Yahoo Finance Green energy entrepreneur Dale Vince's Ecotricity swoops for rival in £60m takeover
Ecotricity owner Dale Vince has moved to take over a rival clean energy supplier, the Good Energy Group (GOOD.L), in a deal worth £59.5m ($81.8m).
His latest bid has upped the ante after Good Energy's board announced it had unanimously rejected a £56m cash-only bid earlier in July. This bid is its fourth since 15 June.
The Good Energy board had rejected previous offers they felt "fundamentally undervalued the intrinsic value of the group's shares".
Under the terms of the new offer, Good Energy shareholders will be entitled to receive 340 pence in cash for each Good Energy share they hold.
This values the Chippenham-based company's issued and to-be-issued ordinary share capital (excluding Ecotricity's shareholding in Good Energy) at approximately £45.3m.
The deal represents a premium of approximately 10.6% over the closing price of 307.5 pence per Good Energy share on 9 July 2021.
The Good Energy Group was founded in May 2000 and completed an initial public offering in July 2012. Ecotricity has consistently held Good Energy Shares since March 2016 and currently holds approximately 25.1% of the group.
In Ecotricity company filings, justification for the deal lay on the fact that Ecotricity has a development function for new green energy generation, something that Good Energy lacks. Ecotricity also operates a "bills into mills" concept which links a customer's energy bills to the building of new green energy sources, Good Energy said.
The deal follows the sale of Ecotricity's electric car charging network to Gridserve.
Good Energy Group's stock fell 1.2% in early trade following the news.
The growth of the eco empire is not an unusual move for Vince, who has made a point of flying the environmental flag in other ventures too. In 1995 he founded the Renewable Energy Company, a move that laid the groundwork for Ecotricity.
Vince is a new age traveller, and had lived off grid before moving into renewables.
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In another, more esoteric, venture as the chairman of Forest Green Rovers FC, he banned the sale of any meat products, leaving only vegetarian options. Players were also banned from eating red meat for health reasons.
In October 2020, he said that he plans to create artificial diamonds by chemical vapour deposition using carbon dioxide captured directly from the atmosphere to form the diamonds – which are chemically identical to diamonds mined from the earth – using wind and solar electricity, with water collected from rainfall.
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