The Management Committee and, subsequently, the Executive Commission of the Iberdrola Council met this Tuesday in Bilbao to review the progress of ongoing projects and assess the forecasts for the remainder of the year, with an eye on beating, once again, the group's results in this second half of the year.
During the meeting, the electric company reviewed the advances in markets considered strategic, with special attention to the United Kingdom. In distribution, the integration of the distributor in Northwest England, based in Manchester, was evaluated, whose purchase last year involved an investment of 5 billion euros. In transmission, the start of the works for the new submarine lines included in regulatory framework 26/31 was reviewed, in which the company plans to allocate a total of 15 billion euros.
The meeting also served to study the evolution of the main projects in the United States, where investments in transport and distribution networks maintain a high pace. As the company recalled in a statement, the offshore wind farm located off the coast of Massachusetts has already been put into operation, which required an investment of 4 billion euros.
In the results chapter, Iberdrola emphasized that new investments, the increase in generation in Spain, and favorable news from the network business in Brazil "confirm the trend of strong growth in results conveyed in the last results presentation, in which possible improvements were already mentioned after the summer."
Last July, during the presentation of the accounts for the first half of the year, the president of Iberdrola, Ignacio Sánchez Galán, after reporting a net profit of 4,336.4 million euros up to June, 21.7% more than in the same period of the previous year, reaffirmed the group's objectives for 2026. He then reiterated the goal of achieving a growth of over 8% in adjusted net profit and pointed out that, if the positive trends observed in the second quarter were maintained, the energy company could "bring good news after the summer."
In that same appearance, Galán stated: "Today we are already working to continue exceeding our forecasts for the coming years, thanks to the acceleration of organic investments in networks in the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom or Brazil, and also in generation, mainly in the United States, with additional improvements in efficiency and process improvements related to artificial intelligence."
Advances in the integration of Caruna
In the meeting held this Tuesday by the company's senior management, the status of the authorization process for the integration of Caruna was also examined, the Finnish distributor valued at 5 billion euros whose acquisition was recently agreed upon by the group.
Caruna is the main electricity distribution operator in Finland and serves one and a half million people, more than 20% of the country's population. It has a network of approximately 89,000 kilometers, of which 67% is underground, which reinforces the resilience of its infrastructures.
The company operates through two distribution concessions in the area surrounding the center of Helsinki and in the Joensuu region, an area with a strong industrial presence and growing demand associated with new data centers, in addition to residential developments. It is also present in other areas of the west and northeast of the Nordic country.
The definitive closing of the operation is still scheduled for the first quarter of 2027, subject to obtaining the usual regulatory authorizations in this type of transaction.