In September, we held an investor event in Paris to launch our Cleaner Energy in Your Power strategy. We have built on it already. We have made five acquisitions in our zero-carbon energy management business. And we’ve made two in LPG: one in the US and now, subject to merger clearance, a sizeable one in Germany.
Progas - a nationwide business founded in 1949 - is a top 5 LPG distribution business in Germany, Europe’s largest energy market. It would mark DCC’s biggest ever acquisition in Germany for around £140m. Once combined with TEGA, our existing business, we’ll start with over 100,000 customers, and we see a bigger prize.
We intend to make “Cleaner Energy in your Power” come to life in Europe’s biggest energy management services market by bringing options to our current and future German LPG customers such as solar, heat pump or hybrid heat pump. We’ll add many other recurring revenue services in time.
LPG emits less carbon than oil (-12% CO2e) or coal (-33% CO22e) *, though we are working hard to do more by scaling up biogas across DCC Energy. We intend to be able to provide our German customers - not connected to the natural gas grid - the offer to replace LPG seamlessly with renewable equivalents in the future.
We plan to grow LPG profits across Europe by £120m by 2030, of which we plan £70m to come from acquisitions. Our proposed acquisition of Progas will bring us closer to this target in the fragmented German market.
Most importantly following completion of the acquisition, we would be welcoming 350 new colleagues from Progas into the Group, taking our people up towards 16,500.
