Brookfield Infrastructure Partners LP

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Brookfield Infrastructure Partners Q4 2020 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any operator assistance, please press star 0. It is now my pleasure to introduce Managing Director, Renee Lubiansky.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Thank you for joining us for Brookfield Infrastructure Partners' fourth quarter earnings conference call for 2020. On the call today is Bahir Manios, Chief Financial Officer, David Krant, Senior Vice President of Finance, Sam Pollack, Chief Executive Officer, and Ben Vaughn, Chief Operating Officer. Following their remarks, we look forward to taking your questions and comments. At this time, I'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and talking about our growth initiatives and our financial and operating performance, we may make forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, and future results may differ materially. For further information on known risk factors, I encourage you to review our annual report on Form 20F, which is available on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bir.

Thanks, Rene, and good morning, everyone. We're all pleased to be here today to help take you through our results for 2020 and provide you an operating update. My remarks this morning will focus on providing a quick overview of our accomplishments for the year, touch base on our balance sheet and funding plans, and then I'll conclude by taking you through our approach to ESG. So starting off on the results and accomplishment front, I think it goes without saying that this past year was like none we've ever seen before. From a business perspective, this unique environment showcased the resilience and strength of our business. Our operations continue to deliver uninterrupted service despite many of the broad-based restrictions that have been imposed globally. Additionally, during the year, we added a number of high-quality assets in key strategic sectors and geographies that we expect will become significant contributors to our future cash flow growth. Our key accomplishments for 2020 were as follows. First, we achieved solid performance across our operating segments, delivering organic growth of 9% in our businesses on a constant currency basis. We deployed $2.5 billion into new investments and organic capital projects, with the notable highlights being the acquisition of a large-scale portfolio of telecom towers in India and an investment in a world-class LNG export terminal that's contributing to global decarbonization efforts. We also generated over $700 million through capital recycling. We completed four sales processes and several assets asset-level financings that resulted in an average after-tax IRR of approximately 20%, and three times a multiple of our invested capital. And last but not least, we listed Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation, or BIPC, on the New York and Toronto Stock Exchanges, significantly expanding our market access. Launched on March 31st, the listing was met with strong investor reception and robust trading volumes. Shifting now to our balance sheet, our overall discipline approach to financing at the corporate and asset level allowed us to remain focused on opportunistic transactions throughout the year. With our attention on de-risking our balance sheet and maintaining a healthy liquidity position to support our growth opportunities, we completed several important initiatives in this historically low interest rate environment. First, we enhanced our corporate issuance profile, and we did that by extending our debt maturity profile, given the refinancings that we completed. And with that, our nearest corporate maturity doesn't now take place until 2024. We also commenced a green preferred unit program, raising a total of $400 million over two issuances, of perpetual preferred units in the U.S. with an average coupon of approximately 5%. This is a relatively deep and attractive market that we expect to continue penetrating. Next, we continue or maintain robust credit metrics and a strong investment grade credit rating. We have a conservative balance sheet with approximately 85% of our term debt residing at the asset level on a non-recourse basis. and a 21 times interest coverage ratio at the corporate level. These factors support our strong investment grade rating of BBB plus stable, which was reaffirmed in June of 2020. Lastly, we meaningfully advanced our capital recycling program. We generated over $700 million of proceeds and launched other sale processes that are progressing extremely well, and Sam will make some remarks on that front later on the call. Our liquidity position currently sits at 3.7 billion, of which 2.4 billion resides at the corporate level. In the near term, we expect to further strengthen our liquidity position by incremental 2 billion at several sale processes near completion. I'm also pleased to announce that as a result of our strong financial and operating performance and robust liquidity position, our Board of Directors has approved a quarterly distribution increase of 5% to 51 cents per unit in 2021. This represents the 12th consecutive year of distribution increases for our business. And lastly, before I conclude my remarks, we thought we'd take some time today to address our approach to ESG, or Environmental, Social, and Governance. We have a long history of owning and operating long-life infrastructure businesses, that provide essential services both globally and in the local communities in which they operate. ESG considerations have always been embedded in how we operate and underwrite our businesses, and we make it a priority to actively engage with all relevant stakeholders on a regular basis. With investment communities' increased focus on this topic, we wanted to provide you with a reminder of our approach and how some and highlight some recent initiatives in this regard. To begin, ESG considerations and monitoring practices are integrated in our underwriting and operating standards. We use our operating expertise to identify material ESG risks and opportunities when underwriting a prospective investment, then develop and oversee the implementation of short and long-term plans to drive performance. We drive strong cultures within our operating businesses by holding senior executives accountable for specific performance targets and leveraging our Brookfield network to bring new ideas and approaches to the organization. Additionally, we invest in resilient businesses and account for stranded asset risks. Avoiding stranded assets has always been top of mind for us. as this risk could be influenced over time by various factors, particularly environmental considerations. Using our midstream assets as an example, we're focused on businesses that are both resilient and active contributors to global decarbonization efforts. Revenues generated are mostly contracted on a long-term basis and have no commodity price or volume exposures. We have a diversified base of credit-worthy counterparties and earn attractive cash yields. Most importantly, there's significant upside potential should these assets be repurposed in the future as part of a global energy transition. Lastly, I wanted to speak to our strategy around the measurement and reduction of greenhouse gas or GHG emissions over time. We are striving towards net zero emissions on an avoided carbon scope one and scope two basis. On that basis, Brookfield Asset Management is currently net negative across its entire $600 billion asset portfolio, largely due to its ownership of one of the world's largest pure play renewable power businesses. Through our affiliation with Brookfield Asset Management, We can benefit from their broad expertise regarding the implementation and maintenance of industry-leading ESG policies and protocols and benefit from attributes shared at the group level. It's also worth noting we track GHG emissions and we will develop and regularly publish decarbonization plans consistent with the Paris Agreement. Within the envelope of net zero, we will continue to own and operate certain essential infrastructure assets globally that transport fuel. While natural gas-related assets make up only a portion of our well-diversified portfolio, we believe that they play an important role in the global energy transition and act as a bridge to renewables and potentially hydrogen. We want to assure the investment community that when we acquire these assets, we will be laser focused on the duration of cash flows. We will operate them with their contributions to the transition to net zero in mind and with plans to continuously improve them over time. So with that, thank you for your time and I'll turn it over to David to discuss our operating results for the quarter.