In the Media

Partners Group's Christopher Bone, European Head of Private Debt, discusses the current state of the market at a Private Debt Investor roundtable. Read the full article, published in PDI's December Edition.

In our H2 2017 Private Markets Navigator, we talk about the increased reliance on renewable energy generation globally, which has created a number of attractive investment opportunities in different regions.

In North America, renewables are the fastest-growing power generation sector and are becoming increasingly cost competitive compared to conventional power generation assets. Meanwhile, ambitious renewable energy targets in the Asia-Pacific region continue to drive deal flow for new-build projects such as solar platforms and wind farms.

In Europe, where the renewables industry is more mature, new opportunities are arising in adjacent industries such as energy storage, energy transmission and offshore wind support vessels.

Direct loans and junior debt, particularly loans not involving underwriting banks, can be very attractive in the current market environment. While some market players are chasing more aggressive broadly syndicated structures and assuming outsized credit and macroeconomic risks as a result of pressure to deploy capital and meet high IRR targets, club transactions, in contrast, are typically characterized by lower competitive dynamics and in our opinion offer attractive relative value with regard to risk and return dynamics.

Partners Group's Fredrik Henzler, Co-Head of Industry Value Creation, introduces the 'portfolio approach', the next step in the evolution of operational value creation.

Todd Bright, Partners Group Managing Director and Head of Infrastructure for the Americas, highlights the best opportunities in communications, power generation and midstream sectors.

We believe a number of ongoing transformative trends are driving real estate demand on a global scale, including new urbanization, which is influencing property design so that it caters to the mobile generation's busy 'live-work-play' lifestyles. In the US for example, this trend has led us to focus on office properties in highly amenitized urban locations benefiting from strong underlying key drivers such as population and employment growth. As primary markets are highly valued, we focus on secondary CBD markets, such as Austin, Atlanta and Nashville, which offer opportunities to drive net operating income growth.