Invest Europe

Invest Europe Leader Interviews: John Anderson, Manulife

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1:58

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09 Jul 2025

John Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Finance and Infrastructure at Manulife, discusses how, in times of crisis, infrastructure has stood out for its resilience, outperforming targets while other strategies have faltered.

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With lower volatility than public markets and growing relevance in developed economies, it’s no surprise more investors are doubling down.

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Infrastructure equity continues to outperform target return over the last three years.

I'm John Anderson. I'm a 30 year infrastructure investor and for the last 24 years I've been doing that at Manual Life. So, the reason I got into this space was because it's just a really cool opportunity to invest in essential companies that make life better for all of the communities they serve.

What I really spend my time on is the massive developed country opportunity in infrastructure where manual life we've been involved in developing a 22 billion infrastructure equity portfolio and a 50 billion infrastructure debt portfolio.

If that's the reason we got involved in the space and we've kept growing it, the the investment performance is why we keep doubling down our efforts and have grown the portfolio as much as we have. And for sure over 20 years we've outperformed public equity markets with like one quarter the volatility.

So great that we can hit our investment returns deliver for our policy holders without the roller coaster of public markets. But it's also beyond volatility. It's resilience when you need it most. So the COVID shock, what a traumatic event. Infrastructure equity, our best performing alternative equity, the only one that outperformed its target return during those tough days.

Then most recently, we've seen interest rates go escalating very heavily, really holding back strategies that depended on high leverage, private equity portfolios sort of suffering over the last 3 years, infrastructure equity continues to outperform target return over the last 3 years.

So, not only do we have something that meets the needs of local communities, is really fun to work on, has more and more investors getting involved, it's also something that's been an out performer for our book. Keeps our customers, our clients, our policy holders very, very happy.

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Invest Europe

Invest Europe Leader Interviews: John Anderson, Manulife

1:58

09 Jul 2025

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