Taiwan Cement Corporation has increased its valuation of battery storage and electric vehicle infrastructure solutions provider New HOrizons Ahead (NHOA).
TCC, trading as TCC Group Holdings, is currently the owner of 87.78% of the share capital in Italy-headquartered NHOA and signalled its intent earlier this year to acquire the remaining shares via a Simplified Tender Offer and squeeze-out.
The move would take NHOA fully into private ownership and result in its delisting from the Euronext Paris Exchange. In an interview with Energy-Storage.news Premium published in July, Giuseppe Artizzu, head of NHOA’s energy storage business line, said the move would be a “financial efficiency driver.”
However, an ad hoc committee of NHOA’s Board of Directors said earlier this week (19 August) that it had some reservations about the fairness of the parent company’s offer to purchase shares at €1.10 (US$1.22) per share.
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Based on preliminary analysis by an independent expert and its financial advisor, the board suggested that the value should be higher due to the potential of two of NHOA’s e-mobility infrastructure businesses, including a joint venture with automotive OEM Stellantis and a fast and ultra-fast EV charging division.
TCC responded by increasing the price to €1.25 per NHOA share after its Board of Directors met on 20 August. TCC said the new price represented a 114% premium over the closing share price (€0.58) on 12 June, the day before the takeover was announced, prompting a jump to €1.06 at closing on 13 June.
TCC’s board also said the new price reflects significant premiums over volume-weighted average prices up to 180 days before the tender offer announcement.
Negotiations will resume between the two parties on that basis. NHOA shares remain suspended from trading in the meantime, with an updated draft offer document to be filed with the French regulator, AMF, by mid-September 2024, meaning the tender offer and subsequent squeeze-out process will continue longer than originally planned.
NHOA Energy, the company’s battery energy storage system (BESS) business line, reported an 11% year-on-year fall in revenues for the first half of 2024. Releasing its half-year results in July, the system integrator attributed this to a market-wide fall in the price of BESS.
NHOA Energy clocked €90 million in revenues for H1 2024, while EV charging solutions arm Atlante’s rose 7% to €124 million, and its JV with Stellantis, Free2Move, doubled its revenue year-on-year to €32 million.
Despite the drop, NHOA Energy was EBITDA positive for the period by €4.4 million, and BESS projects deployed and in operation rose 344% from H1 2023 to more than 1GWh, while it cited a further gigawatt-hour currently being in construction.
In the ESN Premium interview, NHOA Energy CEO Artizzu said the listing of the company’s shares was by that point “almost counterproductive” with low volumes of trading, and that after the squeeze out the integrator would be better able to leverage TCC’s balance sheet to go for big gigawatt-hour scale projects. Despite its impending removal from the stock exchange, it would remain in NHOA’s best interests to maintain a degree of “financial visibility,” the CEO said.
“If we want to be a bankable provider, we need to give visibility, so it is going to be in my interest to ensure that enough visibility is given to the market on our financial reports.”
