Seems as of October 2024, Kraken entered into a partnership with MAINGAU Energie

From the article, Maingau Energie is a energy supplier for the German Market

Even more interesting is that Powercloud customer, Yippie Energie is a reseller for MAINGAU Energie

It would have made sense that Powercloud would have been a partner for MAINGAU but Kraken was chosen instead

Looks like a potential business opportunity lost by Hansen's Powercloud either from restructure activities distracting sales activities or maybe Kraken could be a better offering.

So while Hansen was making Powercloud more proftiable, Kraken had started creating a beachhead in Germany and snagged a energy supplier in the process which arguably is much better than a energy reseller

I was going to post under Origin, but I think this is more relevant to Hansen due to Yippie being a reseller of energy supply from MAINGAU

Not really convinced but here is a summary from Flinders Investment partners to add to my previous comment on Hansen

Much of the success still depends on Germany's commitment to the deployment of smart meters which for now is not very strong.

Would be good to research also which customers Kraken stole from Powercloud when Hansen made cuts to the global division.

I can see Hansen is trying to get Powercloud's house in order, but it seems that is at the expense of future growth to the benefit of Kraken (ORG) and Kazula (AGL)

NB: I hold ORG as of last week.

A bit of history on Powercloud and past ambitions

In 2022, Powercloud did a collaboration with AWS and wrote a case study on using AWS resources to deploy Powercloud for their customers.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/powercloud-case-study/

Most importantly it gives a hint of technology stack behind Powercloud and ambitions to enter the US market

"powercloud now has plans for international expansion. Its pipeline of new customers includes businesses across Europe, North America, and Australia. The scalability of AWS supports this growth. “As we expand to new countries, with new customers, we know we can confidently and easily deliver our solutions,” says (Zoran) Petrovic. Chief growth officer - Powercloud"

However Powercloud was already losing money from expansion into other regions such as US and Spain. In 2022 Powercloud made a loss of 19m Euros.

More importantly, their other investment in Chargecloud was losing money and in 2023 they decided to make an exit and sell their stake to the last 2 major shareholders

After the takeover by Hansen in 2024, further cuts were made which forced Powercloud to focus on the German, Swiss and Austria market https://www.energate-messenger.com/news/247504/powercloud-to-shrink-into-the-profit-zone

This meant that Kraken was able to migrate Powercloud customers onto their platform. Some may know that Origin Energy uses Kraken and has a stake in Octopus energy (another company I'm looking into).

It's hard to figure out what went wrong with Powercloud

Perhaps it could be the haphazard energy policy in Germany?

Apparently Germany has the slowest rollout of Smart Meters in the EU which is Powercloud's (and now Hansen's) key market.

This article about a draft policy to delay the smart meter transition rollout doesn't help.

Ah well, I had fond memories of backpacking in Germany and learning about the history. Was such a great country and industrial powerhouse when I visited. Not sure about it now.

I decided to do some research on Powercloud to find out why Gentrack still can't find out how to release the handbrake and get the Europe deals flowing.

After a bit of stumbling I found this German company called EvyCloud

All in a foreign language of course which I can't understand

Although I do see the translate button, I am still not closer to understanding the European Energy Market. But I do know Powercloud seems tied to the German market and existed purely to assist in the transition to Smart meters for Germany. My reading indicates they have about 60 customers already but for Germany alone which further reinforces the thinking that Powercloud main focus is Germany along with Austria and Switzerland that encompass the DACH region.

Also want to highlight this partnership between EvyCloud and Powercloud is not recent according to this article it was started before the acquisition in Mid 2023. Below is the non-paywalled version.

There's a few other articles I'm sifting through such as one about Dortmund energy (DEW21) who apparently use Powercloud.

While looking at Gentrack to get a better idea of valuation, I thought it would be worth looking at Powercloud for a change.

On their website there is a high level overview of how everything is connected

But when I try to understand smart meters in powercloud, my question remains unanswered and they are unable to articulate their implementation.

Compare that to Gentrack which explains the smart meter strategy in more detail.

And for the techies out there, you can even call the Gentrack endpoint API

There is no documentation on endpoints in Powercloud website

Powercloud does have partners who build apps to enable customers to use the platform.

So I'm finding it harder to understand the advantages of Powercloud vs Gentrack.

I haven't compared Hansen's offering against Gentrack as I assume Hansen bought Powercloud to keep up with the changes in utility billing.

I'm hoping someone that has looked at Powercloud more closely can deep dive further. As it is hard for me to find a case to switch from Gentrack to Hansen despite the recent institution selling in Gentrack (WAM, Milford, Regal AEF have been selling)

Broker Research Report from RBC Capital Markets Feb 2024

Price target 5.60 (downgrade from 6.50)

The report is a bit old (from 21 Feb 2024) but does include the most recent result

Pulling out the important bits