Third-quarter global corporate funding in the solar sector rose by 5.1% quarter-on-quarter to USD 6.2 billion (EUR 5.5bn), including venture capital/private equity, debt financing and public market financing raised by public companies.
Consulting firm Mercom Capital Group LLC announced this on Wednesday, saying that public market financing dropped to USD 1.8 billion from USD 2.3 billion because solar stocks “made a complete U-turn in the last three months”. TerraForm Global Inc, Sunrun Inc and Grenergy Renovables SL all carried out initial public offerings (IPOs) during July-September and together accounted for more than half of the total public market financing for the period.
Debt financing increased to USD 4.1 billion from USD 3.4 billion, with Chinese firms dominating after raising over USD 2.9 billion during the period, more than double the USD 1.4 billion secured in the prior quarter.
The total large-scale project funding announced in Q3 2015 went up to USD 2.5 billion in 23 deals from USD 1.9 billion in 26 deals. The largest deal was the USD-400-million Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC) investment guarantee secured by SolarReserve and ACWA Power for their 100-MW Redstone concentrating solar power (CSP) project in South Africa.
When it comes to residential and commercial solar funds, five deals valued at a total of USD 997 million were announced during the quarter, significantly down from nearly USD 2 billion in just as many Q2 deals. The year-to-date total of USD 4.8 billion already exceeds the USD 4 billion recorded throughout all of 2014.
In July-September there were 22 corporate merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions in the sector, compared to 17 deals in Q2. The largest one in terms of dollar value was SunEdison’s USD-2.2-billion takeover of Vivint Solar in the US.
Venture capital (VC) funding climbed to USD 257 million in 15 deals from USD 142 million in 24 deals, with solar downstream firms accounting for USD 114 million.
During the period there were 42 large-scale solar project acquisitions with a combined value of USD 1.2 billion, involving assets with a total capacity of 3.9 GW. This compares to 66 Q2 transactions worth a total of USD 2.9 billion.
(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.888)
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