Active, tactical and collaborative management key to infrastructure success

Produced in partnership with Macquarie Asset Management.

When investors think about the asset classes that lend themselves to active management, they’re likely to think of listed equities, fixed income and even private equity.

Private infrastructure doesn’t immediately spring to mind and yet Macquarie Asset Management (MAM) has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most successful infrastructure investors by adding value through active management including timely exits.

What that entails exactly has changed over the past 30 years.

In the 1990s, when the group’s portfolio consisted wholly of Australian assets, including the Hills Motorway, active management looked like arranging private-market finance, tax structuring and underwriting deals.

At the turn of the century, MAM expanded into other regions, investing in ports, bulk liquid and gas storage, and telecommunications towers.

Today, the portfolio also features land and motor vehicle registries, data centres and fibre optic cable networks, reflecting MAM’s evolving, emboldened approach.

As the size of MAM’s infrastructure portfolio has swelled (the group managed $A358.4 billion in real assets, as at June 30, 2026) and diversified, both by asset and geography, the group’s capability to manage assets has increased significantly, says Kieran Zubrinich, lead portfolio manager of the Macquarie Private Infrastructure Fund, a fund managed by Macquarie Asset Management.

“Going back in time, when you owned a toll road, your operating costs were a very small percentage of your overall revenue so even if you had a highly efficient management team, the amount of value they could deliver could be quite small,” he tells Professional Planner.

“If OPEX accounts for 10 per cent of revenue, then achieving a 10 per cent uplift in efficiency isn’t going to make much of a difference.”

On the other hand, assets with greater operating leverage, such as airports and data centres, present more opportunities to add value.

“When we moved into airports, we learned that there were more operating levers to pull, such as optimising the retail space and offering, and upgrading the car parking facilities,” Zubrinich says.

“Our approach has become more sophisticated, and we have a lot of people in our team with C-suite experience and an operations background. They work closely with our investment professionals to drive value in the underlying assets that we invest in.”

Similarly, there are plenty of opportunities to create value with digital infrastructure, although the scale and nature is markedly different, Zubrinich says, pointing to MAM’s investment in North American business, Aligned Data Centers (Aligned).

When MAM invested in Aligned in 2018, the company had two operational facilities and 85 MW of critical capacity. At exit, the business had become a leading hyperscale data centre platform with 51 campuses and more than 6.4 GW of operational and planned capacity across the Americas.

In July 2026, MAM successfully sold Aligned to a consortium of investors comprising the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), MGX and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners.

The Aligned sale followed MAM’s 2024 sale of AirTrunk to Blackstone for over $A24 billion. MAM’s co-head of infrastructure for Asia Pacific, Ani Satchcroft, told Professional Planner in 2025 that the sale followed a period of active management by MAM to support AirTrunk’s growth.

Ways to add value

Over the past 30 years, MAM’s brand of active management has turned many fledgling businesses into sizable, mature businesses.

Zubrinich says there are numerous strategies to improve assets including expanding into new geographies, increasing capacity, bolt-on acquisitions and cost-out programs.

“Where you can do that, you can deliver significant alpha,” he says.

“We’re not asset gatherers, we’re alpha generators.”

Zubrinich observes that the skill set of infrastructure managers has expanded significantly since the Global Financial Crisis.

“Prior to the GFC, the industry was partially focused on financial engineering but that has been replaced with a strong focus on developing assets and driving operational performance,” he says, adding that a manager’s ability to drive performance is contingent on “control”.

This, he says, can be attained in a variety of ways including being part of a consortium of like-minded partners or having veto rights.

“With every investment, we have a value creation plan and in order to execute that plan and deliver on our objectives, we’ve got to have control,” Zubrinich says.

“That can be outright control or negative control. We could own 100 per cent or be part of a group that agrees on plans and controls a business together. It could be a significant minority stake that provides the ability to block decisions that we don’t agree with.”

Exiting is an art

On average, MAM holds an infrastructure asset for eight years. That’s a good amount of time to get a “few things right” and exit well, according to Zubrinich.

Targeting a timeframe shorter than that runs the risk of veering into assets with a risk profile that’s different to infrastructure, he says.

“Infrastructure assets are long-term assets so it’s hard to predict timing because there are points in the cycle when there are many buyers and points in the cycle when buyers are scarce,” he says. “If you need to exit in the next three to five years to deliver your base-case returns then assets will start looking like something other than infrastructure.”

Continuing to push boundaries

While some managers cling to traditional definitions of infrastructure, MAM seeks to identify new services needed for a high functioning community.

Assets must still be essential to support economic and social activity, and deliver stable, predictable cashflows.

“Data registries, fibre optics networks and, more recently, data centres weren’t part of the definition 25 years ago, but we’ve been early movers there,” Zubrinich says.

“The definition will continue to evolve, and in some cases, we’ll be the ones pushing the boundaries but not always. There are a lot of bankers out there pitching assets to us as infrastructure and when we pick it apart, sometimes we agree, sometimes we don’t.“

“For 32 years, MAM has been at the frontier of infrastructure investing. Our focus is on where infrastructure is moving and where there are unmet needs in the community, helping us identify opportunities to enhance long-term value for investors.”

The Macquarie Private Infrastructure Fund is only open to investment by Australian wholesale clients (as defined in section 761G of the Corporations Act).