years, at least, as things go.
Thank you.
Observation. I followed you for 40 years, so I think I know you.
Oh, thank you very much, and, and thank you, everyone. I think to just to reiterate that comment, I think, and Bruce has said this many times in the past, you know, we can't always affect where stocks will trade. We just try to run the business to create value year after year and hope to narrow the difference between price and value. I think in the last, you know, 12, 18 months, you know, the increase in short rates in particular impacted, you know, maybe some of our stocks a bit more, BIP in particular, because our results have never been better, and the business never been better.
And I do think as we see short rates come down in the next little while, I think that will provide a great tailwind for the company, and we should see that reflected in share price. So I'll end on that, thank you so much.