The 7th Annual Powering Africa Finance Options Meeting (PA:FO) will take place from 14-15th November at the Vineyard Hotel & Spa in Cape Town, designed to help investors identify the most profitable future opportunities in Africa’s power sector.
Karen Breytenbach, Senior Project Advisor for the National Treasury’s PPP Unit in South Africa, will be joined by senior representatives from Kenya Electricity Generating Company, Eskom, China-Africa Development Fund, Schneider Electric, Globeleq, Webber Wentzel, Odebrecht, Aggreko and Standard Bank among others to discuss and debate the future of the market, share ideas on investments and question peers and competitors on their plans over the coming year.
With Africa’s industrial economies booming and liquidity among banks struggling to keep up with demand, can private equity fill the gap in getting mid-cap projects off the ground? We have seen a reflection of South Africa’s successful power investment programmes in many parts of Africa driven by resource investment and government engagement - specifically in the power sector. Notably, Nigeria’s economy has transformed in the last 12 months with a wash of projects coming online and investors falling over themselves to participate.
At the recent EnergyNet Power Investors Summit: Nigeria, one major international investor commented that testing their planned entrance strategy at the meeting had “highlighted considerable misgivings- the round table discussions provided enough valuable content to potentially save the business a US$100mln investment error.”
As a consequence of such rapid growth, within the gold rush there will be casualties. As is clear, working in Africa requires specific knowledge and understanding that will give a project the best opportunity for success; this will be the difference between US$100mln and US$1bln of investment from private equity firms.
This new format of investor meeting will see stalwarts of the African power sector on both sides of the developer and structured finance value chain trading knowledge with relatively new investors to make sure early mistakes are missed.
Distributed by APO (African Press Organization) on behalf of Clarion Events
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