Essent wants to merge with Nuon

Het Financieele Dagblad

Essent wants to merge with Nuon

Essent and Nuon, the two biggest power companies in the Netherlands, hope that Economic Affairs Minister Laurens Jan Brinkhorst will approve their planned merger.

They want to create a single national power company, which will be able to hold its own and compete in the liberalised energy market in Europe.

Dutch competition authority NMa is opposed to the idea on the grounds that it would limit competition in the Netherlands. But Essent and Nuon hope to convince the NMa to look at Europe as a market in which a new super-company would operate.

The NMa, for its part, has indicated that once national power markets within the EU are further integrated, it would not object to a merger between the two.

Nuon and Essent are the biggest energy players in the Netherlands, having a 35 percent and 31 percent share of the electricity market respectively. Noun controls 30 percent of the gas market and Essent has 26 percent. The next biggest company Eneco has a 27 percent share of both the electricity and gas sectors.

Nuon has campaigned for some time for a merger with Essent, which was created in 1999 by the merger of several smaller power companies. Both Dutch giants fear that individually they are too small to compete on the European level.