Infra Dig – APAC infra with Actis

Fresh from having hosted IJGlobal Infrastructure Finance Forum: Asia 2025 in Singapore, the Infra Dig podcast continues the theme with a regional focus. 

IJGlobal editorial director Angus Leslie Melville pulls up a seat for a far-ranging conversation on matters predominantly energy with Rahul Agrawal – managing director and head of Southeast Asia for Actis. 

This podcast runs for almost 31 minutes and sees Rahul take the listener through the regional market with a strong leaning towards data centres, renewable energy and electricity generation in general.

This latest episode can be accessed on Spotify (embedded above) as well as through the Amazon service. It is also hosted across a slew of other platforms, open access on all of them.

Rahul (pictured right) leads the regional energy infrastructure team for Actis out of Singapore investing in critical infrastructure across the ASEAN economies where the fund manager’s primary focus is the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Talking about the 5 top Southeast Asian economies, Rahul says: “If you put them all together, this is 700 million population, $3.5 trillion GDP – a pretty sizeable market.

“This market has been having pretty strong GDP growth of between 4% and 6% per annum, except for 1 or 2 countries, and generally stable macro. And infrastructure is a sector that has been underinvested across many of the sub sectors.

“So, given the strong macro and the underinvestment in the growth opportunities, various sub sectors are providing lots of avenues for investment. In particular, what we are seeing is energy, general infrastructure and digital as the themes that are most investible in this region.”

Rahul identifies energy as being the area for most consistent growth across the region and key for investment as these economies grow at 5-6% per annum.

“Most of these economies are dependent on imported fuels which means these economies are also looking at energy security,” Rahul adds.

He stresses that energy transition, energy addition and energy security are all coming into play at the same time, creating a sizeable investment opportunity – with renewables leading the charge.

“Given where renewables is today, with about 3-4% of the energy generated from renewables, it is an underinvested sector which provides us with strong room for growth,” Rahul adds.

To hear about the broader regional market, with drill downs into the likes of MTerra Solar and Levanta Renewables, tune into this latest episode…