Capital markets activity within the infrastructure sector, including mergers, acquisitions and privatizations of listed companies, has accelerated in the past three years as the competing incentives for public-market listings tilt in favor of privatization as the cycle matures. The privatization drivers are familiar — global investors migrating from fixed income in the search for yield and for long-term capital to match liabilities — but the strategies are complicated by the sheer scale of the sector’s listed companies.

The global infrastructure sector is comprised of a relatively small number of very large companies. In the listed sector, for example, as captured by the Global Listed Infrastructure Organization’s (GLIO) Global Listed Infrastructure index, 140 companies have a combined market capitalization of approximately $2.5 trillion. These companies span regulated utilities, transportation, energy and communication infrastructure. “These are ‘mission critical