Finance
Activist fund Ananym pushes Siemens Energy to spin off ailing wind division
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on December 9, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on December 9, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Ananym Capital urges Siemens Energy to spin off its struggling wind division, Siemens Gamesa, to improve investor returns and focus on core businesses.
By Christoph Steitz
FRANKFURT, Dec 9 (Reuters) - U.S.-based activist investor Ananym Capital has taken a stake in German power equipment manufacturer Siemens Energy and is asking the group's management to review its loss-making wind division, its co-founder said on Tuesday.
According to Charlie Penner, a spin-off of the business, Siemens Gamesa, could raise returns for Siemens Energy's investors by as much as 60% as it would focus activities on the group's lucrative gas turbine and power grid businesses.
"We believe in wind long term. We're thinking that Siemens Gamesa can be worth $10 billion in a few years. But having it sit around and basically drag on value doesn't make any sense in our view," Penner told Reuters.
"Wind would be stronger without having to compete for investment capital with the company's higher returning businesses, and with a shareholder base fully bought in to the wind story."
SIEMENS GAMESA IS EMERGING FROM TURBINE CRISIS
Penner, the architect of a massive three-board-seat victory at Exxon Mobil in 2021, declined to quantify the stake Ananym had taken, saying only that it was "meaningful" in the context of the firm's $300 million capital.
Siemens Energy said in a statement on Tuesday that it "values constructive input for creating sustainable value for shareholders, employees, customers and partners", and that it had addressed the development of its wind unit at a recent capital markets day.
Siemens Gamesa, which is still recovering from a quality crisis from two years ago, posted an operating loss of 1.36 billion euros ($1.58 billion) in the fiscal year ended September.
The unit's ongoing losses have repeatedly driven calls by investors to review or even sell the business, but Siemens Energy has so far committed to turning the unit around, touting the long-term prospects for wind energy overall.
"The real question would be whether (a spin-off) would trigger a closing of the discount to U.S. peer GE Vernova," Citi analysts wrote.
Siemens Energy trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 29.3 times, compared with GE Vernova's 51.8.
The Financial Times first reported Ananym's engagement.($1 = 0.8587 euros)
(Reporting by Christoph Steitz in Frankfurt; Additional reporting by Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Writing by Miranda Murray; Editing by Sabine Wollrab, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Jan Harvey)
Siemens Energy is a global energy technology company that focuses on providing solutions for power generation and transmission, including renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
A spin-off is a corporate action where a company creates a new independent company by selling or distributing new shares. This often occurs to unlock value in a specific business unit.
Renewable energy is energy generated from natural resources that are replenished constantly, such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy.
An operating loss occurs when a company's operating expenses exceed its revenues, indicating that the company is not generating enough income from its core business activities.
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