Apollo sees US$50 trillion opportunity in energy transition

APOLLO Global Management sees an “industrial renaissance” emerging as part of an energy transition investment opportunity worth US$50 trillion over the coming decades, according to Leslie Mapondera, a partner at the private capital firm.

“Just in Europe there’s probably US$1.8 trillion to be spent” between 2025 and 2030, Mapondera, the company’s co-head of European credit, said at the Bloomberg Intelligence credit market outlook conference in London on Thursday (Nov 28).

Apollo manages about US$275 billion of investment-grade credit and its high-grade capital solutions business – which focuses on multi-billion dollar corporate deals – has originated about US$100 billion in the past four years, including transactions with Intel and Air France-KLM. The firm is targeting 150 to 200 basis points of excess spread from many of those large deals, he said.

“Historically the market has thought about risk and illiquidity as being relatively aligned but we don’t think that’s so much the case,” he said.

The private credit market has held up better than he initially expected through the cycle so far, he said. While improving fundamentals in the US and interest-rate cuts have helped some managers, there will come a point where some of the differentiation in performance will become evident, he added.

Junior debt such as payment-in-kind and mezzanine “has been one of the coping mechanisms as we have gone through the cycle as sponsors have sought to monetise assets in some form”, he said, speaking generally about private capital. “I would expect that this is something that will remain a feature of the market over the next year or so.” BLOOMBERG