There is a cash settlement on the stock exchange when a company is required to make write-downs in the billions. Ørsted must admit this, after the energy company announced a write-down of 12.1 billion kroner on Monday evening. On Tuesday, the company lost 10.7 percent of its market value.
The write-down was justified by interest rate increases, lower valuations of several American seabed areas and delays in the ongoing Sunrise Wind project.
The wind turbine-critical Donald Trump, who was re-elected as US president on Monday, is not helping the company's share price either. That is the opinion of Jacob Pedersen, head of equity research at Sydbank. He finds it difficult to predict what the near future for Ørsted will look like.
- There is very limited visibility in relation to what will happen in the Ørsted business, he says.
- Trump has played out what can be called the worst-case scenario. Namely, that he will stop new development of offshore wind in the USA, and this will affect the new projects that were to be tendered. There will be less to compete for globally, and this could also make competition tougher to the detriment of Ørsted's earnings.
New round of major write-downs
This is not the first time that Ørsted has had to make billion-dollar write-downs.
In the autumn of 2023, the company dropped plans to build the Ocean Wind 1 and 2 wind farms in the USA. This was because the projects had become much more expensive to build due to delays in supply chains and rising interest rates. In this connection, the total write-downs amounted to DKK 28.4 billion.
If you look at the period from Donald Trump's election victory in early November last year to now, the Ørsted share has been under considerable pressure several times.
The day after the decision in the US election, both Ørsted and Vestas fell more than 12 percent on the stock exchange. The decline was repeated in early January - albeit to a lesser extent - when Trump spoke critically about wind turbines during a press conference.
With today's fall, Ørsted has lost almost 80 percent of its market value since the beginning of 2021, when the price peaked. At that time, an Ørsted share was worth almost DKK 1,300. Today it can be purchased for 278.7 kr.
/ritzau/
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