Pantheon Infrastructure PLC

infrastructure plc healthy results investor presentation throughout recorded presentation investors will be in this in any mode questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time by the q a tab situated in the right corner of your screen just simply type in your questions and press send the company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself have the company can view all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so before we begin i'd like to submit the following poll i'd now like to hand you up to partner richard sem good afternoon sir

Good afternoon. Hello, everybody. For those that don't know me, my name is Richard Sem. I am the PM for Pint. I'm a partner in our Pantheon business, and I head up our infrastructure business here in Europe. I also sit on our global infrastructure and real assets investment committee, which means I oversee the deployment into the various different infrastructure strategies that we run. I'm supported on today's call by Ben, who many of you know, and Siwei is also a very valuable member of the team. So just maybe a quick outline of what we're gonna cover today. So usual format, we should be done in about 30 minutes or so. We'll provide a summary of the recent highlights for the business. We're gonna talk a little bit about our approach to infrastructure. Then I'll cover financials and give you an update on the portfolio. We're also pretty excited that we've made a commitment to intersect power. This is a renewables power business in the US, and I'll spend some time on that a little bit later on. And then, as you heard in the introduction, we're going to leave some time for Q&A at the end. So please do submit a question on the right hand side there. So you'll all be, I think, familiar with the strategy at Pint. Our aim is to create a globally diversified portfolio of infrastructure assets looking to generate attractive returns over the long term through both growth and yield. We continue to target assets that are essential to everyday life and those that benefit from either long-term contracts or regulated revenues. What we're trying to do is really find assets that can provide stability of cash flows. Given the macro uncertainty, we also want to make sure that we've got strong inflation protection or escalation mechanisms to protect the value of our assets. We believe that this provides a robust downside protection in light of both the stickier inflation environment that we're in, and also I think the elevated recessionary risk and general uncertainty we have in the world. Moving us along to kind of the investor case. So look, we're targeting an eight to 10% NAV total return. We are very excited to have tracked above that for the last two full years, and also now for this first half year. In terms of dividend, 3.5% increase for the period with 2.173 pence as our first interim dividend. We remain on course to be fully covered this year with the significant Calpine proceeds, about $35 million expected in Q4. Our model, as you know, is to hold assets for the medium term. We typically have about a five to seven year holding period. And so we'd expect to see a couple of assets realizing every year, given the scale of the portfolio we have now. In terms of our wider platform, so third box along, 25 billion, almost 25 billion of AUM, just under 2,000 assets. We invest alongside 60 or so sponsors. That's a lot of growth since when we launched. So when we launched Pint, we had about 16 billion of AUM. So you can see a lot of traction with our wider business. Pint is also able to access this wider platform and continues to benefit from this wider allocation to deal flow from these leading sponsors. The existing portfolio also provides us with an amazing opportunity to data mine the various sub-sectors within our portfolio and looking to find more and more ways in which we can feed this into our investment monitoring, our origination and our asset allocation. And obviously with this team, we offer both speed, certainty of execution for the sponsors that we work for. So a few key highlights. Our track record for Pint, it's been a relatively short period since launch, almost four years ago now. You can see the progression across some of the key metrics. Again, as I said, strong first half for the year. We're committed to 13 assets. We are looking to recycle the proceeds from Calpine with our 30 million commitment into Intersect Power. We announced that at the beginning of last week. It's also great to see our share price discount narrowing, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Another key milestone for us was the admission to the FTSE 250 in June. The dividend target was increased to just over 4p, 4.34 for the year, with that first interim due to be paid at the end of October. We've seen our NAV increase to 122.7p. And we've also seen that backed off that middle chart there, the 78 million of EBITDA. So seeing strong kind of 18% EBITDA year-on-year growth across the portfolio. The portfolio now sits at a 1.42 metric, multiple rather, as a metric that we've been targeting and communicating to investors. Think of that as a net multiple on invested capital. So really sort of stripping out any of the FX noise. So really just looking at the underlying deal currency money multiple. We wanted to I think take a minute just to think a little bit about our share price performance for the period. It's clearly been a very challenging period for the sector at large. So very pleased to see kind of this re-rating of these core plus growth infrastructure strategies. You can see that in the share price here. We have now been consistently trading as one of the narrowest discounts across the whole infra sector, the infra and renewable subsector. So very pleased to see that coming through, both in terms of performance, but also in terms of shareholder returns. And you can see the table down the bottom of the page there with some really significant strong performance on a one year and three year basis. So just in terms of our co-investment approach, I think as you'll recall, some of the key factors here, we team with the sponsors that we work with. We give access to our investors to deal flow that is strongly aligned with those sponsors and with other pools of capital that we manage, enhanced returns because we are not suffering any underlying fees at the company or asset level, just the fees at the underlying fund level. federally strong portfolio construction, being able to really sort of try to pick the best risk-adjusted returns we can find within the portfolio as a whole. Nice, strong diversification and exposure to some pretty exciting investment sectors and subsectors, which we'll talk about in a minute. So with that, I'd like to hand over to Ben, who will take us through our portfolio.

Thank you very much, Richard, and good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be here again talking through the Pint results. So to kick off with the portfolio overview, as we were at 30th of June, reality is that there's not been a huge deal of change here since the year end because Pint has not made any divestments or new investments. So what you see is effectively the recalibration arising from fair value movements. We still maintain a good balance between Europe and North America. The intention was very deliberately set to target assets in those geographies at IPO. From a sector perspective, again, remain pretty unchanged. You can see the largest exposure to digital, but we set that out between the three unique subsectors of fiber, towers and data centers. We remain heavily concentrated on contracted revenues. So this is the majority of revenues of each of the underlying companies. It's definitely our focus. It provides a lot of downside protection with the residual GDP linkage being to the Prima Frio investment that we made, and then the regulated linkage being to National Gas. And then we maintain that roster of 11 sponsors. So 13 deals, 11 unique sponsors. That will soon change. The composition of this chart will happily soon change once we finalise the investment into Intercept Power that Richard's mentioned and that will appear in the portfolio overview for the year end. Look now at how the NAV has moved during the period. So a 4.6p gain, that's net of the second interim dividend that was paid in relation to 2024. That was declared and paid in April of 2.1p. Fair value gains of 7.4p or around 35 million sterling in aggregate. We'll go through some of those drivers. Safe to say there's been a significant contribution from Calpine, specifically where the mark to market has gone higher. on the Constellation Energy share price. As usual, the impact of our FX hedging means we're only marginally exposed to foreign exchange currency movements. You can see there's been a net 0.3p gain during this period. That's effectively just pockets of unhedged exposure, but generally speaking, we mitigate FX movements through the hedging. And then expenses and financing costs pretty much in line with expectations. Only other thing I'd mention here, you can see the 4.8 million distribution on the bottom charts of 4.8 million cash that came from underlying project company distributions during half one. The first half of the year tends to be pretty quiet. Most of our distributions come through in Q3 or Q4. As Richard mentioned, we've got good line of sight to the first component of the Calpine disposal coming in in December. And that will be, we expect, moving point to a position of full dividend coverage. Look now at a familiar slide, but with potentially unfamiliar figures, this is how we think about our capital allocation and the sources being cash and the available on hand liquidity through the RCF net of our commitments and our cash buffers, which we have a very institutional approach to the key figure being that increase in the commitment so we announced the deal to into intersect power last tuesday richard's going to talk you through the deal and the pipeline in in more detail later on but now in effect that figure that's been hovering around 30 to 35 million over the last year of funds notional funds available to invest has now been deployed a key thing to bear in mind with this analysis is that this is a snapshot in time It gives no bearing to the imminent cash flow receipts we're expecting to receive, not just from the Calpine realisation, but also from some of the other assets that are distributing income during the period. So whilst that three million figure might look low, we'd expect that to significantly increase as and when we receive those distributions. That's even allowing for the imminent first interim dividend, which will be paid in October. And the expectation is that the Intersect Power deal will be funded partially by cash. So our net cash position after allowing for the dividend is around 14 million. The balance of the funding requirement for Intersect Power is expected to come from the utilisation of the RCF, which we would then expect to repay when those cash flow proceeds from the Calpine close come in at the end of the year. Now to look at the portfolio, we'll talk you through the metrics that we've proposed or presented previously. I think the main one to dig into here is the weighted average discount rate. We had a couple of inbound questions around this. It looks like it's dropped materially from 13.6% to 12.3%. What you can actually see if you dig into the details of the footnote that we've put here is we've effectively stripped out the exposure to the Constellation Energy share price. So A large part of the sale of Calpine is linked to inheriting exposure to the CEG stock. That effectively is not something that can be measured with the discount rate. It moves intraday. It's something that has moved significantly, not just since the quarter end, but also since the deal closed or was announced in January. So what you see here is 12.3% discount rate on the portfolio, excluding the element of the valuation that relates to the Constellation Energy share price. What we can say is that there's been no other rebalancing changes. So whilst it looks like it's moved on a light for light basis, it's been unchanged, albeit we've now segregated the fact that there's this exposure to a listed stock, which we don't feel needs to be reflected in the discount rate. In terms of the other metrics, weighted average gearing, as a reminder, we present this as net debt to enterprise value on a weighted average basis based on our underlying shareholding in each of the relevant investments we've made. That's holding steady at around 36%. So companies typically are using leverage to grow. So we're always very focused on this and making sure they've got the capacity to do so. But happily, we can see that they've done that on a fairly consistent basis with historic gearing. Likewise, weighted average hedge debt, what this also includes is fixed debt. So the other way to think about this is that only 18 percent of debt on an average basis across the underlying look throughs is exposed to interest rate risk. And this is something that we've spoken about before. We do see some pockets of exposure, but only where companies are using short term debt facilities. So a revolving credit facility or a warehousing facility is. to finance the rollout and the deployment of a pipeline. So again, this is sticking to the very clear guide rails we've set at the start to make sure we're managing things like interest rate risk. Moving to the bottom row now, so weighted aggregate revenue has grown 15%. CAGR over the period, year on year, this is around a 17% increase. So the companies are still growing significantly through organic and in some cases inorganic ways. EBITDA over the period has had a slightly higher compound annual growth rate. Year on year, the 78 million figure is about an 18%. year on year growth. So really happy with how that's tracking. And again, it supports that significant valuation movement, which is supporting our NAV returns. It's something we'll remain really focused on as a growth play and investing in companies that are very deliberately seeking to expand their earnings as opposed to being a finite life asset. It's something that people should judge us by. The final figure here, which we've not always gone into as much detail about when we're presenting to investors is around CapEx. And there's probably two things to consider here. So we've spoken probably at relative length before about the fact that we're investing in companies that have a fully funded business plan. So we don't want to be investing in a company that needs to find a way to fund growth within a couple of years after it's closing. So there's various means that, you know, that can come through funded debt facilities. It can come through the headroom to an equity commitment we make. So the amount that's not been called, or it can be just through the regeneration of cash flows, the recycling of cash flows within a company. So a really acute example of that is the data center companies. One like Cyrus One that has a highly cash generative operational portfolio, but such as the demand for cash to roll out there their pipeline is that that's entirely being recycled. So a company like a very high growth sector like data centers is less likely to distribute cash to clients until we actually sell and realize that asset. So another thing that we're really focused on and we think speaks to the fact that we are targeting companies that are well positioned to deliver against significant tailwinds and we would expect in turn in time that significant capex outlay to translate to accretive earnings. look at the portfolio now. So this has had the addition of what looks like a series of crocodiles on the right-hand side. The intention here is to demonstrate, to visualize how the moiks on these investments have materialized over time. And I think there's probably a few things to flag here. Obviously, there's been some that have moved in a a non-linear progression, and I think that's probably a key theme that we take from this, is that these are very complex operational businesses. From day to day, you know, never mind quarter to quarter, the outlook can change materially. Valuations don't always move necessarily in the way that you'd see in a finite life, a PPP asset or a renewables asset, absent things like changes in the discount rate. We thought that would be a useful exhibit to demonstrate that whilst we're happy with the progression of the portfolio, it's not always uniform in the way that MOICs evolve and valuations increase. In terms of maybe looking at performance, rather than going in asset by asset, we talk about maybe sectors. It would be no surprise to everyone to hear about the significant growth in that CapEx outlay and that earnings progression that we've seen in the data center business, the data center businesses we've backed. This is driven by the continued and sustained demand from hyperscalers for AI compute capacity. So this is a real shift from just the cloud computing model that we'd originally entered these companies in. So really benefiting from our timing in entering that sector. What I would say is that Vantage is in a slightly different part of its progression than Cyrus One. Cyrus One, as a listed entity, had a very significant proportion of its business was in its operational fleet. The ratio is a lot more skewed for the case of Vantage to its development pipeline, which is why you can maybe see a bit of a stagger in the way that those mocks have evolved. In terms of fibre, you can see we've got one above plan, two below plan. I think the characteristic to take away from this is that MBI is a business that we backed because of the significant downside protection of effectively being a monopoly. So it operates under a concession agreement with the Irish government. What that means is that basically they're the only show in town for rural fibre. It means there's risks in delivering that model. So it has to be done on time and it has to be done on budget, which happily they are. delivering on, but there's limited pockets of overbuild risk, which is not necessarily the story we've seen for the other two fiber operators, less so an issue on Global Connect. I think that the challenges that we had there was that they decided to withdraw from the German fiber to the home market because they saw the prospects of overbuild as being unattractive. In the case of Delta Fiber, they've seen slightly overbuild than they expected to initially. This is a function of the incumbent operator, the incumbent network operator in the Netherlands, actually overbuilding in certain pockets that weren't envisaged. So some softening from those other fiber stories. In terms of towers, both those businesses tracking on plan. Vertical Bridge, a bit of a different story. They've just onboarded the Verizon portfolio, so they've gone from around 11,000 to 18,000 towers. There's massive potential here for... Upleasing, so adding more tenants to towers, which is highly profitable for both of these companies. If you think about existing infrastructure, tagging on a few more dishes has next to no marginal cost. So it's highly incremental and it means that the pivot of both these companies has been to focus on co-location and increasing tenancy ratios. In terms of power and utilities, Calpine needs no introduction. It's the asset that is now sitting at nearly three times. It's been a real beneficiary of the load growth that we're expecting to see in the US. It was provisionally acquired by Constellation Group, which I mentioned earlier. who operates a predominantly nuclear fleet. Gas is seen as a quicker route to market. It's also cheaper than nuclear. So it's complementary to the existing fleet that Constellation have and is something that is benefiting substantially from both behind and front of the meter, private wire or direct PPA arrangements with a lot of the hyperscalers. National Gas is a UK regulated business that delivers the methane transmission network. They're also looking to pivot to hydrogen, expecting some positive news from the UK regulator in time about 2% blending, which we think will be very good for nurturing the development of potentially in time a backbone hydrogen network. And then Cartier Energy is the one that we had a few more challenges with. It's a district. It's a platform of a number of different district heating businesses in the US. They're exposed a little on some early contract terminations as well as exposure to natural gas prices. A quick word on the other three. So Zenobi is a UK operator of network infrastructure, so grids, batteries, and also buses. We're happy with how that business is tracking. We're seeing significant opportunity set in the electrification of transport in the UK, but also in the States where they had a big contract win in, actually in Canada, so North American footprints expanding. And they're now starting to see a real ramping up of some of their network infrastructure opportunities For Jora is not a dissimilar story. So they're benefiting from grid congestion in the Netherlands by providing adjacent products to their customers outside of medium voltage transformers. So things like behind the meter batteries, integrated solar and EV charging, really happy with how that business is tracking. And then Prima Frio has seen a real recovery in revenues and volumes in the last two years, had some early challenges in our investment here around where fuel costs were going with the increase in inflation and then also the cost of leasing, they're now seeing the impacts of that tapering off and the business is becoming even more profitable. Won't dwell too long here, but we've got a refresh of the cash flow forecast that we prepared at the year end. I think the big message to take away here is that it's pretty much unchanged right now. In time, sponsors' plans can change. They might shift their exit window or their horizon might change depending on where they see value creation opportunities. The key change here when we did these figures for the year end was the fact that we had that near-term liquidity coming from the Calpine exit. So not just from the cash component, but also from the expectations about the disposal of the Constellation shares subject to those lock-in periods. unchanged uh current horizon we do continue to monitor this with the sponsors that we work alongside um what we're tracking towards um without putting figures to it is to have that dividend fully covered as richard mentioned it's taken a little longer than we'd have hoped but we're now seeing meaningful cash come off a variety of different sources and not just calpine This is an extension of the slide we showed two pages back. So you can see where the, this is the nuts and bolts of where the movements have come. Safe to say a large component of the valuation gains have come from Calpine and specifically from the mark to market movement from the Constellation Energy share price. So we disclosed the sensitivity in the year end that pretty much for a $10 movement in the share price, we benefited to the tune of about half a P and that's translated Excuse me. That's translated with the fair value gains that we can see in this asset. Other notable movers have been Fedora and Prima Frio moving quite nicely, as well as Vantage data centers. Some softening from that story that I mentioned around Delta Fiber. They remarked the business to track the latest expectations of adoptions. That's probably the one disappointment across the portfolio there. But generally speaking, we're very pleased with where the portfolio is going. We think that the outlook for these assets remains incredibly positive. Calpine, I mentioned, so this is the sensitivity I touched upon. A recap for those that need it. This is a business that has done incredibly well from those AI tailwinds and load growth. The value that was struck was 16 and a half billion in January. Four and a half billion of that is in cash. So we will be entitled to a very large chunk of that in December. And the balance was through the value of the CEG. Share price, so that was quoted as nearly 12 billion back then, but that was on a $238 share price. Where we are today is about $100 north of that. The value at Q2 was around $320. So a significant movement upwards in that. That does introduce mark-to-market risk. We have looked at ways which we might explore for hedging this. It's not possible to do before the deal closes. We can't get a counterparty that would be able to price that contingent risk so that we're not exposed if the deal didn't close. But there's a couple of options we've looked at and may explore for potentially minimizing that mark-to-market exposure going forward. And a final word on Constellation. So this is taken directly out of the most recent earnings call. Some notable updates there. They've been re-energizing a couple of their key nuclear facilities. They're seeing really significant long-term offtake for these assets. a really significant development for the sector as a whole was the meta PPA that they entered into for 20 years. It's the front of the meter one. So this is something that is seen as mitigating potential regulatory concerns about behind the meter PPA arrangements that might potentially compromise grid resilience so this is something that has been a key area of focus from the regulator in the US and and happily they've found a constructive way around it and you've got very captive off-takers here you've got potential market for significant loads that this fleet is able to generate as a combined entity because of the sheer nature of the demand for power within these hyperscalers and the data center sector so Really encouraging prospects that the share price rally reflects that. We know that there's that volatility that in time we wouldn't ideally like in the portfolio. But the contribution to performance has been incredibly impressive and something that has led us very much to a key component of the NAV returns that we've delivered. With that, I'm going to hand back to Richard to talk to Intersect and the pipeline more broadly.