The countdown has begun for the presentation of the Enel's 2018-2020 business plan. The appointment of the entire staff of the Italian multinational with the analysts is for Tuesday 21 November in London when Francesco Starace, CEO and general manager, and Alberto De Paoli, financial director, will announce the group's new three-year guidelines.
The goals of will certainly be confirmed decarbonization (away from coal by 2025) and by growth in renewables, the completion of the reorganization of participations in South America (Enel Chile and Enel Generacion Chile have convened their respective Extraordinary Shareholders' Meetings for December 20) and the push forward on innovative sectors starting with electric mobility. An important space is ensured for the development of optical fiber project, assigned to Open Fiber: “We have no interest in exiting capital. This line will be reaffirmed in London. It will clearly emerge that OF is an integral part of Enel's strategy,” Starace said in an interview published on Thursday morning in Il Sole 24 Ore.
The weight of innovative sectors is growing, to which the group has dedicated a special division, la e-Solutions led by Francesco Venturini (former CEO of Enel Green Power) and the signal of how much it intends to focus on these new value-added activities will be given in London with the presentation of the new brand and the new division name on Monday afternoon. The launch takes place a few days after two significant events in Enel's new strategy: the first, which took place at the end of October, was the acquisition of the Californian company eMotorWerks, leader in the supply of charging stations for electric vehicles, the JuiceBoxes, and owner of JuiceNet, the platform of Internet of Things (IoT) for intelligent management of the charging of electric vehicles and other distributed storage systems. Starace and Venturini are betting on the American company for fast and smart charging systems (therefore in two directions, from and to the grid), as a stabilizing factor for the grid in the development logic of electric mobility. The acquisition went almost unnoticed but it is thanks to eMotorWerks, whose platform will be progressively installed on all the group's columns, that Enel plans to give a significant technological boost and added value to its mobility offers. The second event to be recorded occurred immediately after and concerns the start of the national plan for the installation of 14.000 columns in Italy by 2022 which add up to the already existing thousand and the other 4.000 in Spain, Romania, Greece, Chile, Colombia, Argentina.
It is in e-Solutions (top secret on the new name) that Tommaso Pompei will find a place, abruptly replaced in Open Fiber by new To Elisabetta Ripa . Francesco Starace intends to link his name to the development of e-Solutions which will be better detailed in London.
On the side of optical fiber instead, the Pompeii exit opens a second phase for Open Fiber which, according to the declarations of Enel's number 1, will focus on project financing and the 3,5 billion "jumbo" loan needed to implement the bulk of the plan for the new ultra-fast network in black and white areas, net of public funding . The loan, currently under negotiation, should be completed by the end of the year or, more likely, in the first few months of 2018.
What is certain is that two different visions confront each other on the new fiber network: that of Franco Bassanini, president of Open Fiber with the support of Palazzo Chigi, is in favor of an agreement on the network with Tim to arrive at a single fiber network in Italy in a logic of separation between those who make the infrastructure and those who, the operators, offer services to customers. And while the rumors of a possible commercial collaboration between Tim (rising in Piazza Affari on Thursday) and OF thicken, Francesco Starace does not give up either on the theme of a single network company and even less on the possibility of corporate reorganizations (“No to accrocchi companies" he said a few months ago): "The closure is total. We are not interested and this is because it makes no sense either for Open Fiber or for Tim. But it seems to me that they are on the same line”, concluded the top manager. The next episode on Tuesday in London.
