After selling the Goiás electricity distributor Celg, the Italian Enel decided to leave the Ceará market as well, to concentrate its operations on energy distribution in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
The decision was announced this Tuesday (22nd), as part of the company’s new strategic plan, which provides for greater concentration of activities also worldwide, with the departure of countries such as Romania, Peru and Argentina.
The plan foresees investments of 37 billion euros (R$ 202 billion) between 2023 and 2025, focusing on six countries: Italy, Spain, United States, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. The idea is to focus on integrated business models and digitalization.
“This will improve our resilience to potential future turmoil and enhance our value creation, benefiting all our stakeholders [públicos de interesse] and accelerating the energy independence of our target countries”, said the company’s president, Francesco Starace.
After a period of strong global expansion, Enel’s strategy now foresees a strategic geographic repositioning of the business, with a €21 billion (R$115 billion) asset sale plan.
Brazil has been one of the company’s growth focuses in renewable energy, but has also received large investments in electricity distribution by the Italian company in recent years.
In the largest of them, Enel bought Eletropaulo, which has the concession for the metropolitan region of the capital, for R$ 5.5 billion and was renamed Enel São Paulo. With the acquisition, the company started to provide the service to 17 million customers in four states.
In this process of concentration of operations, however, in September it announced the sale of Celg for BRL 1.6 billion, in addition to the transfer of BRL 5.7 billion in debt to Equatorial Energia. Enel had been struggling with supply quality issues and had been threatened with loss of concession by the state government.
The idea of selling the Ceará concession, says the company, aims to “expand the focus on distribution networks in megacities”. The company expects to complete its asset sale plan by the end of 2023.
Half of the investments planned by Enel for the next three years will be earmarked for power generation. Another 40% will be allocated to distribution and the remaining 10% to consumer services. Around 90% of investments in generation will be made in Italy, Spain and the United States.
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