On the occasion of Cohen & Steers receiving the 2025 Asia Asset Management Best of the Best award for Global Listed Infrastructure (3 years), AAM speaks to Ben Morton, executive vice president and head of global infrastructure at Cohen & Steers.
The global economy’s new regime of higher interest rates, sticky inflation, and slower growth “is a market environment that has historically favoured infrastructure investing,” Morton points out. He refers to secular trends – including digitalisation of the world’s economies, higher power demand, decarbonisation and deglobalisation – that are accelerating infrastructure spending, providing a strong fundamental tailwind for the asset class.
Even so, Cohen & Steers believes that growing global power demand is underappreciated by the market today, Morton continues. North America especially, he adds, is the epicentre of this demand growth story, given significant data center growth, reshoring of industrial production, and electrification trends in the region.
“This presents opportunities both in electric utilities, which generate electricity and operate transmission lines connecting sources of energy to consumers, and midstream energy companies, which transport and store the natural gas needed to satisfy rising electricity demand.”
As for the global communications sector, this is supported by the massive increase in data intensity of mobile traffic, Morton emphasises. Cell tower and satellite operators can benefit from this trend, he believes, as wireless network operators and satellite customers continuously invest in their network connectivity.
Cohen & Steers’ strategy overall “is positioned to capitalise on the diverse investment opportunities presented by the heightened level of macro uncertainty, currency fluctuations, rate outlooks, and growth trajectories that may result from country-specific policy actions,” Morton concludes.
Asset class advantages
Moving on to the advantages of the asset class, the house view is that listed infrastructure is a powerful complement or substitute to private infrastructure in portfolios. “Both listed and private infrastructure have a history of equity-like returns with a meaningful downside cushion,” Morton notes, largely due to relatively low cash flow volatility, which he says stems from infrastructure companies’ long-term contracts and provision of essential services. “These assets have long appealed to investors seeking diversification and stable income,” he adds.
In addition, he notes there are several features that differentiate listed infrastructure from privately held infrastructure. This includes liquidity, avoiding lockup for multi-year periods.
“Listed infrastructure managers can be active and nimble, allocating capital to themes and stocks to capitalise on dynamic fundamentals and valuation signals,” he adds, versus more static private portfolios.
Furthermore, Morton proceeds, listed infrastructure portfolios are typically much more diversified, “with exposure to dozens of infrastructure assets across several infrastructure subsectors and multiple geographies,” while private managers are constrained by their more concentrated holdings. Private infrastructure managers tend to focus on specific regions or infrastructure sectors, and from a portfolio construction or deal perspective are somewhat beholden to the assets that are offered for sale at any specific point in time.
Strategy and selection
The Cohen & Steers Global Listed Infrastructure Strategy, launched in 2004, employs a total-return, relative-value approach to investing in global listed infrastructure, as Morton explains. The strategy seeks to achieve attractive risk-adjusted total returns over the long term and to outperform its benchmark over a full market cycle of approximately three to five years.
In addition, Cohen & Steers employs one of the most tenured investment teams dedicated to the asset class with ten team members having spent their careers focused on infrastructure, with an average of 20 years of investment experience, Morton points out.
“This large team allows very detailed bottom-up analysis of the companies in our universe – a critical requirement given the very specific and nuanced regulatory and political dynamics that drive outcomes for our companies.”
Cohen & Steers is also among the largest global listed infrastructure investors, and one of very few firms with a proven and consistent performance track record managing global listed infrastructure portfolios at scale, according to Morton. Consequently, with US$9.6 billion in global listed infrastructure assets under management as at March 31, 2025, he believes the company’s size and scale provide advantageous access to company management, regulators and other market participants, while still allowing for “nimble, active portfolio management.”
