I came across Infratil for the first time recently and have been doing research on what to me is a multi-faceted infrastructure type play that invests in structural areas of growth (data centres, telecomms, healthcare, retirement villages, renewable energy). Having personally seen the explosion of the CDC data centres business first hand in Sydney and during my reading realizing that Infratil had part ownership in the business drew me into look a little deeper.
Prefacing that it is originally a New Zealand business on the NZX which is dual listed on the ASX, there seems to be only minimal coverage on any major business media over here (****** has a few mentions of it on 'The Call' where some commentators weren't even that familiar with it, and there were some articles I found in the AFR over the past few years), there also seems to be little to no posts in this forum section from other HotCopper users as well.
What baffles me is that it's track record since IPO / listing on the NZX and similarly on the ASX has been well above the market average most years, almost double (below from their website which is in terms of NZX performance, but ASX performance isn't much different). Usually any business with these sort of numbers would attract a lot more attention.
One thing I noted while checking the financials from various sources was that the business looked pretty lackluster e.g. ROE over past 5 years of 1.9% and ROIC over past 5 years of 2.5%, also trading on a forward PE of around 35 which is fairly high. Typically these are not good metrics but as a shareholder of Washington H. Soul Pattison, which has somewhat of a similar business structure, the accounting gets messy and doesn't stand out as obviously as other businesses may. I saw this as a potential reason it may get overlooked as it doesn't scan very well if people are simply using them sort of tools.
Another point which further added to my conviction was the the bid by Australian Super to take over the business back in December 2020, whether a strategic play from Australian Super in a time of economic fragility due to covid, it seems to infer that Infratil's assets are something that a super / sovereign fund would be interested in and I can see why.
One thing I need to do more work on is the management fees which Morrison & Co. charge Infratil, if anyone could point me in the direction of where on the annual reports this is found that would be appreciated, I am not sure if the management fees are factored into their great post-tax returns or I am missing something?
I am very interested but still have further research to do but am open to hear others opinions on something which seems like a great opportunity to me. It seems like an under-hyped consistent compounder that has just flown under the radar due to scanning bad and being predominantly NZX listed with little to no media coverage in Australia.
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