3i Infrastructure (3IN) fund manager Bernardo Sottomayor says the “sustained” wave of capital pouring into the asset class underpins his confidence that the £3.4bn investment company can continue to sell investments at big premiums like it did with the £1bn sale of TCR in March.
“Over recent years, significant capital has been raised by ‘core-plus’ and ‘value-add’ infrastructure funds, attracted by the asset class’s defensive characteristics, inflation linkage and structural growth drivers,” said the managing partner and head of European infrastructure at 3i Investments.
“This depth of private capital provides a visible route to exit for the company’s investments, as demonstrated by the agreed sale of TCR to Global Infrastructure Partners, which closed a $25.2bn fund in June 2025,” he said.
3IN announced in March that Global Infrastructure Partners, a subsidiary of US funds giant BlackRock, had bought its 71% stake in TCR, the Belgian airport ground support equipment provider, for €1.14bn (£1bn). This was a 22% premium to the 30 September valuation and 50% more than at 31 March last year when its biggest position was put up for sale.
The good price reassured shareholders after 3IN’s shock write-down of its £212m investment in German telecom provider DNSNet in the previous month as lender support for the company and its sector evaporated.
Although Sottomayor said macroeconomic conditions remained uncertain, the largely contracted nature of 3IN’s portfolio companies provided strong cash flow visibility. His comment came in annual results accompanied by the declaration of a 6.725p final dividend taking the total covered pay-out for the year to 31 March to 13.45p per share, an increase of 6.3%.
For the current financial year 3IN is targeting another 6.3% increase to 14.3p per share. The 3.5%-yielder has lifted its dividend for every year since launch in 2007.
Including the semi-annual dividends, 3IN made an 8.5% total investment return for the year in line with its 8-10% annual target. Shareholders saw an 8.6% total return from shares that at 370p currently stand at a 7% discount to their net asset value of 398.4p
Sottomayor said the proceeds from the TCR sale would be reinvested to further diversify the 11-strong portfolio which is currently spread across the digital, transport, energy and medical infrastructure sub-sectors.
He expected 3IN’s investments would withstand the economic shock of the US-led war against Iran and the surge in oil prices, pointing out the portfolio had been resilient during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and through the ensuing periods of high inflation, volatile energy prices, rising interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty.
During the year, 3IN invested €131m (£113.9m) in three “transformative” bolt-on acquisitions for its portfolio companies. These included €107m for Joulz, the Dutch “energy as a service” provider which bought two businesses, boosting its earnings by 70% and expanding into Italy and Belgium.
It also invested €300m for a majority stake in the Lefdal Mine Datacenter, a high-quality Norwegian data centre campus located in a former mine.
It confirmed its succession plan for chair Richard Laing who is to retire next January. Andrew Sykes, a former chair of private equity fund SVG Capital and wealth manager Smith & Williamson, is joining the board as a non-executive director in July and will succeed Laing. Sykes will step down from the board of fund manager Intermediate Capital Group.
3IN is the best performing fund in the AIC Infrastructure sector having generated total shareholder returns of 50.7% and 182.3% over five and 10 years.
Our view
James Carthew, head of investment company research at QuotedData, said: “There is nothing new in the 3i Infrastructure results but it is good to get confirmation that even in a year where it was forced to write off one investment (DNS:NET) it still managed to meet its return objective.”
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