Dong Energy, a Danish company that owns offshore windfarms around the UK, was valued at Kr 98.2bn (£10bn) as it successfully pulled off Europe’s largest stock market flotation this year.
The Copenhagen-based group, which employs 700 people in Britain and is in the middle of a transition from a focus on fossil fuels to renewables, saw its shares soar a further 10% after they were sold to new investors at Kr235 each.
The Danish government said last month it hoped to see the business valued at £11bn if possible but settled for slightly less only to see both institutional and small buyers keen to pick up for stock after the initial public offering.
“There has been a lot of interest in becoming part of the ownership of Dong Energy, both among retail and professional investors,” Claus Hjort Frederiksen, Denmark’s finance minister, said in a statement.
“It gives Dong Energy a solid foundation to retain and develop its position as one of the leading green energy companies in the world.”
The Danish government continues to be Dong’s biggest owner, with just over half of the shares as opposed to 59% before the float while US investment bank Goldman Sachs has reduced its holding from 17.4% to 13.4%.
Dong is in good financial shape having reported a 35% increase in first quarter profits last month. The company still has UK gas interests off the north of Scotland but is concentrating new investment on windfarms such as the London Array off the Kent coast.
The utility has already invested £6bn in this country and plans to double this spending by 2020 through constructing projects such as the Hornsea Project One windfarm off the east Yorkshire coast.
Since the Paris climate change talks there has been renewed interest from a host of oil and gas companies in low carbon investments. Total, of France, recently unveiled a $1bn (£700m) plan to buy Saft, a company that specialises in batteries which hold the key to electricity storage generated from low carbon sources.
Earlier this week, research showed that solar power produced 50% more electricity than coal in the UK during the month of May.
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