Winning by Losing

After the acquisition fell apart in 2016, NEE and HE's stock prices diverged, even before the Lahaina fires.

(This post is related to yesterday's about the collapse of Hawaiian Electric Industries' stock price.)

Seven years ago Florida-based NextEra Energy (NEE) failed in its attempted acquisition of Hawaiian Electric for $2.63 billion. The deal was rejected by Hawaiian regulators.

The ostensible reason was that NextEra did not provide enough details about whether its green-energy plans were sufficiently compliant with Hawaii's own goals. In truth there was a local element that would have resisted any takeover of HE, a Hawaiian institution that was more than 120 years old.

NEE, with a current market cap of about $137 billion, must be thanking its lucky stars that the deal fell apart. With a wealthy Mainland parent company who would be convenient to blame, the Maui victims and lawyers would try to extract $billions in damages from HE's parent.

In NextEra's case the failure to make a deal was the best deal.