THE  BOOK 

Investors in infrastructure such as pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds, pursue multiple objectives. First and foremost, they seek long-term stable returns to match their long-term liabilities. Second, they look for portfolio diversification. Infrastructure investments, due to their often low correlation with other asset classes, enable investors to improve the overall risk-return profile of portfolios.

"Infrastructure as an Asset Class" is considered by many as the standard work of infrastructure investing, thanks to its comprehensive guidance for investors, especially during these challenging times. This Second Edition has been extensively updated and expanded. It now also covers the energy sector – from generation to transmission, storage and district energy systems – and sheds light on sustainable investing in infrastructure, an indispensable topic, which any long-term professional investor can no longer ignore. It introduces a strategic approach to benchmarking the financial performance of infrastructure investments and presents various sustainability benchmarking tools used across the industry.

Bringing together the topics of infrastructure investments, project finance and public private partnerships (PPPs), has proven to be crucial for equipping investors with the essentials of theory, fundamentals and practical examples needed to fully master the key aspects of infrastructure investing. Mirjam Staub-Bisang joins the powerhouse team of Barbara Weber, as lead author, and Hans Wilhelm Alfen to bring sustainability knowledge and insight to this new edition’s heightened focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

This single-source guide for newcomers and experienced investors alike covers all aspects from basic fundamentals to highly specific infrastructure investment-related questions such as: How to define infrastructure, how to classify the ownership structures and business models in various industry sectors; what the main characteristics, sources of revenue and value chain elements, competition and regulation and investment opportunities in the various infrastructure sectors are; and how the broad spectrum of risks can be systematically analysed, evaluated and mitigated through adequate structuring of transactions. It also explains in detail how project finance works both in a traditional and in a PPP context.

 This updated edition includes the latest developments on the subjects covered, which makes it an extremely relevant source of guidance for infrastructure investors in both industrial and emerging market countries, and enables them to:

 

  • Know about relevant developments in current infrastructure Markets
  • Assess individual infrastructure assets step by step for their suitability within an investment strategy, including sustainability aspects
  • Understand all factors determining risk-return profiles of infrastructure assets, including ESG and, in particular, climate change risk and how to mitigate such risks
  • Learn from illustrative real-world case studies on infrastructure assets across countries

 

 Even experienced infrastructure investors who have read the first edition will find this revised standard work Infrastructure as an Asset Class, Second Edition, very useful as it supports them in their tasks of identifying and assessing suitable investment opportunities and making well-informed investment decisions.