“BlackRock announced this Friday the purchase of the investment fund Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) for approximately 12.5 billion dollars (11.4 billion euros).” GIP is the owner of 20% of the capital of the Spanish company Naturgy. The operation is structured through a payment of 3,000 million euros in cash while the rest will be executed through the acquisition of 12 million shares, worth about 9,500 million dollars at the close of Thursday.
According to information published by the Bloomberg agency, the president and CEO of GIP, Adebayo Ogunlesi, a former Credit Suisse executive, will join the board and the global executive committee of BlackRock once the operation is closed, a milestone that is expected to be reached before the end of the third quarter of 2024.
With this operation, BlackRock, which is the largest fund manager in the world, with $100 billion under management, positions itself as one of the main investors betting long-term on energy, transportation and digital infrastructures.
To these will be added the 50,000 million assets in infrastructure that GIP provides. The bet marks BlackRock's belief that larger institutions will pay higher fees to invest in illiquid funds that support large, complex projects.
"The unprecedented need for new infrastructure - digital infrastructure, enhanced logistics hubs, decarbonization and energy security - coupled with unprecedented public deficits means that private capital will be needed more than ever," said Fink and Rob Kapito, president of BlackRock, in a note to employees cited by Bloomberg. "This will be one of the fastest growing areas of our industry over the next 10 years."
The deal is BlackRock's largest acquisition since its purchase of Barclays Global Investors in 2009, putting the asset manager on track to become the largest provider of exchange-traded funds. In recent years, BlackRock has been involved in multibillion-dollar investments in oil pipelines in the Middle East, a carbon capture project in Texas, and a fiber network venture with AT
The deal with GIP comes as the company posted better-than-expected fourth-quarter profits, with capital inflows putting its total client assets above $10 trillion for the first time in two years.
For Naturgy, the entry of BlackRock into its shareholding can take some of the tension off the management team. Since while GIP had been pressing for months for a solution to exit the shareholding, after the Gemini project that sought to divide the company into two areas was frustrated, BlackRock is a less speculative fund with a greater vision of long-term investments. Although the decision of whether or not to sell that 20% of the gas company will depend on the fine print and the exit requirements that were raised in the financial vehicle with which GIP entered Naturgy.
