The one the largest utilities and infrastructure companies in the world is the UK’s National Grid PLC. [www.nationalgrid.com]

Because of the nature of its business, hard physical assets (gas pipelines, electricity network, substations, transmission lines, liquid natural gas [LNG] storage) National Grid is able to borrow huge quantities of money to finance its day to day capital intensive operations and able to meet debt repayments from the cash flow of its business.

It borrows on the Bond Market and one can see the various programmes of bond issuance.
[http://www.nationalgrid.com/corporate/Investor+Relations/DebtInvestors/Debt+information/Programmes/]

Looking at this debt profile [http://www.nationalgrid.com/corporate/Investor+Relations/DebtInvestors/Debt+information/] one can see it has a debt profile of about £2bn – £1bn of debt each year maturing for the next 20 years.

When you add up all this debt (bonds outstanding) it equates to:

£21.4 Billion = £21,400 Million = £21,400,000,000.

The creditors of these bonds, such as pension funds, fixed income unit trusts, income ISA’s etc are getting a stable and safe income and have the reassurance of the debt secured against hard assets and also from a company with strong and regular cash flows.