German energy utilities EnBW and EWE have agreed to restructure their shareholdings and to swap assets.
As a first step, EnBW will acquire EWE’s 74% shareholding in gas company Verbundnetz Gas (VNG), while EWE will buy 10% its own shares from EnBW for a price of €504.8m. As a second step, in 2016 EWE-Verband will purchase a further 10% of EWE’s stock from EnBW for a fixed price. EWE-Verband has also undertaken to acquire the remaining 6% of EWE’s stock from EnBW by 2019. The transaction will thus be complete. As part of this transaction, EnBW will provide EWE and EWE-Verband with a total cash settlement in the amount of €125m. Upon completion of the transaction, EnBW will be the majority shareholder in VNG, while EWE and EWE-Verband will once again hold all of EWE’s stock.
Verbundnetz Gas is a German gas wholesaler. The company has long-term gas supply contracts with Russian, Norwegian and German producers and operates 2.6 bcm of gas storage capacity. The local utility EWE Aktiengesellschaft (city of Oldenburg) successively increased its stake in VNG to 74.2% as a result of the purchased of Wintershall's 15.8% share (October 2014) and Gazprom's 10.5% stake (April 2015). The remaining 25.8% are hold by in local utilities.
Interested in Global Energy Research?
Enerdata's premium online information service provides up-to-date market reports on 110+ countries. The reports include valuable market data and analysis as well as a daily newsfeed, curated by our energy analysts, on the oil, gas, coal and power markets.
This user-friendly tool gives you the essentials about the domestic markets of your concern, including market structure, organisation, actors, projects and business perspectives.