Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. (NYSE:BIP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Krant: Hey Rob, it’s David here. I can start and feel free to jump in. Look, when we — at our Investor Day, obviously, we had similar insights to where we are today in the market. I’d say the market hasn’t changed all that much. To your point, the commodity environment remains strong, and that’s a tailwind for not only our midstream businesses, but a lot of our transportation networks that haul or transport bulk commodities. So I’d say the transport and the midstream sectors continue to perform well to start the year, and that will fuel again part of that outlook. The other element is obviously the fact that we committed to and have now already deployed the $2 billion of new investments in HomeServe and DFMG that will fully contribute to our results. So those would be, I’d say, the prevailing tailwinds that were certainly informing us and giving that guidance. And I’d say we still feel the same outlook as appropriate.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Rob Catellier with CIBC.

Robert Catellier: I’m wondering if you could give some indication of how the markets received the semiconductor joint venture and what other industries might seem most suited to similar structure…

Samuel Pollock: Rob, it’s Sam here again. So — let me start just by the reaction. I think in — in my — I hate to say many years at Brookfield because it’s a long time. I probably haven’t seen as much interest in a single transaction as I’ve seen in that transaction. Clearly, it was seen as innovative. The scale was large, and the fact that it was related to a very topical and critical industry also brought a lot of interest towards it. So whether it’s governments, other sectors and obviously, all our competitors investment banks, everyone’s been studying to see how they can apply to other semiconductor facilities or companies or other sectors. So suffice to say, it’s definitely being studied, and I think I would be shocked if in some different way, shape or form, it wasn’t replicated again multiple times for other sectors.

And obviously, we would look to do that ourselves. As far as I think where it’s most applicable, it’s applicable for — you need to have a couple of ingredients. You need to have large dollars. You need to have a long-life asset that you are supporting and you need a strong counterparty or some sort of strong commercial framework to support the low cost of capital that makes the transaction interesting for both ourselves and for the use of the capital. So that could be battery manufacturers, I think other semiconductor facilities. And I think already a lot of energy businesses use the structure, and we’re referencing a lot of the Middle East transactions, whether it’s ADNOC or Saudi Aramco, we all use similar type of arrangements to finance their businesses.

So I think we’ll see a lot more of it, and it’s something, obviously, given that we feel we are at the forefront of arranging capital from alternative private sources and packaging it together for investors. We think we should be hopefully doing a lot more..

Robert Catellier: Okay. That’s very helpful. And then just one more here, sort of getting into the weeds on Heartland, but maybe you can elaborate on the process, the start-up process there, how it’s tracking versus expectations? And if there’s been any need for major rework or component replacements.