I built Silk Road Advisory, where I originate and execute hypothetical transactions in infrastructure. Alongside the deals, I write a view on each subsector. I chose infrastructure, the grand, connective tissue of our cities and country, because the more I understood real assets, from the modelling granularity to the commercial intuition, the more they felt like where I want to be. This project was only worthwhile if done properly, so every deal starts from a real party’s position and ends in a transaction note justifying it qualitatively and quantitatively. Silk Road Advisory is how I explore the full deal cycle end to end, as I am certain that knowing the whole puzzle helps you be a better piece in it.
We cover infrastructure in Australia and New Zealand, and every mandate here answers four questions, in this order.
What is wrong with the asset today: the wrong owner, the wrong capital or the wrong perimeter. If nothing is wrong, there is no deal.
The named, dated event that makes the change possible, such as a regulatory determination, a commissioning or a halted sale process.
Why it has to happen now rather than in two years.
Who pays, at a price that works for them, and how it is financed.
If you are holding an asset, a platform or a problem without a clear path, we’ll find the route.
Buy and sell-side, capital markets and project financing, we’re full service to ANZ infrastructure assets and the companies that hold them. The route, the model, the note, the close.
CIS underwriting made each battery bankable on its own, but funding them one by one meant four processes, four security packages and four sets of lender diligence against a developer of twenty-seven people. We took the portfolio out as a platform: one equity cheque across all four builds, one facility over the portfolio, and the Commonwealth floor doing identical work in each.
A situation arrives as a problem, not as a product. Deciding which of the four it becomes is the first call we make, and usually the one that sets the price. Most mandates begin as somebody’s problem, be it a regulatory reset, a stranded asset, or a sponsor who has run out of balance sheet. We structure the transaction it calls for, build the model ourselves, and publish it with the transaction note.
If you are holding an asset, a platform or a problem without a clear path, we’ll find the route.
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Before we take a mandate, we want to know which way its market is moving. These six pieces are that work, one for each subsector: what changed hands in the past year, at what price, and what it tells an owner deciding whether to sell, fund or wait.
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Twelve infrastructure transactions in Australia and New Zealand, each advised from the first idea to close. Transaction notes sit behind their respective tombstones.
New Zealand dollar values are converted at the Reserve Bank of Australia rate of A$1 = NZ$1.1980 on 31 July 2026.
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Each battery in the Tender 8 portfolio was bankable on its own CIS terms. The constraint was concurrency: four builds drawing sponsor equity at once, against a funding plan written project by project.
A single platform cheque against the portfolio, sized on the bid's revenue floor, carrying all four builds through construction concurrently. The raise prices the platform, not the projects.
The floor is given; the solve is ours. Lender coverage alone would require c. A$218,000 per MW per year weighted; the bid's floor sits thirty-nine per cent above it, and the equity is sized against that spread (exhibit 1).
Concurrency is the risk the structure retires. Sequenced builds would push the last energisation past the CIS window; the platform cheque buys the right to build all four at once and carry the timing (exhibit 2).
Silk Road Advisory is a fictional firm. The mandates and transactions attributed to it are hypothetical and have not been proposed, announced or undertaken by the parties named. All other information is drawn from cited public sources, and the analysis built on it is Silk Road's own.
There’s no crossing here. Back to the silk road.