The prize asset in Australian infrastructure this spring is not a data centre. It is a road — or, more precisely, a tenth of one. Data centres have been all the rage for the last two years, but infrastructure investors now have something new to pursue, courtesy of Canada’s La Caisse, which has mandated Macquarie Capital to sell its stake in WestConnex, the Sydney toll-road network that ranks as the country’s most valuable.
The pension savings giant owns just over 10 per cent of the road — 10.045 per cent, according to the Australian Financial Review — in an asset valued at more than $30 billion in total, $33 billion by one count. Simple arithmetic puts the block on offer at something above $3 billion.
The timing is not accidental. The exit is being prepared just weeks after the New South Wales government finalised its review of the state’s toll roads, an exercise that resulted in little pain for operators. A regulatory cloud has lifted; the traffic, and the tolls, continue.
La Caisse — the pension fund known abroad as CDPQ — arrived in 2021, as part of the consortium Sydney Transport Partners, taking STP’s ownership of WestConnex to 100 per cent with CDPQ holding a 10 per cent stake. Macquarie, for its part, knows this road from the other side of the table: advising on the New South Wales government’s sale of a 51 per cent stake in WestConnex helped more than double Macquarie Capital’s profit, to $406 million, in 2018, SBS News reported. Now the bank gets paid again, to help take one of the original private owners out.
For two years the big institutional cheques chased server halls and the electricity to run them. Now they will be asked to read traffic forecasts and toll schedules instead. The road, it should be said, stays exactly where it is.