Leonhard Birnbaum, Eon CEO, and Katherina Reiche, CEO of the Eon subsidiary Westenergie.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf The energy company Eon plans to invest 27 billion euros over the next five years. The Essen-based company announced this on Monday evening. A large part of the money is to flow into the expansion and modernization of new power grids and new digital business areas. The dividend is to rise by five percent and the profit by four percent per year. For the year 2026, Eon expects an adjusted Ebitda of 7.8 billion euros (6.9 billion euros in 2020).
Since the billion dollar swap deal with competitor RWE, Eon has been concentrating on the grid and sales divisions and has given up green electricity production. And Eon CEO Leonhard Birnbaum sees great growth potential in this. Each additional kilowatt hour of green electricity produced is not only fed into power lines, the network operators also play a central role in the management of supply and demand. In Germany alone, 50 percent of renewable energy systems are connected to the Eon network. The regulated network business is expected to grow by four to five percent annually until 2023.
The shareholders in particular should be pleased. After all, the group, which Birnbaum only took over from his long-term predecessor Johannes Teyssen in May, is still in poor shape: its debts are high, equity is weak – and the share price has been a disappointment in recent years.
After all, since Birnbaum took office, the share price has already risen by almost ten percent. Birnbaum sees two central trends in the energy industry: “sustainability” and “digitization”. And while Eon lagged behind the energy transition for a long time and stuck to the old energy world for too long, the group is now to be radically modernized.
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All processes are to be optimized digitally – in sales, but also in the energy networks. The total of 1.5 million kilometers of cables are to become the intelligently controlled control center for the energy transition – and generate new sales for the group. Just like new digital products for the more than 50 million customers. Eon wants to work with industry giants such as Microsoft, Google and SAP, but also with start-ups.
At the end of September, Eon already secured a majority in the digital start-up GridX. The electricity company has been working with the Munich start-up since 2017. The company, which was founded only five years ago, develops digital solutions for intelligent control in the power grid. For example, through the bidirectional charging of electric cars. They should then not only consume the electricity, but should also be able to feed it back into the grid if necessary, thus helping to better compensate for the increasing fluctuations in solar and wind energy.
Birnbaum, who has been on the board since 2013, wants to explain exactly what the new timetable should look like when the new strategy is presented on Tuesday.
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