The infrastructure sector of India has a reason to cheer as the Morgan Stanley has successfully closed the Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners (MSIP), a fund, with $4 billion of equity commitments crossing the firm’s initial target of $2.5 billion.
Commenting on the fund’s performance, James Gorman, co-president, Morgan Stanley said that the fund raising beyond the set targets shows that there is a demand for infrastructure investment and investors have keen interest in investing in an alternative assets that generate long-term stable cashflows.
The Fund raised its capital globally in North America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Asia. Investors include major pension funds, insurance companies, high net worth individuals (HNIs) as well as Morgan Stanley and its employees. “Infrastructure is now an important component of any asset allocation strategy, it offers portfolio diversification and the ability to invest in real assets, with uncorrelated investment returns relative to other asset classes”, Gorman said.
Morgan Stanley’s infrastructure investing business is headed by Sadek Wahba, chief investment officer and global head of Morgan Stanley Infrastructure, based in New York.
The industry expects that a portion of this fund may be allocated towards Indian infrastructure sector. With regard to India, Wahba said, “India has become a major investment opportunity and in many respects is a leader in bringing the private sector into new infrastructure projects. There is significant growth potential which combined with strong local development expertise make India unique.”
It may be mentioned here that Indian infrastructure sector has seen a slew of public offerings to mop up resources from the market for their expansion plans in the last two years. The government is also providing several tax sops to encourage infrastructure sector to develop and to take advantage of that the Mutual Fund (MF) industry too has lined up several infrastructure linked schemes during the period.
