Perspectives
10 March 2022
As Macquarie grows its investment in Italy, EMEA CEO Paul Plewman explains what makes the country attractive and the role he sees the Group playing in helping to finance the nation’s ambitions.
A version of this article originally featured in Milano Finanza
Macquarie sees Italy’s huge potential and is ready to support the country’s growth ambitions through our growing Italian team. With our established global infrastructure, renewables and commodities business, there is a strong belief that we can make a valuable contribution to Italy by providing leading expertise in these areas.
While the world continues to deal with the uncertainties of COVID, Italy is poised to emerge strongly with a rapid economic recovery. The central bank forecasts 6 per cent growth this year, helping the economy back to pre-pandemic levels during 2022. It’s clear that structural change and investment in economic and social infrastructure will be key to delivering both the immediate and longer-term recovery – and we believe that the private sector capital has an important role to play.
The Italian government has set out ambitious plans, backed by the EU recovery plan. Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan outlines spending and reforms to recover from the pandemic and build back better, with a strong focus on decarbonisation, digitalisation, and new infrastructure. We believe we are uniquely positioned to support this ambition, with a successful investment track record established around the world in these areas of vital community infrastructure.
Macquarie is a diversified financial services group providing specialist, global expertise in areas such as infrastructure, energy, commodities, technology, and real estate. Founded in Sydney, Australia in 1969, we now operate in 33 markets globally. Through the diversity of our operations, combined with a strong capital position, we’ve managed to successfully maintain a 52-year record of unbroken profitability.
We have a deeply entrepreneurial culture, focused on innovation, careful risk management and delivering sustained long-term value for our clients and vital services for our communities. We also provide support to hundreds of community organisations globally each year through our staff led Macquarie Group Foundation, which provides financial support, volunteering and skills sharing.
Recent news reports might suggest that Macquarie is new to Italy, however, we’ve been active in Italy for almost two decades across the energy, transport, and the real estate sector. Our first Italian investment was in Aeroporti di Roma back in 2003.
More recently we have invested, through Macquarie Asset Management, in strategic infrastructure assets such as Autostrade per l’Italia and Open Fiber, as well as in Italian real estate - with Corso Europa 12 in Milan’s central business district. Our asset management business is also invested in the Trentino business, Hydro Dolomiti Energia, which operates 1,280 MW of clean energy capacity for Italy - via 28 hydropower facilities. In addition, Macquarie’s Green Investment Group is developing 1.5GW of new solar generation, through the wholly owned Cero business
Macquarie is committed to growing our business in Italy, offering an even broader range of services and capabilities to our clients and partners - and we’ll be establishing a new office location in central Milan next year to support this growth.
Our local team in Italy is expanding, with new colleagues expected to join Raffaella Copper in our Macquarie Asset Management team in the coming months.
We also recently announced the appointment of Roberto Sambuco within Macquarie Capital as a senior managing director. He will work alongside Roberto Purcaro, who has been deeply involved in the majority of our Italian transactions and has been with the firm for almost 17 years. Roberto Purcaro has recently returned home to Italy - part of a wider trend of Italian nationals at Macquarie who’ll be relocating from London and bringing their global expertise back to the Italian market.
We see huge opportunity in the Italian market and believe that we can play an important role in helping to finance the nation’s ambitions – by applying not only our own capital and the capital entrusted to us by our investors, but by providing our deep sector expertise across infrastructure, energy, and commodity markets.
