A British green electricity supplier, Good Energy, has agreed a near-£100m takeover by a company controlled by a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family.
The retail energy company said on Monday it had agreed a deal with the Dubai-headquartered Esyasoft for a cash offer of £4.90 a share, valuing it at £99.4m.
The share price of Good Energy, listed on London’s junior Alternative Investment Market, rose by a fifth on Monday morning to £4.75. The offer was two-thirds higher than Good Energy’s share price on the day before Esyasoft’s interest was first revealed in October.
Good Energy serves about 245,000 customers in the UK, providing 100% renewable electricity as well as specialising in letting users sell solar power back to the grid. It also installs solar panels and heat pumps.
Esyasoft is ultimately controlled by the Abu Dhabi International Holding Company (IHC), the investment company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the son of the United Arab Emirates’ founder, and part of the Abu Dhabi ruling family.
IHC owns companies involved in oil and gas drilling, including servicing the huge growth of the US shale gas industry. However, IHC also counts solar power among its investments, and Esyasoft focuses on power distribution technology.
The takeover would give a windfall to the energy entrepreneurand Labour donor Dale Vince, whose holding company Green Britain Group is the largest shareholder in Good Energy, with a 26% stake.
Good Energy was co-founded in 1999 by Martin Edwards and Juliet Davenport, who left the company in 2021 and offered her backing for the deal. The investment would give the “opportunity to scale the Good Energy propositions” and “make a real difference to climate change”, she said.
Edwards has a 7.3% stake in the business, while Davenport holds 2.7% of the shares, according to Reuters.
“I founded Good Energy 25 years ago to be a pioneer in the provision of clean power to all customers in the UK,” Davonport said. “The energy industry back then was very different, founded around fossil fuels and designed to be a centralised system.”
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Esyasoft said it would spend six months working out a long-term strategy for the company, but that “Good Energy Group would continue to operate in materially the same way without significant disruption to its business or operations”. However, it also said it wanted to expand Good’s solar installation and maintenance business, sell its services internationally, and try to make the electric car charger app Zapmap profitable.
Nigel Pocklington, who took over as chief executive from Davenport, said the deal would provide a “partner that shares our sustainable energy vision and has the resources to accelerate our purpose substantially”, including by operating in new markets in which Esyasoft already works.
