Perspectives
This article was reproduced under licence from Infrastructure Investor.
5 March 2025
In their first joint interview, Macquarie’s co-heads of APAC infrastructure tell Daniel Kemp which markets excite them, why the AirTrunk exit valuation was not excessive and what makes for an effective partnership.
Among all the signs of infrastructure’s evolution into a truly global asset class, Asia- Pacific’s growing popularity has been one of the more significant trends of the past decade.
Previously viewed by some firms as having markets that were too tricky to do business in, or that did not have the required regulatory robustness and maturity to rely on, many global fund managers focused on the region as a place to raise capital from but not a place to put that capital to work.
That has changed. Opportunities now abound in more developed economies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, alongside the more mature infrastructure investing landscape of Australia. Developing markets – in particular Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia – are also starting to open up.
GPs have recognised this, with a string of large fund closes focused on the APAC region in 2024, setting new records for the amount of capital raised in the process.
Until recently, the record-holder for the largest pan-Asia fund close, Macquarie Asset Management has been active in the region for longer than most, thanks to its home base of Sydney and its long track record of investing in infrastructure.
After a headline-grabbing end to 2024 when it agreed the sale of data centre platform AirTrunk to funds managed by Blackstone and its co-investor CPP Investments for an eye-catching sum, Infrastructure Investor is sitting down with MAM’s co-heads of Asia-Pacific infrastructure: Ani Satchcroft and Verena Lim.
The two were elevated to their joint leadership positions at the beginning of April 2024 as something of a generational change took place in the firm’s APAC business.
Long-term head of APAC infrastructure Frank Kwok stepped up to become deputy chief financial officer of Macquarie Group, while Grant Smith, who led the firm’s infrastructure investment activities in Australia and New Zealand, retired after several decades at the firm.
That opened the door for Satchcroft and Lim to jointly take the reins for the region, the former working from Sydney and the latter out of Singapore.
While the two now find themselves at the top of MAM’s APAC infrastructure business, they have taken different routes to get there.
Satchcroft was not “born at Macquarie” as Lim puts it, with many of the firm’s senior managers often spending their entire careers at the firm. After completing an internship with the Macquarie infrastructure unit in Sydney, she worked as a solicitor in London, Paris and Dubai before working with the infrastructure teams at UBS and Goldman Sachs in London.
She then returned to Sydney and after a short spell with RARE Infrastructure, joined Macquarie again as an associate director at the beginning of 2016. A rise through the ranks followed – she also holds the title of senior managing director – working on several high-profile deals in Australia, including the acquisitions of AirTrunk, Vocus Group and two land registries before her appointment as co-head.
Lim, on the other hand, has been with Macquarie her entire career. She completed an internship with the firm in 2004 before moving straight into Macquarie’s graduate programme after finishing university.
She relocated to Singapore in 2007 and worked her way up to eventually become Macquarie Group’s Asia CEO in 2021, a role she still holds alongside the title of co-head of Asia infrastructure that she added last year.
The pair proved hard to pin down for this interview – but we managed to catch up with them in Toronto – working as they do in different countries most of the time. Scheduling aside, though, Satchcroft says the two work together very closely.
“Prior to being made co-heads, we’d worked on a number of the investments in our Asia Infrastructure Fund series together,” she says. “The benefit to there being two of us is that we can actually give [the region] the attention it deserves.”
Macquarie is a very bottom-up institution, and we look at each of our businesses not by region, but by areas where we can find growth and generate more dealflow and opportunities”
Verena Lim, CEO of Macquarie Group in Asia, Co-Head of Infrastructure, Asia-Pacific, Real Assets, Macquarie Asset Management
The region does require some attention, it’s fair to say, with MAM a particularly busy firm in recent years.
The latest fund to close in the MAIF series was its third iteration, MAIF3, which raised more than $4.2 billion in May 2022, exceeding its target of $3billion to become what was then the largest pan-Asia infrastructure fund.
Infrastructure Investor understands the firm is in market with MAIF4, although Satchcroft and Lim are unable to discuss fundraising.
MAM now has around 100 infrastructure investment professionals across the region in seven different offices, with Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong and Mumbai making up the total alongside Sydney and Singapore – a long way from when Lim first moved to Singapore as one of only a few infrastructure investment professionals in the region outside Australia.
Lim says that at the wider Macquarie Group level, Asia’s contribution has been growing “quite strongly” but that it still makes up only around 10 percent of the group’s income.
“Macquarie is a very bottom-up institution, and we look at each of our businesses not by region, but by areas where we can find growth and generate more dealflow and opportunities,” she says. “From that standpoint, we don’t have a specific target where Ani and I are told: ‘You need to increase PNL by X percent in a certain number of years.’ It’s more nuanced than that.”
Satchcroft says that the region is important because of how it can fit into tailored global solutions that MAM is able to off er LPs, as well as the ability to leverage learnings from one region to another.
By way of example, she points to the firm’s investment in Aligned Data Centers in the US, where learnings from that were brought to bear at AirTrunk as MAM helped the latter business expand from Sydney across APAC. And in turn, what was learned on AirTrunk is again being put to good use at Bersama Digital, the Southeast Asian regional digital infra platform, in which Macquarie acquired a significant minority stake in 2022 for approximately $610 million.
Satchcroft helped lead that initial investment into AirTrunk, the Sydney based data centre platform in which a Macquarie-led consortium acquired an 88 percent stake in 2020 that valued the company at roughly A$3 billion ($1.85 billion; €1.80 billion).
She acknowledges that the data centre space has “moved really quickly” since then. The same could be said of the company itself, which within four years saw its portfolio expand from five assets in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore to 11 assets that now include Japan and Malaysia. Capacity across the portfolio has grown from 450MW to over 1.8GW, and as Lim told us in the Infrastructure Investor podcast last year, contracted capacity also grew 10x.
The final valuation it achieved at exit – more than A$24 billion – didn’t surprise her, Satchcroft says, because it reflected the underlying growth of the business.
“The business was continuing to sign customer contracts at an amazing speed during the process and I think the valuation just reflected that,” she says. “It also reflects the fact there’s a lot of runway there. The trends we saw which made the asset perform well, in terms of the demand for data storage and artificial intelligence, have continued.”
Interestingly, she does reflect on how some were less certain of the AirTrunk growth story at the beginning, but that the eventual result has demonstrated how high the rewards can be when you have the courage of your convictions.
“Initially, people commented on the amount we paid for it and there were also a lot of people saying it wasn’t infrastructure at all,” she says.
“When we invest, it’s not always that everyone then claps. Some people will question if it was the right call. We have to have a high conviction about the investments we’re making and have done the work to be confident in the investment thesis, which will add value and lead to a good exit.
“That’s one of the important things about being an investor, right? If you’re going to make investments that have a positive impact on the community and a positive return to your underlying investor group, you need to be high conviction and have done the work, but you’re not always going to get everyone agreeing.”
The other thing that AirTrunk illustrates neatly is the importance of securing an attractive exit multiple for LPs. Historically, APAC has been perceived as a market with lower liquidity, on a relative basis, where exits are harder.
Lim says MAM is focused on money multiples, not just IRRs, when it comes to assessing how successful deals and funds have been.
“Over the past three years, we’ve made 12 divestments or realisations, and at the moment our track record has seen us achieve a money multiple of over two-times invested capital in US dollar terms, which is pretty strong for infrastructure,” she says.
“We obviously celebrate the acquisitions; we love it when we close a deal that will bring value to our clients and the community. But we’re even happier on the divestments or exits because that’s proof that we made the right investment to begin with, did what we needed to do and created value for our LPs.”
While on the subject of LPs, Satch croft adds that more LPs than ever are interested in gaining exposure to APAC, with around 40 percent of the LP base across the MAIF fund series actually coming from the region as well.
On deployment in the region, Lim says APAC is complex and diverse. “So, one of the most challenging aspects is to identify and assess opportunities that make sense from a local perspective – so we have a long history of building and retaining local talent,” she says.
Satchcroft adds that the firm does not necessarily think about investments solely in terms of sector or geographical thematics.
“We think about it on a first principles basis, in terms of meeting unmet community need with private capital. So, whether that it is in new jurisdictions or in emerging sectors as we did with data centres and fibre early on, culturally I think the team is really great at thinking about where there is a need for capital that others aren’t serving and then trying to match the assets with that capital,” she says.
Australia has still proved to be a busy market, bucking the oft-cited perception that it is an over-saturated market where deals are hard to come by.
“I don’t think that’s been our experience in the past few years,” Satchcroft says. “But in Australia you do need to go back to first principles and ask: what does the community need in terms of infrastructure?
“And infrastructure doesn’t have a static definition. You have to think about what the essential service is, where is the community moving to and where is there a gap? We have to work out what our value-add is in terms of the expertise we can bring to the asset.”
Outside its home market, Lim cites a handful of other geographies that are exciting for the business, namely Japan, India and the developing economies of Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. The themes of digitalisation and decarbonisation are most prominent.
“In Japan, there have definitely been some changes from a market perspective. There’s a push by the government to focus on better governance and creating efficiencies, which translates to corporates being a lot more proactive than reactive when it comes to opportunities,” she says.
We have to have a high conviction about the investments we’re making and have done the work to be confident in the investment thesis, which will add value and lead to a good exit”
Ani Satchcroft, Co-Head of Infrastructure, Asia-Pacific, Real Assets, Macquarie Asset Management
Illustrating this is MAM’s agreement, at the head of a consortium, to invest around $1 billion-$2 billion for the sale and leaseback of a portion of the mobile network assets owned by Rakuten Mobile, a subsidiary of con glomerate Rakuten Group.
That deal, which was quite unusual for the Japanese market, has increased engagement with other corporations in Japan, Lim says, with other firms more willing to consider unsolicited offers than they had in the past.
MAM appointed Toru Inoue last June to lead its activities there. According to Lim, having someone local with extensive knowledge of that market and a strong network with all the relevant stakeholders is a “threshold matter” when it comes to doing business there.
Elsewhere, MAM has been investing in India since 2009, so it is a market it knows very well. “It’s always been an important target market for us,” Lim says, while acknowledging that outcomes there have been “somewhat mixed” over time.
Again, though, both co-heads are positive about the prospect of doing more deals in India, with Lim saying that the past few decades of experience have helped the firm understand who is best to partner with on the ground and what those partnerships need to look like to produce the best results.
“We know how much influence or control we need in order to execute on the business plan that we’re underwriting. We’re wiser there than we were 15 years ago,” she says.
Of course, Macquarie is far from the only major player active in the region now. In fact, some of its largest competitors – KKR and Stonepeak in particular – have teams that are led by ex-Macquarie infrastructure professionals.
Is that making it harder to find the best deals and raise the required capital to execute on them?
“I always say competition is good. It keeps us on top of our game,” Lim says. “The other benefit of people getting more comfortable and entering this market is that a lot of our exits have been to our competitors. Having more liquidity in the market is helpful.”
It’s clear throughout our conversation that Lim and Satchcroft have an easy rapport, and a working relationship which Lim describes as being “seamless”.
“I really appreciate that [Ani] comes from a different path, and she’s worked in different organisations and provides a different perspective to the way we do things,” Lim says. “I’ve been excited about this partnership for the past 12 months and I continue to be on what we can do together going forward.”
Satchcroft, for her part, says they can “divide and conquer”. Given MAM’s success over the past two decades, you wouldn’t bet against them doing just that.
