Patria Investments Limited (NASDAQ:PAX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Alex Saigh: Okay, and thanks for your question again. Within our infrastructure vertical, I think we have our flagship fund. As I mentioned, we’re raising right now our infrastructure flagship number V. The strategy or the differentiator of that fund, the strategy that makes that fund or family of funds very different is the fact that we take on development risk. And we have dominated that. And I think that’s why we do continue to perform extremely well. As mentioned also during the call and also doing some of our earlier calls late last year, the divestments of two great companies that we had in our infrastructure fund III. And what does it mean taking development here? Now in the end, what we do is pretty easy to explain. I think it’s harder to execute.

We do win an auction or we buy an asset, we then take the risk of that asset by taking the development of that project, and then we sell it. So we buy the risk itself and we derisk mainly through development of that asset, because it can be a greenfield. When you win a concession of a new power project, for example, where we can buy a small brownfield and then develop that to create a larger asset. An example of the data center business that we just sold late last year and we started from scratch, we actually bought a piece of land. We constructed our first data center in the outskirts of Sao Paulo here in Brazil. And from there, we created over 60 megahertz company now with potential to expand to 100 this year, and we have pent-up demand already, signed contracts to bring this company to 400 mega and we sold it and we made over 4x our money there in U.S. dollars.

So that’s an example of beginning our thesis from scratch and taking on the development risk and then creating this LatAm platform and selling it. We did the same with toll roads that we just sold to an international global player, strategic global player, toll road that we had here in Brazil. In this case, we won the concession we took on the development risk that came with the concession of expanding duplicating parts of the highway, creating new toll plazas and blah, blah, blah. And two years later, we had derisk — the main portion of the CapEx needed to modernize that toll road. And then we sold a portion of that toll road to this international player. In this case we’re going to see a global player in the toll road space, and they now actually represent their entrance in the toll road space in the Brazilian market.

So taking that development risk that we do dominate makes us differentiate ourselves. I think most of the international players that you mentioned, they buy mature assets in the region that are already performing. We sold our data center company to another global data company sponsored by a major infrastructure fund. And they are buying our mature assets already. And of course, they’re going to take it to a different level. But it’s already a developed asset, already grown from scratch, as I just explained, the case of this international toll road player is the same. They are buying also a toll road in the state of Sao Paulo that, as I mentioned, we took on the development risk and sold that toll road already as mature asset. And that’s what we do well.