Bearish Bets
More than 22 percent of Vestas’s 203.7 million outstanding shares were sold short as of April 17, the highest percentage on record for the company, according to New York-based research firm Data Explorers. Short interest in Vestas also exceeds 597 stocks in the Stoxx Europe 600 Index (SXXP), in which companies average about 3 percent.
Vestas may have trouble luring a buyer while the wind industry faces a decline in demand and excess production capacity, according to David Vos, a London-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. The company can manufacture more than 8,500 megawatts of turbines a year, according to its annual report. Turbine production and shipments totaled 5,054 megawatts last year, or about 60 percent of capacity.
“It doesn’t make sense for any player to add so much capacity to their operations at this point in time,” Vos said.“The major conglomerates who might have the spending power to purchase assets have overcapacity themselves, and you’re facing a structural demand decline over the next two or three years.”
‘Tough Time’
Spain in January declared a moratorium on subsidies to new renewable-energy plants, while India, the world’s third-biggest wind market, reduced a tax break this month.
In the U.S., the second-biggest turbine market after China, a Treasury grant program offering as much as 30 percent of development and construction costs for renewable-energy plants expired on Dec. 31. Another incentive, the Production Tax Credit, expires at the end of 2012. Vestas in January said it may cut an additional 1,600 jobs in the U.S. if lawmakers don’t extend the credit, which gives an incentive of 2.2 cents a kilowatt-hour of wind power.
Vestas stock, which reached a record 692 kroner in June 2008, has dropped 72 percent in the past year to 51.45 kroner.
“Vestas is going through a pretty tough time,” Edward Guinness, who helps oversee $900 million at Guinness Asset Management Ltd. in London, including Vestas shares, said in a phone interview. “They really have not coped brilliantly with the falling prices of turbines and it’s a disappointment that they didn’t act faster on bringing costs down. There’s been hope that things would get better, and they haven’t.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-20/...t-windmills-real-m-a.html