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VATTENFALL

Vattenfall plans France expansion

Energy giant Vattenfall is hoping to grow in France. The state-owned company wants to invest up to nine billion kronor ($1.5 billion) in French hydropower.

Published: 4 June 2011 10:39 CEST
Vattenfall plans France expansion

France will be offering hydropower concessions at the end of this year, and through the acquisition of “significant” shares, Vattenfall hopes to grab a foothold on the French energy market.

The company is hoping to obtain concessions for 1,000 MW, representing roughly 4% of the French hydropower market.

“Our establishment in France will underline Vattenfall’s position as a leading European energy company,” says CEO Øystein Løseth in a statement recently released by Vattenfall.

The company claims in the statement that they aspire to grow in renewable energy.

“The upcoming opportunities in France fall well within this scope. France is a growth market for Vattenfall,” Løseth says.

Vattenfall has previously been heavily criticized by environmental organizations for their eco-damaging work, and insufficient investments in renewable energy.

Over the next three years, the company will be investing 54 billion kronor in renewable energy, which represents 28% of their total investments.

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VATTENFALL

Swedish energy firm racks up giant losses

UPDATED: Swedish energy giant Vattenfall recorded losses amounting to nearly 29 billion kronor ($3.4 billion) on Tuesday as the company continued its battle against increasingly tough market conditions.

Published: 21 July 2015 10:43 CEST
Updated: 21 July 2015 12:17 CEST
Swedish energy firm racks up giant losses
Vattenfall chief executive Magnus Hall on Tuesday. Photo: Fredrik Persson/TT

Hit by asset write-down charges worth 36 billion kronor, Sweden's Vattenfall reported a net loss of 28.812 billion kronor in the second quarter of the year, a huge drop from 2.3 billion kronor in the same period in 2014.

The state-owned energy firm, a major provider of electricity in northern Europe, has been struggling to improve profits for several years, suffering from weak demand and plunging electricity prices.

It attributed 17 billion kronor of the total asset write-downs to the same fall in profits which led to a shock announcement earlier this year that it planned to close Ringhals 1 and 2 in south-western Sweden.

It said at the time that the two reactors were too costly to keep in production until 2025 as previously planned.

“This is of course very negative but unfortunately reflects the reality we're living in,” said its chief executive Magnus Hall in a statement on Tuesday morning.

It also wrote down an additional 15 billion kronor on its lignite, or brown coal, assets in Germany.

Earlier this year Vattenfall announced that 1,000 workers were being let go as part of a series of bids to curb losses, including speeding up the sale of the German plants.

It reported a total turnover of 36.1 billion kronor in the second quarter of 2015 on Tuesday, down from 36.6 billion in the same period last year.

Hall said that the work to tighten the belt was continuing “to identify further reductions in costs”.

Since the Vattenfall Group bought energy giant Nuon in 2009, a deal which has been hotly debated in Sweden, the firm's assets have been written down by over 52 billion kronor. 

Many energy providers in Europe have made huge asset write-downs in the last two years because of weak demand for electricity against a background of sluggish economic activity.

They have also been caught out by the US shale energy boom, which has pushed down the price of coal for power generation, undermining the profitability of new gas-powered plants and some investment programmes.

Vattenfall employs more than 30,000 and has operations in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.