For Australia’s infrastructure corporates, a multitude of risks lie on the horizon. Despite boasting years of robust growth, a more subdued outlook emerges for the near-term, driven by increasingly volatile market conditions. And driving growth in the longer term will call for substantial infrastructure investment. It is no surprise, then, that observers might ask: are the country’s corporates well prepared to manage these pressures?
Writing for Infrastructure Investor, S&P Global Ratings’ Parvathy Iyer argues that it seems so.
The key for corporates overcoming softer revenues and a challenging economic climate, Iyer argues, will be timing flexibility. And while Australia’s infrastructure sector has significant capital expenditure in progress or under consideration, companies spanning the airport and port sectors should have some freedom to alter their timing and level of spending in response to the economic climate.
To read the full article, please click here (behind paywall).
S&P Global Ratings has published 2019’s first edition of Infrastructure Finance Outlook, its newsletter of key infrastructure and project finance-related research and ratings news.
S&P Global Ratings’ Gloria Lu, Senior Director of Corporate & Infrastructure Ratings, Asia Pacific, and Abhishek Dangra, Director, Asia Pacific Corporate Ratings, recently discussed the looming volatility shadowing Asia’s infrastructure market for Brink News, offering their own views and potential responses to increasing risks proliferating in the region.
In a commentary for Brink News, Julyana Yokota, Director of Infrastructure Ratings at S&P Global Ratings, highlights the geopolitical and regulatory risks that are driving a shift in investor sentiment towards Latin American infrastructure.
Financier Worldwide
What key trends do infrastructure investors face in 2019? For one, nationalist and populist movements are on the rise – creating an environment of heightened political risk, which investors may find hard to navigate. The result could weigh heavily on regulatory stability, as well as country risk or sovereign credit quality.
In its “Industry Top Trends 2019” reports for North America’s regulated utilities and merchant power, S&P Global Ratings found that the utility sector’s credit outlook is stable – with both regulated providers and independent power producers likely to see low levels of growth next year.
In September 2018, now-outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB100: a mandate to keep California on a path to deriving 100% of its power from clean sources by 2045. In an article for Utility Dive, S&P Global Ratings’ Michael Ferguson explains how this may mean significant credit implications for the state’s power generators.