China Shenhua Energy is in talks to buy more power plants. The coal producer hopes to pick up cheap assets in the power sector, which is suffering widespread losses because of state caps on tariffs to curb inflation.
'This is a good time to buy and we are in talks with several targets, but we don't have any specific target in terms of investment and quantity of plants,' chairman Zhang Xiwu said.
Lifting the number of power plants would help lower Shenhua's risks should coal prices fall in the future, Zhang said.
Having partially or wholly invested in 15 coal-fired power plants with total installed capacity of 29 gigawatts and a further 16GW under construction, he said: 'There is still plenty of room to expand'.
In May, Shenhua paid 971.7 million yuan (HK$1.19 billion) for a 51 per cent stake in Luoyang Electric, which has commissioned two 600MW coal-fired units this year in Henan province and plans to build two 1,000MW units.
Zhang said Shenhua was also buying into three plants in the Yangtze River Delta with total generating capacity of 2,520MW.
