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| Share Name | Share Symbol | Market | Stock Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Grid Plc | NG. | London | Ordinary Share |
| Price Change | Price Change % | Share Price | Last Trade
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| -18.20 | -1.85% | 964.40 | 10:40:29 |
| Open Price | Low Price | High Price | Close Price | Previous Close |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 966.00 | 960.80 | 970.20 | 982.60 |
| Industry Sector |
|---|
| GAS WATER & UTILITIES |
| Announcement Date | Type | Currency | Dividend Amount | Ex Date | Record Date | Payment Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23/05/2024 | Interim | GBP | 0.1584 | 21/11/2024 | 22/11/2024 | 14/01/2025 |
| 18/05/2023 | Interim | GBP | 0.194 | 23/11/2023 | 24/11/2023 | 11/01/2024 |
| 10/11/2022 | Interim | GBP | 0.376 | 01/06/2023 | 02/06/2023 | 09/08/2023 |
| 19/05/2022 | Interim | GBP | 0.1784 | 24/11/2022 | 25/11/2022 | 11/01/2023 |
| 18/11/2021 | Final | GBP | 0.3376 | 01/06/2022 | 06/06/2022 | 17/08/2022 |
| 20/05/2021 | Interim | GBP | 0.1721 | 02/12/2021 | 03/12/2021 | 19/01/2022 |
| Top Posts |
|---|
Posted at 15/11/2024 18:53 by xtrmntr The UK's ageing transmission system requires at least £60bn of investment, and the first results for National Grid (NG.) since its mega £7bn capital-raising in May this year showed that life as a monopoly infrastructure provider is not so bad. Underlying earnings per share increased by 8 per cent to 28.1p, despite sustained levels of capital expenditure, which was £4.6bn, 17 per cent higher year on year. This spend was driven by grid connections, which underlines how much extrainvestment is needed; the company expects to double overall spending over the next five years, compared with the past five.Management was also at pains to emphasise that the US election would have little impact on its business, with its utilities regulated at the state level. The US division contributes about a quarter of National Grid's overall profits. Indeed, the company still expects to invest £17bn in New York and £11bn in New England in the five years to 2029.Financing this spending from new money was another positive impact of the rights issue, as the company's net debt is now expected to decrease by around £1.5bn, from £43.6bn as at 31 March 2024, with the reported gearing reducing to the low 60 per cent range.It is in the nature of National Grid's business that it must splurge the cash every 40 years or so as its infrastructure wears out. Investors won't be excited by the previously announced rebased dividend, but at a FactSet price/earnings ratio consensus of 13, the company is slightly under its long-term average. Buy. |
Posted at 07/11/2024 07:02 by skinny Interim dividend of 15.84p/ordinary share. This represents 35% of the total rebased dividend per share of 45.26p in respect of the last financial year to 31 March 2024, in line with the Group's dividend policy. |
Posted at 06/11/2024 11:47 by pierre oreilly Yes 1k, ng. will benefit from all this crazy spend of customers' money. The regulator (i.e. the gov) allow a return on capital, so the more ng. spends (or more correctly is ordered to spend on pylons and other guff necessary purely for the daft attempt at implementation of net zero - it'll never happen!). iirc there's 60bn about to be spent by ng. with 30b in the uk over the next few years guaranteeing higher profits for us. As you say, the return ng. is allowed is collected from a markup on traded electricity. It's really unlike any other business, low risk yet gteed profits to come. But I'd personally like profits to come from implementing a sensible efficient grid infrastructure, and not a grid driven by various political agendas. |
Posted at 05/11/2024 11:09 by pierre oreilly Even 'working properly', windmills are intermittent, so virtually fa use on a power matching grid.Closing the last coal station means its (instructable) power will simply be replaced with instructable (i.e. not intermittent) power from either gas (fossil isn't it?) or interconnectors (nuke from France, likely coal indirectly from Germany etc). But when the temperature gets very cold when we need generation the most, it's likely the countries on the other end of the interconnectors will also be facing a shortage, so they'll (obviously) stop exporting to the uk. See how things pan out this winter and pray we don't Europe doesn't get a couple of weeks of sub zero tems all over. ---- Secondly, I'm not sure it's appreciated much that with the current and growing penetration levels of windmills, often we generate too much power. And that means ng. tells windfarms to stop generating. This results in constraint payments to windfarms. More windmills, more constraint payments. The amazing fact of wind constraint payments is that they exceed generation payments - i.e. if windmills don't generate when they can, they get paid more from producing nothing! It's a mad mad world in the uk at least. |
Posted at 01/11/2024 09:59 by anhar Quite right. Pro traders in big caps like NG., whether in the US, UK or elsewhere, are interested only in making money and are entitled to trade how they wish towards that end. The idea that "yanks" sell the share down out of some sort of conspiratorial personal animosity towards it is ludicrous.And as Dartboard suggests, if this was remotely true then other pros would trade against them for certain profits so that the conspiracy would be arbed out. Also there's a nasty element of anti US attitude being expressed here, as if "yanks" are worse than Brits or other nationalities as traders. The message seems to be that "yanks" are bad for NG. whilst Brits of course are good. What utter rubbish. NG. is a public company and anyone, whichever country in which they are located, can trade it any way they want. It's just part of the overall market. The whole silly story is because some people can't bear the feeling of their shares sometimes declining and look around for a scapegoat to blame. |
Posted at 22/10/2024 15:48 by pierre oreilly Uty, yes a different company now (or soon), which has probably escaped journos. There seems to be to me a hell of a lot of similarity with what ng. has just done during its cash raising - projecting situations well into the future to ease transition to net zero. Unless I'm missing something, Neso are now going to largely repeat that exercise (with another few buzzwords like 'spatial'). Whatever, I see neso having many more consultants pulled in (probably now surplus to ng. after the fund raising projections). Who's paying for those? (Not that Neso's costs are anything to do with ng.).I wonder how long before neso tell the government that some/many of their new requirements are incompatible. Probably a good few years. |
Posted at 18/10/2024 18:11 by xtrmntr Hampstead is the deepest underground station in London. Late in the evening, however, residents can still occasionally hear the rumble of trains as they lie in bed. It's a reminder of the world that exists underneath the capital and the country as a whole. Tubes, gas pipes, sewers, water mains, electric cables and telecommunication lines all stretch below our feet.One of the biggest infrastructure projects currently under way in the UK is the London Power Tunnels programme. Run by National Grid (NG.), it involves rewiring the city's ageing electricity system via a series of new tunnels buried 40 metres below the surface. The project started back in 2011 and is expected to cost around £2bn in total. The stakes are high, therefore but for National Grid, it's just one of the challenges on the horizon. In May this year, the utility giant announced £60bn of investment over five years to upgrade and expand the power grid in England and Wales (as well as to bolster its US assets). The capital expenditure plan is far larger than analysts had expected and is nearly double that seen over the prior five years. Investment in the grid is increasingly urgent. Electricity demand in Great Britain is expected to be 50 per cent higher by 2035, with electric vehicles and heat pumps proving particularly burdensome. Artificial intelligence could add to the strain; analysts at UBS expect data centre usage to rise from 2.8 per cent of European electricity demand today to 8.4 per cent in 2030. There is another problem, too. National Grid is rewiring the network to accommodate more power from renewable sources, such as wind. This is needed to hit the government's goal of a net zero grid by 2030. Unlike dirtier forms of power, though, renewable energy tends to be generated in remote areas often offshore in the North Sea. These new sources of supply need to be connected to cities and towns."It is the biggest build-out of the networks since Victorian times," says National Grid chief executive John Pettigrew. "Most of our networks were built in the 1960s when they were transporting energy from the north of the country, where the coal mines were, to the south of the country, where most of the population was. Now we need to rewire Britain so energy is coming from offshore wind in the North Sea and the Celtic Sea."Read more from Investors' ChronicleWhy watchlists could be investors' secret weaponCore holdings from the 'sin', technology and investment trust sectorsYou don't have to be invested in China to care about the market rallyHow to solve London's housing shortageExisting infrastructure isn't robust enough to support these changes. Bottlenecks in the grid mean electricity from northerly wind farms sometimes cannot reach areas of demand. As a result, wind farms are paid to stop generating electricity, while power stations are paid to produce electricity closer to where it is needed.Battery storage providers have also been frustrated at National Grid's infrequent use of their technology. A representative of National Grid's electricity systems operator the oversight business sold to the government in a deal that completed this month told the FT in September that outdated computer equipment and cable shortages were partly to blame. An investment opportunity Tackling these issues won't be cheap. However, National Grid doesn't operate like your average company. It is a monopoly whose returns are determined, largely in advance, by energy regulator Ofgem. Rather than hurting profits and breeding uncertainty, therefore, the group's huge investment programme has transformed its growth prospects.Before digging into this, though, it's necessary to understand what National Grid actually does. At its simplest, the company makes sure electricity is transported safely and efficiently from where it's produced to where it's needed. Its main focus is transmission, which involves moving?electricity at a high voltage through a network of pylons, overhead lines, cables and substations. The company has over 7,000km of overhead power lines across England and Wales enough to stretch from London to Miami. The distribution business is smaller, and involves moving electricity at a lower voltage from the grid to customers. It serves people in the Midlands, South West and South Wales.National Grid's revenue comes from us, the customers. In everyone's electricity bill, there is a small charge roughly £20 a year that covers the cost of transmission. National Grid also charges about £100 a year for distribution in the areas it serves.The more complicated question, however, is what drives these revenues. The amount of money National Grid can make primarily relies on the size of its infrastructure network or its "regulated asset base". This is roughly calculated by taking the value of the assets at privatisation, plus all the money that has been poured in since then, minus depreciation. Ofgem then determines what level of return the company can make from these assets, taking into account the cost of debt and the cost of equity. The calculations are complicated, but the core idea is simple: the more National Grid invests in the network, the more it can earn (in the UK, there is another tailwind too the asset base is indexed to inflation). In theory, therefore, National Grid's investment push should increase its earning power. Its asset base is expected to swell from £63bn this year to £100bn by FY2029, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 9.5 per cent. Analysts at Bernstein are forecasting that operating profit will grow even faster in the same period. "National Grid offers exposure to multi-decade growth in electricity networks in stable and well-regulated markets, providing excellent earnings visibility," HSBC analyst Charles Swabey concludes. Schroders fund manager Ashley Thomas agrees, stressing the group's "secure and transparent" growth profile. These enhanced growth prospects are not necessarily reflected in the share price. There are a variety of ways to value the company but, given its presence in both the UK and North America, many analysts favour a sum-of-the-parts approach. JPMorgan, for example, says given the structural opportunities the UK network should be valued at a 40 per cent premium to its regulated asset base, and values the US infrastructure at 1.4 times its current worth. As such, it has a target price of 1,200p for March 2026, up from today's price of around 990p.The stock looks reasonable from a price/earnings (PE) perspective too. National Grid has traded on an average forward PE ratio of 15 times for the past five years, but now attracts a multiple of just 13.6 times. Given its rapidly expanding asset base, this discrepancy seems unjustified. Glitch in the systemNot everything is set in stone. A shortage of trained workers and supply chain hold-ups could hamper National Grid's investment plans. Meanwhile, Ofgem still has the power to cause problems."Given the expected step-up in UK transmission capex, the crucial unknown is the regulatory framework that will underpin regulated assets growth and returns," says HSBC. The current regulatory period ends in March 2026, with a new five-year regulatory period starting the following month. For now, though, the signs are positive. Last year, for example, Ofgem introduced the term 'investability' in a consultation to "recognise the scale of investment required in coming decades". In July of this year it also expressed an early view on the returns National Grid should make in the next regulatory period. This was largely as expected, with Ofgem guiding for a return on equity of 5.43 per cent for the UK transmission network. More negotiations will follow. "You have seen some regulators shift from being purely focused on minimising the cost to the consumer to also thinking about how we allow the energy system to decarbonise, and what we actually need to do from a grid perspective," notes BlackRock fund manager Alastair Bishop. For investors, though, there is another fly in the ointment. One of the ways that National Grid raised money for its £60bn capex plan was through a £7bn rights issue announced in May. This took a lot of the pressure off the balance sheet, which was looking strained, and paves the way for higher overall profits in the future. However, it also swelled the share count by roughly 30 per cent. Earnings growth on a per share basis looks muted, therefore and National Grid's own forecasts should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. The company expects underlying earnings per share (EPS) to grow at a compound annual rate of 6-8 per cent between financial years 2025 and 2029. However, by starting the guidance from 2025, the management team has avoided showing the impact of the elevated share count. Deepa Venkateswaran, head of European utilities at Bernstein, calculates that if an undisturbed EPS figure for 2024 were to be used instead, the compound annual growth rate will only sit at between 2.8-4.3 per cent. Accounting for bonus shares issued in 2024, this growth figure climbs to 5.1 per cent. These numbers are lower than the 6-8 per cent EPS growth achieved in the previous five-year period and lower than the forecasts communicated by the company, Venkateswaran concludes. The rights issue also impacted National Grid's famously reliable payouts: the dividend has been rebased from 58.5p a share down to 45.3p a share. It is set to start growing again in line with inflation from next year, under the same progressive policy as before. The dividend hit suggests there has been a strategic shift towards growth at the expense of income but many are unfazed by this. "It remains a classic income thesis," says Tommy Kristoffersen, fund manager at EdenTree Investment Management. "But instead of it being a wobbly, risky income thesis, it's underpinned by this £60bn capex plan which, in turn, is underpinned by a government that knows that it's necessary to support renewable expansion."Schroders |
Posted at 06/6/2024 09:09 by laurence llewelyn binliner 1Carus, the dividend will be re-based going forward, but expect 4.5/5% as it will be reduced to account for the dilution coming on the 12th..I added a few more this morning but will have to wait for the rest as/when dividends come in, must not grumble though, they are for free after all.. :o).. We will continue our progressive dividend policy, maintaining the total level of dividend following the RI. Our aim is to grow Dividend Per Share in line with UK CPIH inflation in keeping with the current dividend policy. We will aim to increase the FY25 DPS by UK CPIH following the rebase of the FY24 DPS of 58.52 pence, after taking account of the new shares issued following the Rights Issue.. |
Posted at 03/6/2024 10:16 by pierre oreilly Anhar, many here, including me, find grid operations very interesting (probably many don't too, each to their own).But windmills are crucial to ng. Without the massive expansion of windmills, 95% of the recent grid expansion plans wouldn't be necessary at all, and of course, ng. gets its profit from grid assets, and is completely derisked as to the madness of net Zero (and windmills are part of that). Also, many here have actually worked at ng. and spent a lot of time and energy and expertise making the grid extremely efficient and the best in the world, keeping bills as low as possible for customers. Seeing all that effort go to waste and brushed aside for some political reasons and building a grid of waste and duplication which customers will pay for at a very high level in a few years (ng. investors are paying a small part of that atm to be reimbursed by customers in the future. Instead of believing gov (and our own directors') lies about the future cost and efficiency of our electricity, readers can have offered a more realistic view. NG. shareholders will next year start to be rewarded very profitable for NZ spending (since many projects have already started which will soon contribute) and that will ramp up over several years. But, and it's a big but, it comes at a high cost to customers who increasingly will have to choose between the old eating and heating and worse. I personally want everyone to know that and question whether this is what the uk really wants. So it's off topicish, but not by much. |
Posted at 30/5/2024 15:51 by pierre oreilly Another rights?Of all the quoted companies in the uk, ng. is the least likely to have another rights in the next 6 years. This due to ng. being unlike all other companies. Everything it does has to have regulator approval. The 6 year funding plan was drawn up and/or approved and certainly ordered by ofgem (i.e. the government). The idea is to give clarity in funding nd spending - and ng. will not be allowed to deviate too much from the plans just presented. The upside of having a regulator is that they will ensure the plans are carried out, and another rights isn't in the plan. Even the bank loans to come will be easy to get. If ng. have problems raising the further billions required from the banks, then the gov would step in and order them lend the cash, at a normal rate. Amost everything about ng. is unique and completely different to all other ftse companies. Best to look at it as a part of the government, not an independent company (all regarding the regulated business). |
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