Brookfield poised for more deals
Brookfield is on a buying spree, with more deals close to being finalized on the heels of this week’s $4.3-billion purchase of Enercare Inc. by Brookfield Infrastructure Partners.
Sam Pollock, chief executive of Brookfield’s infrastructure investment arm, told analysts on a conference call Thursday that BIP has another $400 million earmarked for transactions in the final stages of due diligence. If finalized, these deals would reinvest the remainder of funds received from last year’s sale of a 27.8-per-cent stake in the parent company of Transelect SA, Chile’s main electricity provider.
“We are now well on our way to redeploying the proceeds into higher returning investments,” Pollock said on the conference call to discuss quarterly earnings. “In that regard, our US$1.7 billion of committed and advanced initiatives should be fully deployed over the next 12 months.”
Brookfield Infrastructure is contributing about US$630 million to the purchase of Enercare; it is part of a US$1.3 -billion commitment to three recent deals in the energy and data infrastructure sectors.
Another US$540 million was committed to the US$3.3 billion purchase of western Canadian natural gas gathering and processing assets from Enbridge Inc., announced last month.
Brookfield Infrastructure’s institutional partners fund the balance of the investments.
The third deal to redeploy the Transelect proceeds took place in June when AT&T agreed to transfer data centre co-location operations and assets to Brookfield.
Pollock said the new investments should generate “substantially higher same-store growth over time than we would have earned in Transelect.” He said unlike Brookfield, fewer buyers are willing to take on the “additional complexity” of transactions..