Solar panels at the photovoltaic park during its official inauguration in Cestas, France in December, 2015.Regis Duvignau/Reuters
Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. BAM-T is in exclusive talks to buy a majority stake in French renewable energy provider Neoen with a bid that values the company’s shares at €6.1-billion ($9-billion) and includes a plan to take the company private.
Brookfield is offering €39.85 ($59.07) per share to buy 53.32 per cent of Neoen from current owners that include billionaire Jacques Veyrat’s Impala SAS, the Fonds Stratégique de Participations (FSP) and an investment vehicle owned by Noeen chairman and chief executive officer Xavier Barbaro. Funding for the bid will be led by the Toronto-based asset manager’s subsidiary, Brookfield Renewable, as well as institutional co-investors such as state-owned Singaporean fund Temasek Holdings Ltd.
The offer price promises a 26.9 per cent premium over Neoen’s last closing price, according to an announcement Brookfield made early Thursday.
The deal requires consultation with bodies that represent employees and approvals from regulators, which Brookfield expects it could obtain by the fourth quarter this year. Assuming it is successful, Brookfield would then make an all-cash tender offer to buy all the remaining shares and convertible bonds in Neoen to take the company private, likely in the first quarter of 2025.
The bid for Neoen, which would be one of the largest take-private deals in Europe so far this year, signals an ambitious plan that would extend Brookfield’s reach in Europe and Australia, where it currently has a comparatively smaller presence, and help it meet rising demand from large corporations for renewable energy. Paris-based Neoen, which was founded in 2008 and went public in 2018, has more than eight gigawatts of renewable power capacity that is operating or under construction, including France’s largest solar farm, Finland’s largest wind farm and two major energy storage plants in Australia.
“Acquiring Neoen further strengthens Brookfield’s global scale, while diversifying into key renewables markets and adding expertise in battery storage technology,” Connor Teskey, chief executive officer of renewable power and transition at Brookfield Asset Management, said in a statement.
Brookfield plans to pay the largest share of the acquisition price through its latest flagship renewables fund, the Brookfield Global Transition Fund II, which is led by Mr. Teskey and Brookfield chair Mark Carney, the former central banker. By February, the fund had raised an initial US$10-billion and is expected to be meaningfully larger than the first Brookfield transition fund, which raised US$15-billion.
Brookfield Renewable, which is the largest investor in BGTF II, plans to invest as much as €500-million ($741-million) in the acquisition.
“Our board of directors fully welcomes the transaction,” Mr. Barbaro said in a statement.
Neoen’s board hired French financial advisory firm Finexsi as an independent expert to assess the deal.
Brookfield has been pouring billions of dollars of investment into renewable energy and is making a major bet on corporate demand to run expanding networks of power-hungry data centres that will form the backbone of artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies. Early this month, Brookfield announced an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to develop renewable power capacity in the United States and Europe, equivalent to the electricity needed to run about 1.8 million homes, by 2030.
Brookfield manages US$929-billion of assets, including US$102-billion through its renewables arm, which operates about 33 gigawatts of current energy capacity and expects to develop another 157 gigawatts through its investments.