Bogdan Tudorache
Corina Popescu, general manager of Electrica SA, and Adrian Tanase, general manager of Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB), opened on Wednesday the trading session with the occasion of the five-year anniversary of the listing of the company, the largest in the history of the capital in Romania and, at the same time, the only privatization with a majority stake in the capital market.
“Electrica’s listing was more than just the largest IPO on the BVB. Electrica is the best example of how the state can use the capital market to gain easy access to capital, while remaining a significant shareholder in a company on the investment radar of major investors. From 2014 until now, Electrica has brought the shareholders a total return of 37%. The Electrica example can be replicated by the Romanian state through future listings, especially as we now have a more developed and sophisticated market. We would like to have as many companies as possible in the local capital market of Electrica’s size, to convince both local and international investors that Romania has the determination to bring to the forefront companies with a wide representation in the economy,”Adrian Tanase said.
“There haven’t been five easy years, given the challenges of the energy market, but Electrica, together with its partners, has succeeded in doing very important things all the time: we are the BET company that offered the most stable dividend yield, we distributed gross dividends of about ROL 1.3 billion, we became the largest investor in energy infrastructure, with over 3 billion ROL invested over the last five years, and we managed to significantly improve the quality of our services. Throughout this period, we have implemented extensive programs for transformation and optimization of activities, cost reduction and adaptation of the strategy to market conditions, both in the distribution and service area, and in the supply chain, managing to streamline the work of the group”, said Corina Popescu.
July 4, 2014 was the first trading day of Electrica shares on the Bucharest Stock Exchange and the Electrica GDRs on the London Stock Exchange, and the offer was fully subscribed two days before the deadline. Electricity attracted almost 2 billion lei through the initial public offer.
From the first day of trading until the end of June 2019, Electrica’s shares generated transactions totaling more than ROL 3 billion, which represents about 5.7% of the BSE’s total liquidity in this period (52.4 billion ROL ). Practically, in each of the five years since the listing, Electrica ranked 5th, 6th or 7th in the liquidity top.
Electrica’s dividends in the five years since the listing have so far yielded the most stable return of all BET companies, despite large price fluctuations. Thus, the dividend yield was between 5.2% and 7.3% each year.
From the listing up to now, about 250 million shares of Electrica were traded, accounting for 72.4% of the share capital and 73.9% of the voting shares. With a market value of nearly 4 billion lei, Electrica is the only Romanian company listed in the field of electricity distribution and supply in Romania.