Ranking infrastructure’s biggest investors

With 2010 now firmly behind us – major deals closed, the annual reports all printed out and filed with the regulators – the time has come again to take out the measuring stick and figure out the infrastructure world’s largest investors.

That’s exactly what we’ve been doing here at Infrastructure Investor over the past few weeks. If your infrastructure programme has serious heft behind it, chances are you’ve undoubtedly gotten a discreet note or phone call from us with our best guess at the size of your infrastructure programme over the last five years (if you haven’t and believe you should have, please drop our associate editor, Cezary Podkul a note at cezary.p@peimedia.com).

The numbers are still being crunched, but with tomorrow’s upcoming deadline for verifications, a preliminary outline of the world’s 30 largest infrastructure investors – The Infrastructure Investor 30 – has now emerged. We won’t spill the beans here as the full list, plus the related analytics and commentary, will appear in our June issue, but a sneak preview is in order.

As a reminder, our rankings are different from anything else out in the market in that they attempt to gain a snapshot at who has created the most capital for the asset class over the last five years. It’s not that a big fund, deal or pension commitment inked 10 or 15 years ago doesn’t matter, but it certainly doesn’t matter as much its more recent counterpart, which represents capital ready to chart the next chapter in the history of a young asset class.

That capital, of course, can come from a variety of sources, so this year we’ve canvassed multinational development institutions, infrastructure developers, pensions, fund managers, private equity firms and sovereign wealth investors, among others, to get as broad a snapshot of how much equity they’ve created for infrastructure investment in the last five years.

And, given the five-year snapshot we employ in our rankings, we’ve excluded capital created prior to 1 January 2006, meaning that this year’s ranking will be more reflective of the post-crisis environment than last year, when more of the hot pre-2007 fundraising and deal-making market was reflected in everyone’s figures.

With that in mind, expect to see some big names drop a few notches in this year’s rankings. Expect to see some new names active in the post-2007 world step up to take their place. Expect to see a greater geographic diversity of where the money for the asset class is increasingly coming from in the post-crisis world. And expect to see the full story in the June issue of Infrastructure Investor.