“Our unique selling proposition in the market is that for close to two decades we have been a very operationally experienced, hands-on manager of infrastructure assets, with a portfolio of more than 100 assets around the world,” he says.

“As a result, we are a natural partner for financial investors with large amounts of money but no actual experience in running these investments, nor necessarily the desire to do that.”

The survey of managers also noted that 45 per cent of the assets of infrastructure managers were invested in Europe.

Rakowski notes that Australian institutional investors continued to look to developed markets in Europe and North America and are showing the strongest interest in core infrastructure assets.

“Perhaps as a reaction to the global financial crisis and associated volatility, the focus of most institutional investors today is on core infrastructure, and that is basically the low-risk and low-return end of the infrastructure spectrum,” he says.

Brick by BRIC and then some

In recent years Macquarie has built out its portfolio of country-specific funds, adding China, India, Mexico, Russia and regional Middle Eastern and Sub-Sahara African funds to its portfolio.

Rakowski says these funds represent an exciting frontier of growth, as both new entrants to the asset class look to invest first in familiar home countries and regions and more experienced investors diversify abroad.

“We have basically created a portfolio of regional funds that would allow any global investor to have a global portfolio, not by investing in one global fund, but by investing in a selection of regional funds of their liking.”

“We are clearly growing our core business, which are our European and North American funds, and we have had a lot of success in the past 12 months in doing that. But we are also over the years expanding the range of regional and country-specific funds and there are few regions in the world where we have not got a fund.”