Dhe Spanish investor Asterion Industrial Partners will take over the Essen energy group Steag. This was announced by the investor and the Steag owner, the municipal investment company KSBG, on Friday evening and thus confirmed a report by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
According to the company statement, Steag will be valued at around 2.6 billion euros when it is sold – it was also the best offer from an economic point of view. “With Asterion, the best possible solution has been found for the previous shareholders and the company, so that both divisions of the Steag Group can continue to develop positively,” said Heike Heim, CEO of Dortmunder Stadtwerke and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of KSBG. Steag belongs to the municipal utilities of the municipalities of Dortmund, Bochum, Duisburg, Essen, Oberhausen and Dinslaken.
Asterion stated during the bidding process that it did not want to split up the energy supplier, but instead wanted to take over Steag as a whole. At the beginning of the year, Steag divided the group into two parts, both legally and operationally. The long-standing business with coal-fired power generation has recently generated considerable revenue in view of the energy crisis, but the decision to phase out coal has been made, and potential buyers were wondering what earnings opportunities there were in the so-called black part of Steag. The “green” part, which stands for the generation of renewable energies and related services under the name Iqony, is undisputedly attractive for the bidders. 1,700 employees work in the coal business, and around 3,000 employees work under the Iqony brand.
Asterion is a Spanish holding company led by its founder Jesús Olmos Clavijo. It focuses on infrastructure investments and has invested around 5 billion euros so far. Olmos is the former CEO of the Spanish utility Endesa Europa, which now belongs to the energy group Eon. “Our company is fully behind the energy and heat transition,” Olmos was quoted in the statement. “With an energy mix in which gas plays a major role alongside coal, security of supply can be guaranteed during the transition phase,” said Olmos.
Křetínský actually favoured
With the purchase, Asterion outperformed the Czech entrepreneur Daniel Křetínský with his EPH group and the RAG Foundation, which were the remaining bidding consortium in the competition for Steag. The Swedish financial investor EQT and the American private equity company KKR had previously withdrawn.
In 2016, Křetínský took over the Lusatian lignite division of Swedish Vattenfall for a symbolic euro. Most recently, he wanted to involve the RAG Foundation in the takeover, and the companies submitted their bid together on Monday. The RAG Foundation, founded in 2007 to use its assets to bear the perpetual burden of German hard coal mining, has a board of trustees with a high level of political leadership. He is chaired by the former Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Armin Laschet (CDU), in addition to Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) and Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens), the current Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst (CDU), is also a member.
Steag is also an old acquaintance of RAG – the municipal companies once took over the energy company for around 1.2 billion euros from the Essen-based chemical company Evonik. In turn, it also has its history in the old Ruhrkohle AG and is now majority owned by the RAG Foundation, which holds almost 55 percent. The political level of the bidding war meant that market observers had recently seen Křetínský in the lead, but the bidding alliance was probably to his disadvantage due to conflicts of interest.
Antitrust reasons decisive
The decision in favor of Asterion was also due to the fact that EPH could be forced to break up Steag after the takeover for antitrust reasons, according to banking and corporate circles. Asterion, on the other hand, had agreed to initially leave Steag as a whole and continue to run it that way.
The municipal utility consortium KSBG initially took over 51 percent of Steag in 2011 and the remaining shares in 2014 – at a time when the company was in financial difficulties. Stadtwerke restructured and realigned the country’s fifth-largest electricity supplier. Because the green transformation of the traditional group would have required significant investments, the owners decided in 2022 to sell Steag. “With the successful completion of the sales process, the commitment of the municipal shareholders comes to a conciliatory end,” said Dietmar Spohn, who, as spokesman for the management of Stadtwerke Bochum, also speaks for the consortium.