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Europe is becoming a more attractive place to invest in infrastructure as governments move to boost their security and energy independence, a top executive at private capital firm EQT has said.
“The European opportunities that we’re seeing now are probably more attractive and more interesting than they were just a few years ago,” Masoud Homayoun, EQT’s global head of infrastructure, told the Financial Times.
While European governments will focus on defence for a lot of “very capital-intensive investments that are needed”, he added, “there is also a significant . . . desire to increase the overall resilience of the infrastructure in Europe”.
Noting that German politicians voted this month to allow a huge increase in defence and infrastructure spending, Homayoun said that across Europe, the desire to support private investment in infrastructure was now stronger than at any other point in the past decade.
“What you’re seeing happening in the world, we’re in the front line of that when it comes to actually investing,” he said.
EQT, which has €269bn of assets under management and is a major global investor in renewable energy, announced on Friday that it had raised more than €21bn for its latest infrastructure fund. Homayoun said it would invest in renewable energy and digital infrastructure, among other sectors, in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
He said the fund already had agreements or was in talks to invest in 12 companies largely in decarbonising and decentralising energy generation and storage, including “one of the largest providers of flexible generation in the form of large scale batteries” in the UK.
Homayoun added that EQT had invested in the biggest plastic recycling company in South Korea, and in the US it had deployed cash in decentralised solar power generation and fibre internet.
He said that while European governments now seemed more supportive of renewable energy than the Trump administration, “we actually see a lot of opportunities . . . also in the US”.
“The parts of the renewable infrastructure market that we are investing in through the funds are competitive based on technological advancements,” he said, noting that they were commercially viable and not reliant on government policy support.
However, he added that there were “pockets” of the renewable sector that the firm would not invest in because US administration opposition meant the risk was “very high”.
“There’s been, by the current administration, quite a vocal opposition to specifically offshore wind,” he said.
