이 기사는 2020년 04월 13일 08:00 thebell 에 표출된 기사입니다.

Macquarie Infrastructure Debt Investment Solutions (MIDIS) has completed fundraising for its Macquarie Global Infrastructure Debt Fund, raising around 780 billion won of investor commitments.

According to investment banking (IB) industry sources on April 8, MIDIS has recently raised 645 million dollars (approximately 783 billion won) for the fund. The fund is helping to finance essential infrastructure around the world with debt investments in 18 investment grade (above BBB-) infrastructure businesses. MIDIS is the infrastructure debt platform of Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets (MIRA), the world’s largest infrastructure manager.

The fund has already made investments in the United Kingdom, Europe, United States and Australia. The fund’s geographically diverse pool of investments includes transport, utilities and energy infrastructure. In response to growing investor allocations to renewable energy assets, more than 25 percent of the assets currently held in the fund are in the solar, onshore and offshore wind sectors.

MIDIS attracted commitments from pension funds and insurance companies from the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Portugal, with investors seeking high quality assets that generate stable, long-term cash flows to match their long-dated liabilities. All commitments to the fund were raised from investors new to the MIDIS platform, with institutional investors increasingly recognizing the diversification characteristics and superior risk adjusted returns offered by infrastructure debt compared to corporate bonds.

MIDIS executed its marketing campaign toward South Korean institutional investors as well, but none participated. It is because domestic institutional investors prefer sub-investment grade assets which generate relatively high investment returns. Domestic pension funds and insurance companies have invested in an infrastructure debt fund managed by MIDIS, which invests in sub-investment grade assets. Market insiders expect domestic institutional investors’ interest in investment grade assets to grow.

MIDIS was established in 2012 and has quickly become one of the world’s largest infrastructure debt asset managers – raising more than 11 billion dollars of commitments from some of the world’s most prominent institutional investors. As of 2019, MIRA had 136 billion dollars of assets under management, including 156 portfolio companies, more than 600 properties and 4.7 million hectares of farmland.

(By reporter Kim Hye-ran)