Tom O’Flynn is the CFO of AES Corporation (AES). Tom provides a great overview of AES Corporation’s business model. He also discusses some really interesting catalysts for the company and highlights a compelling investment case for the shares of AES’ stock.
AES is a power company, but it’s different from regulated utilities, IPPs, and yieldcos, yet at the same time has similar characteristics. The asset portfolio includes traditional generation facilities, renewables, and a lot of the essential infrastructure required to produce and transmit electricity. Since the current management took the reins in 2011, they’ve pruned the portfolio, with more than $5B in asset sales over the past 7 years and exited 13 countries. During that time, management reduced parent level debt by $2B, cut costs by $300M, and they’ve returned almost $3B of cash to shareholders.
Part of the return to shareholders has been through dividends, and AES has also bought back about 16% of their stock since 2011. Another interesting fact is that the company has reduced coal generation capacity by about 20% over the past three years, and they’ve replaced a large portion of that capacity with renewable energy. De-risking the business has also been a key priority. Management has reduced AES’ FX exposure to around 15% from 40%.
Maybe one of the most interesting facts about AES Corp is that they are the largest owner of battery storage in the world, and the recently announced storage JV with Siemens called Fluence. The Fluence JV positions AES extremely well for the future. One of the reasons the battery JV is so interesting is because of the growth outlook. Generally speaking, growth investors aren’t interested in utilities. That’s because, double-digit earnings growth in utility-land is almost unheard of, at least not on multi-year outlook.
Another potentially big catalyst for AES Corp includes IMO 2020. This is a gross oversimplification, but IMO 2020 puts a cap on the amount of sulphur shipping vessels are allowed to use in fuel oil. This global regulation bodes well for global LNG demand. And with respect to debt, individual projects financed with non-recourse term debt, which means there is a natural deleveraging component to the business.
Something I like about this management team is that they’re focused on what they know, understand, and where they believe they have a competitive advantage. This perspective led to reducing the number of countries where they operate and becoming more acutely focused on developing and owning long-lived infrastructure assets.