ntin Infrastructure Partners’ sale of Idex valued the French energy platform nearly three times what the Paris-listed manager paid for the business – a crucial deal for Antin as it steps up exits.

JP Morgan Asset Management’s open-ended Infrastructure Investment Fund (IIF) agreed to buy Idex for an Enterprise value of around EUR 3.8bn, according to two sources familiar with the deal, around 2.7 times the business’ EUR 1.4bn valuation at the time of Antin’s acquisition in 2018.

This was mostly achieved thanks to Idex’s EBITDA also nearly tripling since the investment – an “impressive growth journey” as Antin managing partner Stéphane Ifker highlighted in the firm’s announcement on 5 August that it had entered exclusive talks with JP Morgan.

The equity value represented around half of the total enterprise value, one of the sources said, which suggests a figure of around EUR 1.9bn.

The sale valued France’s third-largest district heating operator, after EDF’s Dalkia and Engie, at a multiple of around 18x its EUR 210m EBITDA for 2025, according to the sources.

This was roughly in line with the multiple paid by Antin when it bought the business from Cube Infrastructure Managers eight years ago, following a highly competitive auction with as many as six bidders involved in the final round.

The latest comparable deal in France was Igneo Infrastructure Partners’ sale of smaller district heating provider Coriance to a consortium of Vauban Infrastructure Partners and CDC in 2023. Coriance fetched around EUR 1.6bn, or a multiple of about 20x its previous year’s EBITDA.

The relatively high multiples of both deals reflect a combination of core infrastructure characteristics – mainly highly contracted cash flows from long-term district heating concessions – and healthy growth expectations as France plans to triple district heating penetration in the next decade.

The small difference in multiple with Coriance partly accounts for Idex’s different business model, according to one source. Aside from public district heating concessions, Idex also earns part of its revenues from shorter services contracts with industrial and residential customers, which command a slightly lower premium, said the source.

It may have also reflected a backdrop of more challenging exits for large-scale assets compared to mid-sized ones over the past few years, with typically fewer buyers in the market willing to pay large cheques.

While Antin’s sale of Idex drew initial interest from a broad group of bidders, also including Blackstone and Macquarie, it eventually received only two other binding offers, from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and CPP Investments, each for just a 50% stake rather than 100%, according to sources.

The multiple was still towards the upper end of the range for similar European energy services companies outside the Nordics, where valuations are typically higher, Infralogic data shows.

The sale process was led by advisors Morgan Stanley and Rothschild, plus Weil Gotshal & Manges as legal counsel.

To improve the chances of a successful sale, Antin put in place a EUR 1.7bn portable debt package maturing in 2030 well before the sale and upsized it during the auction by EUR 600m, so that a deal would not be dependent on financing conditions in the market.

The process was designed so that “any investor in Idex would have the firepower for a few more years and debt won’t need to be repaid instantly”, one source said.

JP Morgan, which was advised by UBS and Latham & Watkins, was seen as a strong contender since the beginning of the auction and was said to have made a pre-emptive bid before the process started.

The US firm is no stranger to European heating and energy services deals. It dipped its toes in this market with the acquisition of Swedish district heating business Värmevärden in 2017, followed by Finland’s Adven in 2020.

Its biggest deal came in 2021, when it bought Germany’s GETEC for EUR 4.25bn, a 25x EBITDA multiple. GETEC is particularly geared towards providing energy services to industrial and real estate clients, rather than district heating concessions. One source linked the higher multiple paid for the German company to its faster growth prospects at the time of JP Morgan’s investment.

The sale of Idex, expected to close by Q1 2027, will mark a crucial exit for Antin’s flagship Fund III, as the energy company is seen as a trophy asset and one of the most valuable in the EUR 3.6bn fund.

A stake in Idex will also be sold by Fund III-B, an annex fund that was raised in 2020 to provide additional capital to four capital-hungry companies of Fund III.

In Antin’s latest quarterly report in May, Fund III was valued at a gross multiple of 1.9x, and before the Idex deal it was only 37% divested.

The fund already successfully sold French private hospital group Almaviva Santé in 2021 and Spanish fibre operator Lynta Networks in 2022, while in 2023 it exited troubled UK care home operator Hesley, reportedly taking a write-down.

Last month it also agreed to sell a 30% stake in Norwegian salmon farming vessel operator Sølvtrans, while it is preparing a sale of its US digital infrastructure company FirstLight Fiber, Infralogic has reported.

Other assets still held by Fund III include the UK’s largest alternative fibre provider Cityfibre, Spanish fibre-to-the-home provider Elanta, and Kisimul, another UK care home company.

Alain Rauscher, Antin’s chairman and CEO, highlighted how important the exits by Fund III and III-B (as well as the first by Fund IV) will be to the firm, during the presentation of its 2025 annual results in March.

Performance fees, or carried interest, have been low over the past couple of years as Antin held back on launching asset sales during a difficult time for the market, or while companies were not ready. Performance fees totalled EUR 2.9m in 2025 – a tiny fraction compared to EUR 289.5m of management fees, according to Antin’s annual reports.

But analysts expected them to pick up this year, possibly at around EUR 25m, as more assets are sold. Infralogic has reported that Fund IV portfolio companies Indaqua, Hippocrates and Vicinity Energy are currently being sold or prepared for sale.

Mélanie Biessy, managing partner and chief operating officer at Antin, on the same call with analysts in March confirmed the firm was expecting to start earning higher performance fees in 2026 “dependent upon the timing and the outcome of the exits of assets, especially from Fund III and III-B”.

“This is an inflection year for carried interest,” she said.