Brookfield India: Behind the optimism for growth for its businesses here

Brookfield's investments in the telecom infrastructure, real estate, renewable power and private equity have all shown steady growth over the past 12-18 months

By Salil Panchal Forbes India Staff

Published: May 24, 2025 11:42:57 AM IST

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Connor Teskey, President of Brookfield Asset Management

Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s largest alternative investment firms, is confident that its high-growth region such as India could triple or even quadruple in size over the next five years, its president Connor Teskey told media this week.

Teskey’s optimism for their businesses in India is backed not just by the potential, opportunities and timing of their investments here. The past 12-18 months reveal steady expansion for Brookfield India in some of its key engines for growth here. Brookfield’s India business, comprising of infrastructure, real estate, renewable power, private equity and Special Investments, is of $30 billion size, which Teskey estimates to grow to $100 billion in the “near term”.

Over the past 15 years, Brookfield in India has become a prominent foreign investor, investing across sectors which include infrastructure ($12 billion), real estate ($12 billion), renewable power and transition ($3 billion) and private equity and Brookfield special investments ($3.6 billion).

Sectoral growth

In the infrastructure space, Brookfield data shows that after the acquisition of American Tower’s operations in India in September 2024, Summit Digitel, Crest Digitel, and ATC India—combined under Altius—is the second largest telecom towers platform in the world. It currently includes around 257,000 telecom towers spread across India. Rival Indus has about 249,000 towers in India.

The growth outlook for the telecom tower business in India is starting to improve as telcos are starting to pay their dues to telecom towers. Credit ratings agency ICRA, in May, has revised its outlook for the telecom towers sector to ‘stable’ from ‘negative’.

Brookfield India currently has limited exposure to the transportation sector in India. Teskey, however, argued that it was just a “point in time” situation. “We would not take our current point in time lack of exposure to transportation in India as any reflection on our willingness to invest. “

In the renewables space, in March 2025, Brookfield announced the sale of 1.6 gigawatt (GW) portfolio of solar and wind assets in India to Gentari Renewables India, structured in two phases. The first phase, comprising the sale of 1 GW of operating assets, is complete. This marks Brookfield’s first full cycle portfolio monetisation in India for its renewable power business.

Brookfield manages around 40 GW of wind and solar assets in India.

In the real estate business, Brookfield is one of the largest office owners and operators in India with over 55 million square feet across top 9 office markets. Its institutionally-owned REIT, Brookfield India Real Estate Trust, for FY25, showed improved performance. The net operating income for the Trust grew 37 percent y-o-y to Rs 1,854 crore, compared to Rs 1,350 in FY24, led by growing demand from global capability centres and improved gross leasing and occupancy across corporate offices.

In the private equity space, retail NBFC IndoStar—in which Brookfield is a co-promoter—focusses on secured, small-ticket products (vehicle finance for used commercial vehicles, and loans against property) catering to underbanked customers in tier-2 and tier-3 towns. IndoStar’s commercial vehicles AUM has been growing at 15 percent CAGR for the past four years to Rs 7,401 crore.

Nuclear power interest

Teskey has also expressed confidence in exploring nuclear power as a potential investment. “We are believers of nuclear energy. Nuclear is a decision which each country will make on its own… we recognise that those are discussions for each individual country to take a decision on and should a country be supportive we will look at the opportunity,” he said.

Brookfield owns a majority stake in a business called Westinghouse, the largest provider of technical goods and services and design to the nuclear power generation sector globally. It services about half the nuclear reactors around the world.

While the India business would continue to grow, Teskey also expects Brookfield’s global portfolio of around $1 trillion to more than double in the next five years.

On returns on its businesses in India, Teskey said the real estate flagship fund targets a 20 percent return and their performance has exceeded that. The infrastructure fund targets a number in low teens and returns have exceeded that in those markets. “We have seen very attractive dollar returns in India investments, relative to our global targets, for the risk profiles we targeted in those asset classes,” he said.