[danielmarkbruce]

This is overly simplistic. And pieces are just flat wrong.

How are you defining infrastructure? Why is there an assumption it's good for the company buying it? There is virtually always a bidding competition, these assets don't go for cheap.

[Retric]

There are few bidders, and no bid is going to be high enough to make the acquisition unappealing let alone unprofitable.

So it’s generally just a question of how screwed the public gets.

[onionisafruit]

The winning bid will be high enough to make the acquisition unappealing to all but on bidder.

[Retric]

Not quite, there are two basic strategies either make a high but profitable bid to try and win or make a low bid on the off chance nobody does the first strategy.

[danielmarkbruce]

This is some nice theory.

In practice there are dozens of players bidding on infrastructure assets globally. The assets tend to be easy to model, easy to finance and hence finance types (like all the PEs, pension funds etc) love them.

Here is a starting point:

https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/pe-most-active-investors...

https://www.peievents.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/30_1...

https://docs.preqin.com/newsletters/ra/Preqin-RASL-August-16...

No one bidding on these assets is giggling about how much money they are going to make. They are thinking "we are bidding a lot here, these returns don't look so hot, how can we justify this??" and then praying their projections aren't off on the downside. At least, in the first world. There does appear to have been some shady dealings in Russia, Mexico etc in the 90's.

[Retric]

I would add China and several countries to that list of shady dealings and far more recently than the 90’s.

Beyond that you can find plenty of exceptions in first world countries of underbidding paying off, though mostly at the local scale. For a specific example look at US high speed internet a little closer and you can find taxpayers getting screwed.

[danielmarkbruce]

Yep, those 90's examples were just what came to mind.

What is a specific local example of that? Ie in what city/town/metro/etc?

[danielmarkbruce]

What makes you say there are few bidders?