NH Investments & Securities to Participate in US$8 Bil. Infrastructure Deal
A natural gas pipeline of ADNOC in the UAE
NH Investment & Securities will participate in a consortium that will invest US$8 billion to acquire a 49 percent stake in the natural gas pipeline held by Abu Dhabi National Oil Corp. (ADNOC) of the United Arab Emirates.
The consortium was chosen as a preferred bidder for the project, beating another consortium formed by Black Rock, the world’s largest asset management company.
The NH Investment & Securities consortium includes Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a U.S. private equity fund specializing in infrastructure investment, Snam, an Italian infrastructure fund manager, Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, Canadian alternative investment manager Brookfield, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan of Canada.
After being selected as the preferred bidder, the consortium is holding final negotiations with ADNOC. The investment amount of NH Investment & Securities has not been finalized yet. Discussions have been delayed due to the COVID-19 crisis, but the amount of investment is expected to be fixed by June.
“The deal is so large that even if the six consortium participants evenly share it, the investment amount for each will be at least hundreds of billions of won,” said an official of the investment industry.
Market experts say that it is positive that NH Investment & Securities participated in a global-scale deal as it offers an opportunity to expand the investment scope of Korean investors. They expect that this deal is likely to be the world’s largest infrastructure investment in 2020 and the largest ever infrastructure projects where Korean securities firms have invested. So far, the largest one was the acquisition in 2018 of a 40 percent stake in Dunkirk LNG Terminal in France for approximately 850 billion won by the consortium of Samsung Securities, Hana Financial Investment and Hanwha Securities Consortium.
NH Investment & Securities invested 280 billion won in Gatwick Airport in the U.K., together with GIP, in June 2019. It also invested 100 billion won in an infrastructure blind fund run by GIP.