IFM snares $3b deal for European mega-airport
London | IFM Investors has shrugged off a Europe-wide squeeze on infrastructure projects, winning a Polish tender to build and run a passenger and cargo airport at the centre of a $12 billion regional transport hub.
CPK, the state-owned project manager for the Solidarity Transport Hub – the biggest infrastructure project in Poland since the end of the Cold War – chose IFM and its French partner, Vinci Airports, in a year-long tender process worth as much as $3 billion.
IFM’s success comes as rising borrowing costs are putting the brakes on European infrastructure development. Australian institutional investors have been keen to plunge capital into Europe, but find big deals increasingly hard to come by.
It is the third investment that IFM has made in Poland, following the purchase of stakes in a deep-sea port in 2019, and a district heating-generation system back in 2010.
IFM’s Global Infrastructure Fund will become a minority equity investor in the CPK unit building the airport. CPK suggested the outside investors’ stake could go as high as 49 per cent. This means the IFM-Vinci investment could total as much as $3 billion. IFM declined to comment.
The airport, which CPK says could open as soon as 2028, will initially have two runways and reach an annual capacity of 40 million passengers and 1 million tonnes of cargo by 2035. It could eventually expand to four runways and 100 million passengers.
It will be built about 40 kilometres west of Warsaw. It will not replace Warsaw Chopin Airport, but is seen as a regional logistics hub. The government plans to build high-speed railway connections from the airport to several Polish cities and into Germany.
Outside its Australian airport investments, IFM has stakes in Manchester
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