Difference between Infrastructure and industrials?

It's a valid question and it can be confusing at times. I once worked on a toll road M&A deal where we had both the infrastructure financing group and industrials coverage (transportation vertical) on it.

Clients mutually exclusive to industrials would be major industrial corporates – automotive (Ford), chemicals (Dow DuPont), airlines, and stuff like homebuilding/packaging.

Meanwhile, in my experience infrastructure emphasizes covering infrastructure sponsors – think of it as an extension of the financial sponsors group, just focusing on infra funds. You'll cover both corporate and project-specific deals across power, energy, telecom (data centers) and core infra (airports, toll roads, etc.) Nonetheless you'll also cover any non-sponsor corporate M&A / financings that fall under the infrastructure banner.

Basically – infra coverage kind of overlaps with NatRes, industrials, financial sponsors, and TMT, but really focuses on the sponsor side of things.

Would also add that the definition of what is classically "infrastructure" has really broadened as people seek more yield and look for core ++ returns.

I.e a few years ago it would just be things like toll roads, airports, hospitals etc but now because of all the dry powder and desire for higher yields funds are venturing to more atypical assets with infrastructure like characteristics (long-term, stable, some type of contractual agreement, monopolistic characteristics etc). So this would include things like data centers, laundromats, short line rail, even school bus companies etc. So yes the overlap between the infrastructure group and other groups just gets larger as sponsors continue to deploy their capital in other infrastructure like areas. But I would say frequently infrastructure looks at things from the asset level vs company level so think like a portfolio of wind farms vs the construction company that builds them.