Solar park operator Blue Elephant gains investor from France

Solar park near Lichtenau

Blue Elephant operates solar and onshore wind farms in eight countries with a focus on Western and Central Europe.

(Photo: imago images/Olaf Döring)

Dusseldorf The Hamburg company Blue Elephant receives important support: The French infrastructure fund Antin takes over a majority stake in the German solar and wind farm operator. The companies announced this on Tuesday morning.

With this, Blue Elephant has achieved an important goal. In the past few months, the company had been looking for large investors. “It was about finding a partner who would support the growth of our business globally and who could make it easier for us to access projects around the world,” said Blue Elephant founder Felix Goedhart to Handelsblatt.

Blue Elephant is growing fast because the conditions for the company’s business model are good. Germany and other countries have ambitious expansion targets for renewable energies. At the same time, large funds are increasingly under pressure to invest in sustainable projects. It seems logical that Blue Elephant and Antin are now joining forces.

Initially, Blue Elephant did not receive any more money. The company is not issuing new shares, but rather Antin is buying shares from all Blue Elephant shareholders.

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So far, Blue Elephant has been backed by the Wacker family of entrepreneurs (Wacker Chemie) and Jahr Holding (formerly Gruner + Jahr), each with 23.2 percent of the shares. In addition, Blue Elephant’s founder and CEO, Felix Goedhart, held 15.7 percent. And Athos, the family holding company of the pharmaceutical entrepreneurs Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann behind Biontech, owned 15.4 percent. The remaining shares were distributed among about half a dozen smaller shareholders.

Blue Elephant: Hoping for a “very productive” collaboration with Antin

The smaller shareholders are now giving up all of their shares. In the future, Antin will own the majority of all shares. A large part of the Hamburg company, which also implements projects for the German energy transition, is going to a French investor and not to German energy companies such as RWE or EnBW, which are also working on the expansion of renewable energies.

For the future, Goedhart does not want to rule out a cooperation with a large energy company. But he says: “You have to make sure that the cultures fit together. Large energy companies naturally have a slower and more complex way of working than a company like us.”

Goedhart believes in a “very productive” cooperation with the French investor Antin, but also in a reliable source of money. “For us, Antin is a partner who can ensure the long-term financing of our growth,” he says. Even if Antin does not bring fresh money directly with it, the new shareholder could provide growth capital in the future. Antin is “absolutely ready” for this.

Overall, Blue Elephant aims to collect around 300 million euros over a period of two to three years. Blue Elephant Energy’s valuation could rise to more than two billion euros including debt.

Blue Elephant operates solar and onshore wind farms in eight countries with a focus on Western and Central Europe. 90 percent of the capacities are accounted for by solar energy. Overall, the finished parks have an output of around 1.3 gigawatts, with an additional 1.7 gigawatts being developed. The Blue Elephant parks thus produce around 14 percent of the electricity that RWE currently generates with solar and onshore projects.

High electricity prices help to generate high revenues from solar energy

Recently, Blue Elephant has grown vigorously. Last year, the company generated sales of around 100 million euros and an operating result (Ebitda) of 76 million euros. Annual sales growth since 2019 has been 24 percent, which the company could possibly surpass again this year.

This is partly due to the rapid expansion of the portfolio, but also to a lesser extent to the high electricity prices. Blue Elephant can sell the electricity from its parks for a lot of money, provided that it has not already been promised on fixed terms.

>> Read also: “Extraordinarily good result” – RWE increases forecast by 1.5 billion euros

However, the Hamburg-based company is not only benefiting from the current market environment: Blue Elephant actually wanted to go public last year, but was unable to implement the plans due to volatile capital markets. Basically, Goedhart and his team are familiar with the structures of a listed company: Goedhart was head of the solar park operator Encavis for nine years and left the company in 2015 with a dozen colleagues to found his own rival company.

But even now, Goedhart does not want to go public for the time being. “For listed companies, a lot of energy flows into capital market communication, road shows and the like,” says Goedhart. “With our family office shareholders and our new investor, we can continue to work more easily.”

More: Photovoltaic trends: Floating solar power plants are on the verge of a breakthrough

Handelsblatt energy briefing

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