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The activist investor who masterminded Engine No. 1’s successful proxy fight against ExxonMobil has built a stake in Siemens Energy and is pushing the company to spin off its wind business.
Ananym Capital, which was co-founded last year by Charlie Penner and has accumulated about $300mn, has launched an activist campaign against the German energy giant, according to people familiar with the matter.
While the size of the stake could not be determined, one person said it was a “large position” for the fund.
In a letter to Siemens Energy’s board seen by the Financial Times, Ananym said the company’s gas turbine and grid power businesses, which have boomed on the back of growing demand for electricity driven by artificial intelligence data centres, were being held back by its ailing wind energy unit.
“Wind still has a very different and more challenging path ahead of it,” Ananym wrote in the letter, adding that the company’s “true value will likely remain obscured for as long as these businesses remain together”.
The hedge fund is pushing for Siemens Energy to launch a ‘strategic review’ of the wind business Siemens Gamesa © Alamy
Penner has a record of successfully pushing for changes at large companies with small stakes. His biggest coup came in 2021 when he was the strategist behind Engine No. 1’s campaign against Exxon.
Despite owning just $40mn worth of Exxon stock — about 0.02 per cent of the company — the hedge fund was able to convince big investors to back its campaign and eventually won three seats on the board.
Before joining Engine No. 1, Penner spent 15 years at Jana Partners, one of the best-known activist hedge funds on Wall Street. There he took on corporate behemoths such as Apple and McDonald’s. Alex Silver, Ananym’s other co-founder, previously worked at P2 Capital Partners.
The hedge fund is pushing for Siemens Energy to launch a “strategic review” of the wind business Siemens Gamesa, which could involve spinning off the unit it took full ownership of less than three years ago.
Ananym argues the wind unit would benefit as a separate business partly because it would not have to compete for research and development investments with the two other units. One person familiar with the matter said the hedge fund believed the wind business could reach a €10bn valuation within two years.
Siemens Energy was spun off from the Siemens group in 2020, inheriting a majority stake in the publicly listed Siemens Gamesa. Persistent issues at the business weighed on Siemens Energy, however, and the company launched a tender offer to buy out Siemens Gamesa’s minority investors in 2022.
The problems meant Siemens Energy had to turn to the German government for a rescue package to shore up its order books.
Since then, the company has become a huge beneficiary of the data centre gold rush, which has led to a surge in demand for energy. But the state-led support, which was replaced earlier this year, kept Siemens Energy from paying a dividend to shareholders until this year.
Siemens Energy said in a statement that it valued “constructive input for creating sustainable value for shareholders, employees, customers, and partners”. It said it expected its wind unit to be profitable next year and that it continued “to diligently execute on our plans accordingly”.
Ananym said in the letter that Siemens Energy’s management team had made “great progress” on the wind unit, but that it believed the company was still trading at a discount to its sum-of-the-parts value and would be better off as a separate entity.
Wind attracted a different set of investors willing to bet on the long-term prospects of the industry and to endure volatility, Ananym wrote in the letter.
Siemens Gamesa recorded an operating loss before special items of €1.4bn in the 12 months to the end of September.
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