Motiva’s Airport Exit And Mexico’s Quiet Power Play In Brazil
Brazil’s Motiva, the infrastructure group once known as CCR, has quietly made one of the region’s biggest aviation moves in years: it is selling its entire airport business to Mexico’s Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste (Asur) in a deal worth R$11.5 billion ($2.1 billion).
On paper, this is a straightforward transaction. Motiva is handing over 20 airports – 17 in Brazil and 3 in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Curaçao – to Asur.
The assets together handled roughly 45–47 million passengers over the last year, generating about R$2.96 billion ($0.5 billion) in revenue and R$1.52 billion ($0.3 billion) in EBITDA, with margins around 51%.
The price implies an 8.8-times EV/EBITDA multiple, comfortably above Motiva’s own stock-market valuation. Of the R$11.5 billion ($2.1 billion), around R$6.5 billion ($1.2 billion) represents net debt that Asur assumes; roughly R$5 billion ($0.9 billion) is cash Motiva will pocket.
Management plans to use it mainly to pay down borrowing, pushing consolidated leverage from about 3.5 times EBITDA to below 3.
That frees the group to focus on what it believes it does best: highways and rail concessions, where Brazil is preparing a large pipeline of new projects. For expats and foreign investors, the story behind the story is about who really runs Latin America’s infrastructure.
While political debates often circle around state control, it is private operators like Motiva and Asur that decide how quickly terminals are modernized, how attractive airports are to new routes, and how smoothly millions of passengers move every year.
Asur expands Latin American airport reach
Asur, best known for running Cancun and other Mexican and Caribbean airports, will emerge from this deal as one of the largest private airport operators in the Americas, adding more than 45 million passengers to the roughly 71 million it already serves.
That is a Latin American company expanding into another Latin American giant, using its own balance sheet rather than relying on public money or multilateral banks.
If regulators in Brazil and the other countries sign off, likely in 2026, travelers landing in Belo Horizonte, Curitiba or Goiânia may not notice the change in logo overnight.
But the strategic control of those gateways will have quietly shifted south–north within the region, in a way that says a lot about where serious capital — and operational discipline — is coming from.
This article was drafted with automated assistance and reviewed before publication. How we use AI · Report an error