Supervisory Boards of VERBUND says "Yes" to Energy Austria

At the same time the Board of Directors of VERBUND was asked to find a consensus with the syndicate partners EVN, Wienstrom, and TIWAG until August 4th on certain open points, and thus, open up the way for a positive decision in the Extraordinary General Meeting scheduled for the beginning of September. It is the declared objective of the VERBUND Supervisory Board to go ahead with the Energie Austria project as an Austrian solution which is open to other domestic partners.

The facts speak for themselves. Merging the power activities of Energie AG OOE, EStAG and VERBUND will mean the rise of the by far biggest domestic power group with a share of 55 percent of the market in Austria and 41,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) sold, 90 percent of it generated by hydropower. Within the EU, Energie Austria will hold an excellent market position in terms of size then. Within Europe it will rank on the 15th, within the relevant market (radius of 500 km) even on the 6th place.

Compared to the so-called “stand-alone“ solutions of the three companies, the merger is able to raise an additional synergy potential of 2,200 million ATS; thus the targeted synergy of Energie Austria amounts to 3,800 million ATS per year. Also for the equity value of the three merging partners the Energie Austria solution has very positive effects. The value of the partner companies’ shares will be increased accordingly. After the merger, the aggregate value will be approx. 103 billion ATS and thus 26 percent higher than with a stand-alone valuation of the three partners.

Austria’s opinion leaders clearly recognize the advantages of a merger versus co-operations: This was clearly corroborated by personal interviews among 40 top representatives from the economy and politics. No less than 78 percent of the interviewees think that Energie Austria "has very high chances of being realized, since individual power suppliers are too small to be able to stand their ground in the international market ".