Does your company measure up?
Few companies achieve sustainable high performance. Markets change but companies fail to adapt, and investors are unforgiving. Utilities, and new entrants, learned this lesson during the first competitive market cycle of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when few companies sustained a high-performance leadership.
Finding and applying the efficient frontier.
Buyers of power-plant assets use a number of tried-and-true approaches to asset valuation, including discounted cash flow and option-pricing models. While the valuation approaches employed generally are sophisticated, they focus almost exclusively on individual assets. Conspicuously missing is consideration of the asset portfolio as a whole. For illustrative purposes, we performed an assessment of a basic new power-plant portfolio. The results are well suited for general risk analysis and risk management, portfolio planning and restructuring, power plant acquisition, development, and divestiture.
Despite several high-profile deals, utilities remain cautious about outsourcing their key business processes.
It seems that "outsourcing" has become a dirty word among utility executives. But though left unsaid in polite conversation, the word is still on everybody's mind. They might even be doing it. They just aren't talking about it.
Utilities can transform the business while managing risk.
In a survey of 305 North American utilities, 51 percent of the respondents said they either had outsourced or were planning to outsource a customer-care function in the next two years. But despite its advantages, outsourcing remains fraught with risk—the very reason that traditionally conservative utility companies have in the past shied away from letting third parties take over parts of their business.
The efficient frontier is a portfolio analysis concept designed to assess risk vs. return for an investment portfolio.
The efficient frontier is a portfolio analysis concept designed to assess risk vs. return for an investment portfolio. While the financial projections of individual assets are key to the analysis, the end result is critical to successful structuring of the portfolio as a whole. Key to the efficient frontier is that it represents the highest level of a portfolio's return for any given level of risk. It can be applied to physical assets, as well as financial instruments—simultaneously. Figure 1 displays a typical efficient frontier chart.