EON Suspends Sale of Energy-From-Waste Business Over Price

EON AG, Germany’s largest utility, suspended the planned sale of its energy-from-waste unit after failing to get the right price.

“The energy-from-waste unit is currently not for sale,” Christian Drepper, a Dusseldorf-based company spokesman, said today in a telephone interview. “We have received several offers for the business, but we also repeatedly said that we are under no pressure to sell and that we won’t do so at any price.”

EON was seeking to raise more than 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) from the sale that had been complicated by volatile incineration rates and earnings as well as differences over price, according to people familiar with the process earlier this week.

German utility company MVV Energie AG, Swedish buyout firm EQT Partners AB, Morgan Stanley’s infrastructure fund and SembCorp Industries Ltd., a Singapore-based energy and water company, had handed in offers for the unit, the people said.

The unit operates 18 incineration plants with a capacity of about 4 million tons, generating about 2,100 gigawatt hours of electricity and about 2,800 gigawatt hours of heat, according to its website. The unit had 544 million euros in sales in 2011.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tino Andresen in Dusseldorf at tandresen1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Will Kennedy at wkennedy3@bloomberg.net