Australia NSW considers IPO for parts of electricity assets
Friday, 11 Sep 2009
Bloomberg cited Mr Joe Tripodi Finance Minister of Australia as saying that Australia state of New South Wales may sell retailer Integral Energy and other electricity assets in an initial public offering should attractive bids fail to emerge.
Mr Tripodi said New South Wales will seek bids from companies before deciding whether to proceed with an IPO, the government said. The process of inviting bids will begin at the end of September and last six weeks.
He said that “Investors are quite keen. The inquiries from foreign bidders are still strong. Now that we’ve defined our market design, we’ll fire up our pursuit of investors.”
Mr Tripodi said in his statement that an IPO would include only the retail business of Integral Energy, the trading contract for Eraring Energy and the power station development site at Bamarang on the state’s south coast.
The entire process of selling the retail businesses of EnergyAustralia, Integral Energy and Country Energy, along with power trading contracts and new generator development sites, is now expected to stretch into next year, with the transactions closing in the first half of 2010, the government said today. New South Wales previously had said it planned to complete the deals by the end of 2009.
Part of the plan involves contracting the right to sell electricity produced by state-owned generators to private trading companies, the so-called gentrader model. The government said output at both Macquarie Generation and Delta Electricity would each be split into two contract bundles.
The power stations themselves will remain under state ownership.
