Canada-based alternative investment giant Brookfield Asset Management Inc. has signed a deal to acquire Emami Power Ltd, a solar power-focused company owned by the promoters of the Emami Group.
The acquisition comes around seven months after VCCircle exclusively reported that Brookfield was in advanced talks with the Kolkata-based cosmetics-to-paper conglomerate to acquire Emami Power.
“As part of our divestment plan of non-core business assets, we are happy that we could conclude the deal with Brookfield Asset Management to sell our solar power business – Emami Power,” a spokesperson for the group told VCCircle.
Emami Power Ltd, which has units in Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, currently has a capacity of around 50 megawatts and aims to expand to other states in the country.
For the year ended March 2019, it reported net sales and profit of Rs 58.8 crore and Rs 8.1 crore as compared with Rs 29.6 crore and Rs 2.4 crore, respectively, a year before, according to VCCEdge, the data intelligence platform of Mosaic Digital.
The acquisition represents another move by Brookfield to increase its presence in the fast-growing renewable energy segment in India.
Last June, VCCircle reported that the Canadian giant had sealed its first buyout in the sector, by agreeing to pick up two wind farms from the Hyderabad-based Axis Energy Ventures Pvt. Ltd for Rs 500 crore (around $72 million).
According to its website, Brookfield’s renewable energy business has over $48 billion in assets under management. In 2018, it hired Nawal Saini as a managing director responsible for building and managing the firm’s renewable business in India.
Saini was a part of the infrastructure investment teams of Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and JPMorgan.