Pantheon Infrastructure PLC

good morning everyone uh thanks for joining us on this second reporting session for pint uh this is our 2023 full year results to December 31. um my name is Richard Sem I'm a partner at pantheon I head up our European infrastructure business and I sit on our global infrastructure and real assets investment committee and I am the PM for pint Ben maybe you want to introduce yourself

Yes, good morning, everybody. My name is Ben Perkins. I'm a principal I sit in the global infrastructure and real assets team, where I work exclusively on the day to day delivery of pint.

So we are going to canter through our agenda pretty quickly. We'll try and take up about 30 minutes of your time and provide some time for Q&A thereafter. You can see here the agenda that we are going to be following. If you want to ask a question during the Q&A session at the end, please raise your hand and you will be provided with permissions to talk. Or you can click on the Q&A button at the panel at the bottom of the screen to ask a question. If you do want to leave your name, please, if you don't want to leave your name, rather, please tick the box, send anonymously. So maybe a quick update on the platform. I'm sure you're all very familiar with this. I'll keep it brief. Our strategy remains unchanged. We're looking to deliver a diversified portfolio of infrastructure assets that provide attractive returns over the long term. um given the current macro backdrop we're really focused on both downside and inflation protection um i think critical in these uncertain times pint is now fully deployed um into a portfolio of high quality infrastructure assets um as at 31 deck 23 uh pint had invested in or committed 487 million to 13 assets We announced three new investments during the year, totaling just shy of 100 million. Three businesses are a European tower business called GD Towers, the Nordic Fibre operator Global Connect, and the UK battery storage and electric bus fleet specialist, Zenobi. Performance has been really strong, particularly given those uncertain macro times we're in. We've exceeded our pre-IPO target NAV total return for the year at a little over 10%. Our NAV comes in at 504 million. Ben's going to take you through that. That's 106.6 pence per share. The second interim dividend of 2P is payable on the 23rd of April, and that will take our full year to 4P again in line with the pre-IPO guidance. On the corporate side, we've been pretty busy. We've increased the revolving credit facility to 115 million. We've extended that to March 2027, again, providing increased liquidity going forwards. As you know, we've completed just shy of 6 million of share buybacks last year and a further 2.6 after the year end. The board has approved a refresh buyback program after the year end for about 10 million going forwards. On the right-hand side, just a few words on the Pantheon platform. The broader Pantheon platform has 95 billion of AUM, AUA, and has been investing in private markets for over 40 years now. The infrastructure business continues to scale. The team now, we have over 30 people in the team and we've got about 22 billion of AUM across well over a thousand assets. so that's a summary of kind of the platform maybe just over the page um just a quick refresh of the timeline it's actually quite hard to believe that we've only been going for two years this is just a really a quick snapshot of what we've been up to over those just over two years we've delivered on our status strategy we've committed to the 13 assets we paid dividends in line with the pre-ipo targets and we put in place the rcf and we also held our first capital markets day in november when we saw many of you In terms of the next page, a few quick words on our approach to infrastructure investing. We still believe the attractiveness of infrastructure remains strong, especially in light of the current economic and geopolitical environment that we find ourselves in. We'll spend a little bit more on the tailwinds a little bit later. Over the page, just a reminder of what we're looking for from a transaction profile perspective and also target assets. And again, we'll spend a bit more time on the underlying assets themselves when Ben comes to speak. I wanted now, I think, just to turn to financials. And before I hand over to Ben, just a quick summary of where we are with the business. So 487 million invested or committed to those 13 assets. That includes about 16 million of undrawn commitments. No significant movement since June, actually. If you recall, all of those deals were either committed or in legal closing we've now drawn down for those assets we're very pleased with the geographic and sector diversification that you can see on the pie charts on this page I think diversification really is your friend it helps reduce systemic risk especially given the uncertain world we live in right now so that that concludes just my short introduction what I'd like to do now is hand over to Ben we'll get into some of the detail on the results

Thank you very much, Richard. So just kicking off with some attribution of the NAV movement. So we are, I think as Richard says, we've been delighted to see the NAV movement flow through in the year, beating the NAV total return target of 8 to 10%. With dividends paid during the year, the actual NAV movement was 10.8% NAV uplift. It's slightly different to the total return for the APM metric that we have, which was 10.4%. This is pretty much due to the impact of the share buybacks. um which don't through flow through to the income statement um either way that does beat the ipo target of eight to ten percent return for the year which obviously we're very very happy about um looking at the main contributors to that so uh the lion's share of the nav movement has been driven by those fair value gains of 12p and we've had some modest interest on deposits of 0.7 p and that the fund was still holding some fairly substantial cash balances during the year. They've slowly worn their way down to around 20 million, just shy of 30 million at year end. Obviously, buying the shares back at the circa 20% average discount to NAV has been beneficial to the NAV, and it's been offset by around 2p of combined finance and operating expenses. The net FX movement on the portfolio on the fund has been down 0.3p. We've spoken probably at relative length before about the fact that we're seeking to minimise, not entirely eliminate, FX risk through the FX hedging that we have. The movements aren't always entirely aligned and that's a function of the way that the mark-to-markets are prepared on our hedging instruments versus the spot rates used to determine the gains on the underlying portfolio. Looking at the waterfall chart below, so the portfolio movements, we've really seen the portfolio move on during the period. There's a big chunk of cash that's gone out the door, 140 million, that's across the three deals that Richard mentioned, as well as National Gas, which although it had been committed by this time last year, hadn't actually been funded, or had been committed by year end 22, wasn't actually funded until February 23. So that accounts for that 140 million of drawings that you're seeing. The £57.2 million portfolio return, we attribute this in the appendix and in what we think is quite a useful chart. It's in the appendix and also in the annual reports. This equates to around a 13% portfolio movement when you take the denominator being the opening portfolio value plus the drawn amount. So again, that's nicely aligned with the discount rate and again is exceeding those total return targets. So again, like I say, the breakdowns are provided in the appendix and also in the annual report itself. The FX gain figure here, as I mentioned before, this is solely on the portfolio movement. So the 14.6 that you see is arising from the pure spot movements during the period. It doesn't account for the fact that we overlay the FX hedges. And then the 10 million that we see of net distributions, again, we've spoken or we've detailed how these are broken down across the assets in the exhibit later on. We talk a bit more later on in the presentation about cash flow generation and the projections we have across the portfolio. But it's been good to start seeing those distributions ramp up and flow through. I think one thing I would flag here, and we'll touch upon it when we look at the projected cash flows, the way that the company invests through its wholly owned subsidiary, Pantheon Infrastructure Holdings LP, it does mean that the way that you see the presentation of income on the income statement isn't actually fully aligned with what we're seeing from the net distributions from projects. And we'll touch upon how that flows through to the dividend coverage calculation a bit later on. And so the next slide now please, Ashley. This is just a reminder of our approach to capital allocation, which is clearly a very pertinent issue right now. Again, the picture is not hugely changed since June. I think we had the increased RCF in place at that point. I think the benefit of the RCF, very conservative approach we take to the buffers and also keeping commitments back was to essentially unlock the cash that we had on the balance sheet. So it meant that we could move off balance sheet all those retentions for buffers. I think a couple of things to note. So we've topped up and this is relative to the figures that you'll see in the actual accounts. We're showing this figure as of 2nd of April as opposed to 31st of Dec. So it's now including the increased allocation that we've got to the share buyback programme of 10 million. It's quite a mechanical approach that we take to the buffers, particularly around the co-investment buffer and the FX hedging buffer. I think we've touched upon these in detail before, but the co-investment buffer is in effect there to provide a source of emergency rescue capital to prevent dilution should that ever be needed on a deal. And then on the FX hedge buffers, we're catering for some potential tail risk in terms of the likely volatility of sterling and what that could mean for mark to market. And also we're saying that we do retain the entirety of undrawn commitments to that 15.7, which is alluded to earlier on as part of that 487. and this figure has moved on since the year end and so the 15.7 is now 11.6 and this is because we had a call um on cyrus one actually so that will flow through to the next accounts that you'll see i think for liquidity planning and going concern purposes we assume we work on the assumption that that amount is drawn immediately which we think is conservative um the reality is probably quite different i think notwithstanding the cyrus one call we've got a pretty firm steer from a lot of the sponsors that the full amounts are unlikely to be called A final note here, I think the dividend and to a lesser degree, the operating costs, they have come down in terms of the projections. They've come down slightly in the next 12 months. And I guess that's the function of the buybacks, which is actually reducing the NAV. It's reducing the NAV less than it's reducing the denominator with the number of shares. But it does mean that the projected dividend and operating costs are slightly lower. And looking to page the next page now the portfolio, so I think some of you will hopefully recognize this from the capital markets day and it's intended to demonstrate how the. Diversity across the sectors translates to very different underlying characteristics across the deals and. All the deals, I think it should be said, have an element of growth in their underlying investment case. Some clearly offer greater growth potential than others. So data centers versus regulated utilities, for example, or a fiber business with a very specific Intervention area. And similarly, yield potential does vary quite significantly across the portfolio. We've been mindful of this in the deals that we've done for Pint. In some cases, we're expecting a high degree of cash generation during that whole period. But in some cases, again, the data centers where there's just this rapid growth potential, the sole liquidity in those assets may only be derived from realization proceeds at exit. Inflation linkage and the exposure to or the protection from volume financing and commodity risk. These are hopefully self-explanatory. But again, I think the key thing to note here is that there's no common strand through all of them. And this is what we see is that the benefit through portfolio diversification. We've also added since the CMD, we've added a key here to the performance of the assets based on how the companies are tracking in the period. We've provided a more granular narrative around this in the annual reports and accounts, but for now it's probably worth taking a quick look at those that are not tracking on the moderate to plan for the key. So we're notably seeing on Cyrus 1 some significant upside. So although the valuation is tracking broadly to plan in terms of our underwritten IRR, management are forecasting now that they'll beat the base case. And this is largely coming from significant AI driven tailwinds, which wasn't really something we saw in the base case. So that's been very pleasing to see. In the case of Calpine, we've seen sustained higher spark spreads since the original investment case. This has flowed through to longer-term power curves versus the original investment case. The business has also been very proactive in hedging as far out as four years, which is essentially de-risking some of the near-term merchant exposure, causing significant cash generation, which they're enabled for the original underwriting plan to both distribute to shareholders and also to diversify into batteries and more conventional renewables. In the case of Fejora, we've had some very strong performance, stronger than I think expected from the core business of transformer leasing. This is a byproduct of the similar grid constraints that they're seeing in the Netherlands to what we're probably more familiar with in the UK. It's also translating to increased potential and order for some of their ancillary services, which was a big part of the investment thesis here. So this is including behind the meter batteries, which they're rolling out ahead of plan, also EV charging and integrated solar. So very pleased to have seen that business delivering on its investment thesis and outperforming. And then similarly, MBI, the rollout is pretty much on plan for the revised COVID adjusted rollout plan that was agreed with the ministry before we entered the deal alongside Asterion. But the upside here has been the fact that the adoption and the take up of the fibre where the past homes And they've been converting to homes connected at a rate that is exceeding the original expectation. So I think we've spoken about this before. That's obviously great because it drives higher revenues during the construction or the rollout phase. But it also de-risks the long term assumptions that the business has around penetration. So it's proving the concept ahead of time. Fair to mention the one business, the one investment that we've seen some downside relative to plans. This is Cartier Energy. Again, we provide some full disclosures around this in the report. It's fair to say it's been a challenging year. There's been some exposure flowing through to the business through energy costs, which weren't passed down on one specific customer. Largely, they're able to pass down increased utility costs, but on one particular customer, they've not been able to. They also lost a key customer which hadn't been anticipated in the original underwriting plan. And they've actually seen something at the back end of last year and to a lesser degree in winter 22, some seasonality trends that were against the grain of what they'd seen historically. And I guess this is essentially coming down from a lower demand for heat during the winter months. So a bit of a perfect storm for this asset, albeit the sponsor does remain bullish around the prospects in the future. They're still exploring a lot of infill customers. That's essentially where they've got existing capacity within their current infrastructure to go and serve more customers. So it's relatively low hanging fruit and it requires a less intense capex deployment. And I think the final thing to mention is as a result of that underperformance, it has revised down the distribution profile for the assets in the near term. And next page, please, Ashley, just some high level portfolio figures. So we've not marked the Delta versus Dec 22 because we didn't have these figures. We did first present them in June 2023. The weighted average discount rate is slightly down. It was 14% in June. This is due to a number of factors, including the change in portfolio mix. So Global Connect and Zenobi were deals that only actually happened in, I think it completed Global Connect in July and Zenobi in December. There's also been some ups and downs on an individual asset basis. So one utility asset, which name I won't mention, has been trading off a slightly lower implied discount rate. I say implied because the business actually deduces its equity valuation by taking a levered cash flow, so an enterprise valuation. adjusted for net debt. So we have to imply a discount rate, a level equity discount rate. That's shown some modest drops. And we're also seeing a slight drop in one of our data center assets because of the underlying performance there. Again, I won't say which one. Gearing is down slightly on a net debt to EV basis. It's mainly a function of the current lower gearing of Zenobi, which is a new deal last year. We expect that trend to reverse over time because they are expecting to utilize project finance for their new growth. and similarly hedge debt has slightly increased no real material drivers there other than the changing portfolio construction and then the final tab here is the EBITDA figure of 60 million for the period again as a refresh this is not a proxy for pints EBITDA what we're actually saying here is that the weighted by pints underlying shareholding and applied by the relative EBITDA of each of those businesses gets us to 60 million Stripping out the effect of some of the new projects that were added and the FX movements to sort of look what might be a like for like, this is around a 15% uplift on the year-to-date figures at June. I think this has been heavily skewed by a couple of discrete factors. So there's certainly in the case of one utility asset, we're looking at higher short-term and near-term revenues that are unlikely to recur over the future as a function of the markets that it operates in. And then there's also in the case of one particular deal, there's a fairly heavy element of subsidies in the business. So whilst we're very pleased to have seen that EBITDA growth flow through, we've not really been, you know, it's not all singing and dancing around the 15% underlying uplift because we think there's some discrete factors there. Looking now to page 17. So I think the first thing to say here is that these are very much forecast. So we've projected the current portfolio cash flows, assuming no reinvestment. So we'd urge a degree of caution in interpreting these. I think Pint's business model which you'll hopefully know quite well now, is to take minority positions. So there's limited or no sway on distribution policy, nor exit timing or quantum. So this means that the cash flows that you see are not contractual. So it means that the figures ultimately, particularly around estimated realizations, are subject to significant forecasting and certainty, and ultimately the determinants of what will be realized relate to things like asset performance, the macro environment, and also market dynamics, which may change the ultimate exit parameters. So this is not analogous to the cash flow projections that you may be accustomed to in the renewables or PPP funds. But that said, with a kind of disclaimer out the way, we do believe they represent a plausible estimate of future cash flow generation. These figures are based off a blend of either the Pantheon base case figures or where more recent transparency is available or greater visibility is available from the sponsors who have used those figures. I think the big picture to take away here is that distributions are expected to ramp up in the coming years with the first realisations expected around 2026, which would expect us to move to dividend coverage greater than 1%. We've set out the method for calculating dividend coverage in the annual reports. This is quite important because of the presence that I mentioned earlier of the subsidiary through which Pint invests. I won't, you know, spay the chapter and verse of the method now, but I would recommend you look at it. The cover on the basis that we set out for 2023 was 0.3 times, a little bit below expectations due to some distributions actually falling in 2024. Also, some of the money, still some of the IPO proceeds weren't at work for the full period. I think around 50 million was actually invested in in H2, and in the case of a lot of these businesses, they simply won't distribute for at least 12 months post entry. So we can see from this slide that the majority of exit timings are forecast around 2026 to 2030, in line with that five to seven year target hold period. It's not necessarily always the case, so that there are a couple of outliers, but we do drop from, or forecast to drop from 13 to three assets across that period from 2026 to 2030. Like I say, the five to seven year, it's not a hard and fast rule, but broadly speaking, most of the investments Pint's made are targeting exits within that timeframe. It should be noted, I think I mentioned at the top, that this assumes no reinvestment. It's just intended to be a snapshot of broadly what constitutes the current portfolio DCF. The final word from me is on page 18. So we've extracted the sensitivities that are again contained in the annual report and accounts. It's an extension of what we presented at the Capital Markets Day in November. We've gone into detail within the annual report about how we, or more accurately the sponsors, think about the assumptions that they are using in their investment cases and also their ongoing valuations. We do think it's worth a read and these sensitivities should be viewed in conjunction with that. We've got the usual suite of macro ones, but where we think there's probably a bit more instructive for analysts and investors is the extent to which wholesale changes in investment performance would impact the NAV if they were assumed today. Looking at the downside earnings growth, this is saying that you'd see a 12p erosion to NAV if you assume that earnings across the board were slashed by 10%. And we think this represents a pretty huge downside scenario, and it still equates to what is around a third of the current discount. So take from that what you will. The exit value is slightly less sensitive than the EBITDA one. This is a function of the fact that the EBITDA sensitivity is actually toggling EBITDA during the whole period, as well as that terminal EBITDA, which throws through to valuation. Exit timing is relatively insensitive. I think a key thing to consider here is that with a delay, you would still be assuming that EBITDA would grow over that period. So it's actually quite a critical point that a sponsor will consider when they're considering whether they exit a business. So it's a sensitivity run on an all else equal basis. So if EBITDA grows during the period of a delay, then presumably making the same assumptions around their their exit value, and so too with their IRR. At its simplest form, I think the exit timing boils down to the maths of whether they think they can increase the earnings by a business more than their cost of capital. We've also listed at the bottom some of the idiosyncratic risks across the portfolio assets or the sectors. So I think whilst we can see there's pockets of sector risk here, it's evident from these sensitivities through the look through NAV exposure that all else equal, the exposure to these is moderated by that portfolio diversification we've touched upon here. We'll keep banging the drum for this as we did on the portfolio characteristics page. We think point is truly diversified and hopefully this picture gives investors and analysts that comfort. With that, I'm going to hand over to Richard to go through the market outlook. I think you're on mute, Richard.

Thanks. Thanks, Ben, trying to find the button there. So over the page, we can sort of see some key market drivers. I think if we look first to inflation, obviously the benefit flows through to the revenues for any infrastructure business without inflation linkage. We've got particularly strong positive correlation as Ben's just highlighted to you. So we see that as a big positive. Obviously, inflation is moderating, so we'll be watching that closely. We remain very focused on interest rates and also the capital structures in the various different businesses we're invested with. Again, Ben provided you with some commentary there. In light of the organic growth build out of many of these assets, we are sort of seeing that reinvestment as particularly in the digital space, but also more broadly. And what we're particularly focused on is how that supply chain, the cost of that supply chain and the deliverability of that supply chain will impact any of our assets. I think we're pretty pleased with our ability to sort of pass it on through the main head contract. And we've talked about that previously. We need to ensure that we're well capitalized to deliver on that growth. We've got fully funded business plans, as you know. And in the main, we've been able to continue to see that strong deal flow, that strong reinvestment in renewables and digital. We've built a portfolio that is relatively insulated to GDP. That was something we laid out at the IPO before some of the geopolitical risks presented themselves. Uncertainty right now is causing a lot of sponsors pause for thought. I think what's really interesting is that they and we are underwriting to a much more muted economic environment and that translates to more conservatism in the underlying business plans to maybe two to three years ago finally as fundraising may have slowed during 2023 there's still significant dry powder and again we talked about that a little bit during the during the capital markets day but those those sponsors still have the need to deploy capital some of the direct sovereigns and pension funds as well, indeed, are continuing to invest capital into the sector. So that provides, I guess, a positive tailwind to valuations. And, you know, as we think about some of the LPs, there's been a number of surveys, continues to point to increased info allocations over the short to medium term, particularly as the denominator effect has unwound. To put that into perspective, some of you may have seen the wider Pantheon infra platform exceeded our fundraising targets last year. So we are being the net beneficiary of some of those inflows as a broader business. Over the page, maybe just a few words on the infrastructure opportunity set. We still see this as really strong, maybe in the interest of time, just to call out a few key figures. So that first column there on the left-hand side, you can see there's been a 33% growth in mobile data traffic. That supports the investment in mobile towers. It supports the fiber backhaul from those towers up to the data centers and indeed in those data centers themselves. very strong tailwind there capacity growth and renewables has increased massively over the last year as you can see and there's also just that increasing investment required to transition from coal assets that are being decommissioned um and you know we're seeing that particularly uh in calpine and the outperformance there We're also seeing big investment needed in wires and pipes to bring electrons to end users or to bring gas to end users. And again, a number of our assets benefit from that, as well as kind of some of the investment in batteries to provide that grid balancing service. And again, Zenobia is our key play there. Finally, whilst transportation assets were negatively impacted during COVID, there is obviously increased interest in the sector, particularly logistics, where e-commerce continues to provide a very strong investment opportunity for us. Over the page, just what I wanted to do was punch through some of the data sets that we've got. So as you know, we've got a massive database through our wider platform. We're invested in over 1,000 assets. And what that does is gives us unparalleled information access and knowledge about what's going on across the piece. um if we you know if we look at some of the uh some of the sector flows this chart shows through time we've just sort of highlighted that at the top there we continue to see you know three key three key takeaways one continue strong deal flow in digital um there's obviously a peak in 2020 and then again that represented itself um you know during during during the last year um we've seen a decline in traditional energy again probably no surprises there and a bit of a recovery in transport and logistics although that's mainly um logistics assets that that i mentioned previously that are providing that that underpinning and what's going on in e-commerce Over the page, maybe just taking you through quickly some stats that I've shared with you previously, but updated. So top left and right, that's the industry stats by deal flow and geography, by geography and by sector. And you can see that CAGR of about 15% since 2015. So again, strong, strong tailwinds there. I mentioned previously that moderating in the fundraising environment, you can see that in the chart in the bottom left. But, you know, there's still large volumes of dry powder off the back of the increased fundraising, particularly in the years up to 2022. So again, strong, I think strong support for some of the valuations we're seeing. So finally, and we're a few minutes over, I just wanted to leave you with some key takeaways before we move to Q&A, and I can see a few of them have come in. So get to those in a second. Look, we're delighted with the performance. We appreciate the patience that our shareholders have given us as we've deployed capital and waited. for that capital to be deployed and to generate the performance in the underlying assets. Ben took you through what we think are some really interesting assets in terms of the performance outperforming base plans across a number of them, which has done the performance on one asset. We've got a really strong balance sheet. I think that really sets us apart. And we've got fully funded business plans. Again, really important as we look to a number of these businesses to recycle capital to grow their businesses, to grow their EBITDA and to support that exit valuation through time. Portfolio is highly diversified, performing well in light of the current macro challenges. And look, that thematic approach to investing really is supported by our massive informational advantage, but also our massive sponsor relationships. And then finally, we've got that refreshed buyback that Ben mentioned, and I think important in light of the current market weakness. So look, that takes us to the end of our presentation today.