CASE STUDIES
Bolstering UK green finance and investment in Brazilian infrastructure
THE CHALLENGE

To inform its new green and infrastructure investment strategy, the British Consulate-General in São Paulo wanted to gauge UK investors’ appetite for Brazilian infrastructure. It wanted evidence and insight about barriers facing UK companies considering Brazil, and recommendations to address them.

THE OUTCOME

Based on 85 interviews with UK and Brazilian stakeholders, CLT identified activities and initiatives that could accelerate UK investment into Brazil. These directly informed the Consulate-General’s green finance and infrastructure strategy, helped it refine future inward investment campaigns, and supported its OECD accession work.

CLT conducted a comprehensive research study for the British Consulate-General in Brazil to identify solutions to barriers faced by green finance and infrastructure investors and services providers. During 85 stakeholder interviews we uncovered the biggest barriers to investment and developed options to overcome them.

We wrote a profile on each interviewee to help the Consulate-General understand the geographies and sectors interviewees are active or interested in. For investors, we also detailed their financing methods, average hold period, deal size, number of active investments, expected returns and other notes. The profiles were supplemented with a rich database containing names and details of over 450 infrastructure investors and services providers headquartered in the UK (over 5,500 data points), plus information on over 100 Brazilian stakeholders.

Our findings described:

  1. The size of the infrastructure investment opportunity by sector, including Brazil’s global position
  2. The interest of investors in each infrastructure sector, in green finance, in emerging markets and specifically in Brazil
  3. The capability of UK investors to appraise the infrastructure investment opportunities, and of UK services providers in the field of green finance
  4. UK investors’ perceived investability of different asset classes in Brazil, as well as an overview of international investment activity in Brazil (e.g. US, Spain, Portugal)
  5. The policy context and enabling environment in both the UK and Brazil that either aided or impeded investors

We also outlined how the UK government is helping British business access foreign markets. We described the standard assessment methodologies developed through the Infrastructure and Projects Authority as well as other supporting initiatives like the Global Infrastructure Programme and platforms like Infrastructure Exports UK.

Based on this analysis, we proposed six specific solutions that the Consulate-General in Brazil could deploy to encourage investment. CLT presented final results at the Consulate-General in São Paulo. We also shared results with other stakeholders including the multilateral development bank IFC, and Brazil’s national development bank BNDES.

The Consulate-General found the results to be very useful:

Thank you very much for sharing the presentation and the final reports which were already circulated to our internal colleagues. We received very positive feedback about their content which will definitely support our internal strategy regarding the investment agenda between the UK and Latin America. This will have a huge impact on our work internally and externally. It helps us understand what investors need – you delivered all of what we wanted. It’s good for our strategy and will help us implement the vision of the Prosperity Fund, knowing what investors are really looking for. Thank you. ~ Luiz Nano, Business Development Manager for Infrastructure, Department for International Trade, British Consulate-General in São Paulo