* Big M&A bears risk of overstretching - CEO
* Expects oil majors to be top renewables groups
* Danish government quite happy with stake - CEO
(Adds context, CEO quotes)
By Christoph Steitz, Vera Eckert and Tom Käckenhoff
BERLIN, Jan 21 (Reuters) - Denmark's Orsted, the
world's largest operator of offshore wind parks, plans to steer
clear of super-sized takeovers, its chief executive said on
Tuesday, preferring small deals to keep the group among the
biggest renewable players.
"I'm fundamentally convinced that you de-risk your M&A
strategy by not overstretching it," Henrik Poulsen told Reuters
during the annual energy summit hosted by Handelsblatt newspaper
in Berlin.
"I'd rather make a series of small acquisitions than one big
bang where we could stumble," Poulsen said, adding any deals
would rather be in the hundreds of millions, similar to recent
acquisitions in the United States.
He said any deals would focus on projects in new markets.
Poulsen, Orsted's CEO since 2012, oversaw the group's
transformation from a diversified utility with oil and gas
activities into the world's No.1 developer of offshore wind
farms.
He said he expected the global green energy sector to be
dominated by traditional utilities as well as big oil groups,
which have been increasingly moving into the power sector as a
way to diversify away from fossil fuels.
Poulsen said that scale was vital and that not all of the
groups active in the industry would gain scale quickly enough to
remain in the race, which would be a trigger for consolidation.
"We'll be a lot smarter in probably less than 5 years but
when you see the landscape today you can begin to see the future
global green energy majors emerge," he added.
Globally, Orsted ranks 10th in terms of installed renewable
capacity, behind peers including Spain's Iberdrola,
U.S.-based NextEra, Italy's Enel, Portugal's
EDP and Germany's RWE.
Goldman Sachs estimates that the world's top 10 renewables
groups capture only about 15% of the world's total portfolio,
leaving sufficient space for newcomers, including oil majors
Shell, BP and Total, to muscle in.
Poulsen said it was his goal to keep Orsted, whose shares
have nearly tripled since a 2016 listing, among the world's
leaders in the segment. Currently, the group has a market
valuation of 297 billion Danish crowns ($44.1 billion).
Orsted is majority-owned by the Danish government, which
holds 50.1% following a 2016 listing, and while Poulsen could
not say whether that share could change in the future it was his
view that Denmark was "quite happy" with its position.
($1 = 6.7338 Danish crowns)
(Additional reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen; Editing
by Thomas Seythal, Michelle Martin and Alexandra Hudson)
BP (BP.)
