Harmony Energy Income Trust (HEIT) has announced that it has reached a new milestone in the sale of its UK portfolio.
Yesterday (December 19), HEIT confirmed it was in the final stages of negotiations with an unnamed preferred bidder on an exclusive basis for the sale of the company’s entire portfolio of battery energy storage systems (BESS). This comes after the company’s second phase of negotiations, which began on October 18, 2024, and saw an “encouraging” number of potential bids.
HEIT would like to clarify that no agreement has yet been reached on a final sale and that the terms of a possible sale have not yet been confirmed. However, the company added that negotiations with the preferred bidder are likely to be completed by early February 2025. After this, any potential sale will need to be agreed with the company’s shareholders before any further action can be taken.
The news comes at the end of a rocky year for HEIT and development company Harmony Energy. The year started with disturbing news from HEIT; in February, the investment firm revealed that its year-end earnings for the year ending October 31, 2023 were significantly lower than the same period the year before, due to a “weak earnings environment for BESS assets,” a concern echoed by a fellow BESS investment firm Gresham House Energy Storage Fund.
Later that month, HEIT sought to reassure the market by predicting it could generate “attractive returns” despite ongoing concerns about battery energy storage revenues in the UK market.
In May, the company announced it would cancel its first-quarter 2024 dividend and appointed JLL to seek offers for some or all of the company’s assets, partly in an effort to prove the fund was undervalued by the markets . At the time, the company called the sale an effort to “maximize profits and demonstrate the continued disconnect with the stock price,” which was down 57% from the same period a year earlier.
The company later announced that it intended to sell its entire UK portfolio, and an update in August confirmed that HEIT was satisfied with the number of interested parties willing to bid.
In October, it announced that several firms, including the yet-unnamed final bidder, had been selected to begin the second phase of the bidding process.
