Power producer Genneia SA filed for an initial public offering in New York, trying to become the first Argentine company to launch in the US in at least seven years.
The company applied to offer its shares on the NYSE as American Depositary Shares, under the symbol GENN. The IPO, which will offer Class B common stock as ADSs, would be the first from the country in the US since at least 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Bloomberg News reported in November that Genneia was seeking to list in New York after President Javier Milei notched a decisive victory in midterm elections. His win ended a bout of market volatility, re-opening the door to global debt sales from Argentine corporates and potentially paving the way for a wave of equity offerings, with several energy and finance companies in different stages of preparing paperwork.
Genneia is a sizeable electricity producer, running power plants with 2.1 gigawatts of gross installed capacity, most of it renewable wind and solar energy, according to the prospectus. It describes itself as the leading renewable energy outfit in Argentina, with revenue of US$96.4 million and net income of US$7.9 million in the first quarter of the year, according to the document.
Argentina has some of the strongest winds in the world and top solar resources, though capital controls that curtailed financing and power-line bottlenecks slowed a green-energy boom that kicked off under ex-president Mauricio Macri. Still, the country came very close last year to meeting a goal, enshrined in law, of supplying 20 percent of power usage with renewables, a category that excludes big hydro.
Milei’s nearly three years in office have fuelled a rally in Argentine assets as investors bet his agenda to remake the country’s economy will succeed. The libertarian economist has slashed inflation to about 33 percent from almost 300 percent, while erasing the fiscal deficit and stepping up accumulation of hard-currency reserves.
His broader efforts have been lauded by markets, with both Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings upgrading Argentina in the past two months into single-B territory for the first time since 2018. The upgrades helped send the extra yield investors demand to hold Argentine debt over its US counterpart to 433 basis points from a high of 1,456 ahead of the congressional midterms in October last year.
Credit and equity markets have started to stir after years of inactivity, with a swath of fresh corporate debt issuances. Natural gas distributor Distribuidora de Gas del Centro SA became the first company to list stock in Argentina in more than six years in 2024. Another gas distributor, Ecogas Inversiones SA, listed in January 2025.
Those listings were driven in part by Milei’s aggressive push to unlock prices for companies across the utilities industry after seeing them kept artificially low for years under Peronist governments.
But the peso-denominated shares of Ecogas are down 8.4 percent since they started trading, with the loss for investors in dollars even greater given the peso weakened significantly over that period. Argentina’s benchmark S&P Merval equity index has lost steam since rallying sharply after the midterms.
Underwriters for Genneia’s sale include Morgan Stanley, Banco BTG Pactual, BofA Securities, JPMorgan and Latin Securities SA Agente de Valores.
by Julia Leite & Jonathan Gilbert, Bloomberg
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