Investment bankers at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan will be dusting off their contact books for Australian institutional investors in the weeks ahead, after being poised to win mandates for the proposed $2bn-plus float of HMC Capital’s digital infrastructure fund.
DataRoom can reveal that banks will be appointed this coming week and sources say the two Wall Street banks have been lined up for the job of listing the fund.
It’s hoped it can capitalise on the feverish demand for data centres needed for artificial intelligence – to be run by the David Di Pilla-led HMC Capital – and to be on the ASX by Christmas.
It comes after a quiet period for floats in the past year.
The only major deal of any note has been the listing of Guzman y Gomez in June, undertaken by Barrenjoey and Morgan Stanley, with a $335.1m IPO and a $2.2bn market value.
Payments infrastructure company Cuscal has revived its float plans through Bank of America, but has given scant information on price, while another prospect is the Mitsui-backed undersea cable owner Campana, which is planning a float through Ord Minnett and CLSA and may be worth about $400m.
HMC Capital told the market on August 21 that over the past 12 months it had established three new growth platforms in private credit, energy transition, (run by former QIC executive Angela Karl), and digital infrastructure.
Its digital infrastructure platform was established with the acquisition of North American business StrapCap and has $700m of assets under management.
The move to target the digital infrastructure space comes with forecasts that $US1 trillion of capital spending in the sector is needed by 2028.
HMC Capital’s medium-term target was to have about $2bn of assets under management in digital infrastructure and its overall target of having $20bn of assets under management – almost doubling from its current level of $12.7bn.
HMC Capital was launched and floated with the former Masters Hardware properties sold by Woolworths before branching out with a listed healthcare real estate fund and daily needs fund.
It embarked on a $2.5bn merger with bulky goods operator Aventus, purchased $1.2bn of hospital properties operated by Healthscope and has made other acquisitions in renewable energy and real estate.
It told the market it was carrying out due diligence on Global Switch Australia for a potential transaction – one that would come only weeks after Blackstone and backers paid an eye watering $24bn for the Robin Khuda-founded data centre giant AirTrunk, backed by Macquarie, PSP.
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan both worked on the original float of HMC Capital in 2019 and are both believed to be lenders.
The understanding is HMC Capital is also the last party standing in the contest to buy the iSeek data centres, with Queensland Investment Corporation walking away.
It is believed while Di Pilla has been comfortable with Amber Infrastructure’s $400m price expectations, his challenge has been raising the funds to pay for a transaction.
The opportunity on the data centre front is to put the iSeek business together with the $1bn Fujitsu data centres in Australia, which are also for sale, and gain synergies.
Global Switch Australia has been up for sale through investment bank UBS.
On offer have been two major data centres on the western edge of Sydney’s central business district comprising 73,000 sqm of space, owned by Global Switch.
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