Brookfield Asset Management expects India assets to swell to $100 billion in five years

Mumbai: Brookfield Asset Management expects its India portfolio to expand to $100 billion over the next five years, surpassing the growth rate of its global assets, a senior executive said on Thursday.

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Headquartered in New York, Brookfield manages over $1 trillion in assets across renewable power and transition, infrastructure, private equity, real estate and credit. Connor Teskey, president, Brookfield Asset Management, told reporters he expects the global portfolio to more than double in five years.

In India, its assets under management (AUM) are at $30 billion, which Teskey said he expects to reach $100 billion. This implies a faster growth rate of assets than the overall portfolio. While a majority of this expansion would come through inorganic means, the overall growth would be a mix of that and additional investments.

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“It (India) is a large and growing economy. It has a fantastic depth of talent,” said Teskey, who, according to news reports, is expected to succeed chief executive Bruce Flatt.

Bloomberg reported in July 2024 that it’s an open secret in Brookfield’s top echelons that Flatt is preparing Teskey to succeed him at the top of the firm.

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Big opportunity

He believes there is no limit to the scale of opportunity in India, and Brookfield is looking at growth across all the major infrastructure asset classes. India, he said, is rapidly building out its infrastructure. In a world where global corporates are looking to make their supply chains more resilient and are moving away from a single supplier model to multiple supplier points, India seems to be the beneficiary of all of those trends, he said.

“We are very much looking at digital infrastructure. We are very much looking at transportation infrastructure. We look at utilities. And we also look at midstream and power generation as well,” said Teskey, who joined Brookfield in 2012.

“We are long-term investors. We take a long-term approach, and by definition, we are investing in long-term assets.”

Of the $30 billion portfolio in India, $12 billion each is in infrastructure and real estate, while renewable power and transition, and private equity and Brookfield special investments are at $3 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively. These include India’s longest privately-owned cross-country gas pipeline of 1,480km; over 55 million square feet across the top nine office markets in India; about 43GW of wind and solar assets in operation or in development, besides others.

“The focus for us in every market around the world, in terms of putting capital to work, is that we like markets with stability and we like markets with long duration demand trends. In most asset classes and most sectors in India, you absolutely have those,” said Teskey.

He said interest rates in India are very constructive, capital markets are increasingly liquid, and demand is very enduring, both domestically and increasingly from an international demand point.

According to him, Brookfield wants to own high-quality, critical assets in markets with strong tailwinds. Teskey said that Brookfield’s returns in India have been “very robust”, on the back of “tremendous tailwinds and robust macroeconomic backdrop that India has benefited from in recent years and will continue to benefit from going forward”.