YouSaid · the spoken record

Tara Davies

lines on the record: 20
first: 2022-07-08
most recent: 2022-07-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, I will take a personal view on this one, and I've had the privilege of being mentored by George Roberts, who is the founder of KKR. And he's a great entrepreneur, a fantastic investor. But what's most inspiring about George is his humility and the ability to infiltrate that through the culture of KKR. And I find him a very truly inspiring investor. He always says, people do business with those they like and trust. And I think I couldn't think of a better way to work.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in every investment, take a view on the management team, follow your gut and get the best possible team in place quickly.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first successful deal was Sydney Airport, which anecdotally just got taken out in a big takeover. So it's come full circle.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not so good at in your blind spots, but also on the flip side, give you courage to do great things. And I always find the latter most important to me.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I look back over my career, I think when we buy infrastructure assets, I can't imagine a time when I've said I've bought this asset and it's cheap. And so in that guise, you do need to be kind of hungry and aggressive when you lean into doing deals in the infrastructure space. And I think the best investors are those who have that hunger, have that aggression, but can at the same time balance that with the blood, sweat, and tears of the levers in the business plan they need to pull in an asset management setting. That is a really hard trait to diligence and find in an interview process. But those people in interviews who are curious, who are self-starting, tend to be the right type of people to be great investors. And then I think from a mentorship perspective, it's great if people can remind you of your areas for development, remind you of what you're doing.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You start out in finance or investing, most people come from financial analytical background and what is good at an analyst level if someone who gets their model correct and gets their PowerPoint presentation precise. And everyone thinks they're a great analyst. But actually, spreadsheets help without a doubt. But investing is about people. And I don't think people say that to you when you're an analyst. And it's your ability to negotiate. you know, your ability to build relationships, your ability to empower management teams, your ability to sell that makes you a good investor over time. And actually all of those skills are people's skills and soft skills. And so it's a really great career because you have to develop a whole toolkit of experience in order to really excel in the space and everything's different, which is why it's so exciting to be an investor.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think advice is best received from those who know you very well. And the reason I say that is they need to know your blind spots when you're investing and they need to know where your kind of weaknesses are. But they also need to understand what you're doing and have a point of view and be very happy to provide that point of view. And so I tend to kind of leverage off the KKR partners within the infrastructure team because they know what my biases are in the space. They're very happy to tell me when they don't like something. And as a group, we're actually very aligned because we are so heavily invested in the funds. So you tend to get the most transparent and raw kind of advice from them relative to other people.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do always amuse myself on digital infrastructure because when I started an infrastructure, there was no such thing as an asset class that was digital infrastructure. And I know everybody always talks about infrastructure being boring. But what people forget is that people's needs actually change over time and therefore infrastructure actually has to adapt to the needs of people and service them in different ways. And so coming from an asset class that was non-existent 25 years ago, interestingly in KKR's flagship fund, it's our biggest asset class today. So we invest in data centers, towers, cable, fiber to the home, backhaul, and it's such a big part of delivering on the needs of people over time.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In creating a circular economy because it is displacing landfill, which is a good thing. And we're trialling at an operational level to try and extract plastics from that waste stream. This is quite granular. It's operating by nature. It's kind of grassroots stuff. But if we were to kind of roll that out across the portfolio, we would halve our carbon emissions over time. And I think it's that type of granular operational work that everyone in the infrastructure space needs to be focused on to achieve these types of objectives.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So ESG is at the top of our LP's minds and the top of KKR's mind. From an infrastructure perspective, I think the S and the G is slightly overlooked for the E, given there's so much energy infrastructure, which is by default climate related. As fiduciaries, it is our objective and our responsibility to deliver carbon neutrality without a doubt. And the bar is getting higher. And I think mere asset allocation where you sell brown to buy green is just not enough to actually ensure that you do have that genuine energy transition over time. So we are focused on trying to develop our toolkit of operational know-how, ideas in engineering to change our assets from brown to green over time. And a really good example of that is we own an energy from waste business, which quite frankly is a carbon emitter, but it is also very important.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conditions. The world is so uncertain today, and I think many a time when there is uncertainty and dislocation, your assumption is do nothing. And I think, you know, I probably say it's important to be aware of the environment around you, but not be paralyzed from it, because I do think with dislocation sometimes comes interesting investing opportunities as well.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The past six months, we've definitely seen a change in the way we look at deals and the way I think the rest of the market is also looking at deals. Growth businesses are much more tricky in current market conditions and businesses without real pricing power will get squeezed. And I think across the portfolio at KKR, we can see supply chain issues, tied employment markets, rising costs in the underlying OPEX spaces. So if you don't have that real pricing power at the top line, your margins are going to get squeezed. So it's a real area of focus in terms of due diligence where we look at new deals. I feel very privileged because I sit in infrastructure and a lot of infrastructure assets do genuinely have an inflation pass-through mechanic in the revenue line and they tend to catch up with inflationary conditions over time. So a pivot to real assets is what we're seeing from a lot of our investors just as a consequence of current markets.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Satisfy the objectives of corporates as they look to roll out and build new infrastructure over a period of time. And then I think the second area is where certain businesses within the infrastructure space have the wrong type of capital for the objectives they're trying to achieve. And we see that a lot actually in the listed market and public to private have been a very big theme within the infrastructure space during the past year, indeed across KKR we've done four in the past 12 months, which is a lot.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a really great question as it pertains to infrastructure because I think if you look back 25 years ago, there was very little private capital invested in infrastructure. So we've seen a big source of private capital come into the space over a period of 20 years. And the market is getting one a bit more competitive, but it's also getting broader and deeper. So we're seeing by default more opportunities as infrastructure gets broadened in terms of definition. And so with that context at KKR, we tend to focus on two particular areas in order to source our transactions and do M&A. The first is corporate partnerships. In terms of the infrastructure landscape, today there's probably still about 50% of infrastructure that still sits in corporate hands, despite that flow of private capital into the market. And so this is a really good way for us to leverage our firm relationships, create our own ideas, and try and”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think most infrastructure investors tend to have a very specialized approach by way of sector. We're somewhat different insofar as we do have sector specialization within the firm. But the way we look at infrastructure investments is via risk. So depending on the complexity of a particular business, and that could be things around growth, it could be higher operating leverage. It could be our thesis and what we want to do with the business. If it's complex, we classify that as a core plus risk profile, so higher risk, higher returning. And then other infrastructure is simple. It's stable, it's operating, it's yielding. There's not so much to do in and around the business. And that would be core infrastructure for us. And in terms of returns, you'll probably see about 500 basis points in terms of an equity IRR difference between those two risk profiles.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transition as well as telecom infrastructure. As co-head of the European infrastructure team, we tend to focus on Western Europe, but I am a member of the global infrastructure investment committee, so I see a lot of the infrastructure deal flow on a global basis and certainly in different markets. You can find different areas of sector maturity as well as value differentiation, which is interesting to see on a day-to-day basis.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, just by way of background, and as you can probably tell from my accent, I'm not European, I started investing in Australia back in the late 1900s. Having started actually my career as a chartered accountant, I pivoted to investing at quite an early stage and then moved opportunistically to London in 2004, where I've continued my investing career. Before joining KKR, I spent 17 years at Macquarie and I worked both on the investing side and on the advisory side. And I think that was really helpful in shaping my view on deal doing, but also on the underlying LPs of someone like KKR. And then in 2016, I joined KKR within the infrastructure team. And today co-head that team and helped develop their new product in infrastructure, which is a core product globally. From an infrastructure perspective, we take a sector agnostic approach to infrastructure, so invest in a wide range of assets, from utilities to transportation.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that in listening to the podcast, that you really just talk about her expertise and her insights on the market, and not so much that she's a woman in that seat, but that she's just doing an amazing job in that seat. I know our listeners are going to love this one. Here's Tara and Allison's conversation now.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this special series, Allison Mass, chairman of our Investment Banking Division, and Katie Koch, Chief Investment Officer of Public Equities and Our Asset Management Division, speak with the world's most respected investors about their investing strategies, career trajectories, and their outlook for markets and economies. Tara Davies, partner, global head of core infrastructure and co-head of European infrastructure at KKR, has a unique approach to investing in today's markets. But don't take it from me, hear it from Allison Mass, who spoke with Tara as part of our exchanges at Goldman Sachs Great Investor Series. Alison, you had the chance to talk with Tara, who was one of the most senior dealmakers in KKR's European business. What stood out to you from your conversation with her?”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investors are facing one of the most challenging backdrops in recent years amid slowing economic growth, rising inflation, and geopolitical conflicts. I'm Alison Nathan, and this is Exchanges at Goldman Sachs, Great Investors.”
2022-07-08 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Investing with KKR’s Tara Davies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT