Howdy again,
I though to provide a little update on my post from earlier this week. I promise to be short!
As I suspected, with what I thought is capping going on... it appears accumulation is happening by some bigger fish on NWE's register. FYI, the updated top 20 just came out today and in the space of 1 week (from 3rd to 10th May) some large movements...
- HSBC has jumped from no.3 to no.2, purchasing another ~16m shares
- HSBC no.2 account has jumped from no.6 to no.5, purchasing another ~15m shares
- MIN remains at no.1, but has purchased another ~29m shares (I suspect an updated substantial holder notice will come thru soon, unless they haven't finished buying on market... they are currently sitting at 18.1% SOI... maybe they will keep going until 19.9%... another 120m shares?)
- CS third has sold ~2m shares and dropped to no.9
So IMO a continuing vote of confidence... and now the top 20 has added another ~1% to their holdings, plus by my calcs we had close to 50% of all shares traded in this 1 week window that has gone into these larger "sticky" shareholders... whoever is behind the HSBC nominees accounts seems to have some confidence in little ol' NWE. Let's see what changes in the register next week... as I said something is brewing, IMO.
Also thought worth mentioning some thematic news that caught my eye.
Perhaps some of you saw this... interestingly The Pentagon has asked the US Congress for permission to fund mining facilities in the UK and
Australia that process strategic minerals used to make electric vehicles and weapons, calling the proposal crucial to national defense (think lithium, rare earths, tantalum, PGEs etc)... Goes to my point earlier that more and more mining of critical minerals in Aus (particularly WA) will be processed on shore, therefore requiring significant investments in energy for said processing (gas, electricity, renewables, hydrogen etc). NWE stands well to benefit from this.
And to the global LNG market.... The European Union’s REPowerEU plan has set an ambitious target to reduce dependence on Russian gas by 66% within 2022... when the invasion of Ukraine began, European spot prices spiked to a new record of $72 per MMBtu on the 7th March. There is now fear this could again spike to more than $100 per MMBtu when the European winter hits later this year. You know... less than 2 years ago we had LNG cargoes being sold at $2 per MMBtu, circa $3m in total for a delivery... and now we have upwards of $200m revenue for 1 delivery of LNG. What crazy times we live in.
Just to tie this back to the impact on the Aus gas industry and our growing LNG exports (and by virtue NWE)... I just read that a tender of four spot LNG cargoes from Aus for loading during March to June... are in fact headed to Europe, something quite rare for Australian LNG given the distance. My point here is to highlight how critical energy security is and that events happening in Europe and indeed globally, whilst some may not realise... does indeed have an impact on Australia. Our strategic significance is only going to increase, IMO.
The next few months are going to be very interesting indeed...
hagwe
