Constellation

One way that some utilities have been getting ahead of market changes is by issuing equity to pre-fund costs they expect to incur later. This generally takes two forms: equity forward contracts, and mandatory convertible offerings. Examples include Pepco Holdings, which sold about $350 million in shares on a forward basis in March, and PPL, which sold about $270 million in April. Also, NextEra Energy issued $600 million in three-year, mandatory convertible bonds on May 1, and another $650 million in September.

Both approaches carry a premium, but they allow utilities to capture today’s high stock prices in a forward sale. And some issuers have found banks hungry enough to participate in equity deals that they’ll take a substantial haircut for the opportunity. (See “BofA loses $12m on bought convert,” IFR 1932, May 2012.)

However, terms likely will normalize as soon as the current confluence of forces drives utilities back into the equity markets in earnest.–MTB

Although analysis is subject to the imprecise nature of publicly available information, it does offer relative insight into how utilities benchmark against each other. In particular, it highlights the potential for untapped value in the utilities industry, specifically with respect to improvements in operational performance. Accenture defines untapped value as increasing the performance of all bottom-half performers to the bottom of the next performance quartile—that is, all fourth quartile performers decrease spending to the top of fourth quartile, and all third-quartile performers decrease spending to the top of the third quartile.

As seen in Figure 4, there’s significant variance of performance across the three major operations and maintenance (O&M) categories, transmission and distribution O&M per customer, customer care O&M per customer, and administration and general O&M per customer. In all cases, there’s a long tail of performance in the fourth quartile.

Taking the viewpoint that overall company performance should be improved, at least to some extent, by M&A, we find that there’s significant untapped value in the industry. Industry-wide, there’s approximately $3 billion in annual O&M untapped value, which is roughly 10 percent of the annual O&M spending for the industry. Delivering on this untapped value will be a prerequisite to driving significant shareholder value through future M&A deals.

By definition, green flag companies have a lower untapped value per customer than either yellow flag or red flag companies. This is due to the fact that operational performance—which drives untapped value—is part of the M&A strength criteria. Interestingly enough, untapped value is equally spread across industry players from size (revenue), customer count, and region perspectives. In other words, no single factor explains why some companies have higher untapped value than others. As such, the field is wide open for performance improvement.–JA, WS, and TW