Canada-based Brookfield Business Partners is exploring options including the sale of a minority stake in Westinghouse Electric Co, Reuters reported on 23 April citing “people familiar with the matter”. The sale could value the U.S. nuclear power developer and servicer at as much as $10 billion including debt, Reuters noted.
Brookfield Business Partners has hired investment banks to engage with potential buyers for a minority stake in Westinghouse, the sources said, requesting anonymity. They added that there is no certainty Brookfield will find a buyer and that an outright sale of the company is also an option. Brookfield Business Partners Chief Executive Cyrus Madon said in February that it could "test the market" in relation to Westinghouse. "We could hang onto it and continue milking these incredible cash flows, but it will all come down to what's the value we can get versus what we can create by keeping it," Madon said.
Brookfield agreed to buy Westinghouse from Toshiba for $4.6bn in 2018, after Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in March 2017. This followed long delays and cost overruns at the Vogtle and Summer nuclear plants in the USA, for which it was supplying AP1000 reactor technology. Westinghouse has changed hands several times since it was founded by George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1886, changing its name to Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1945. It purchased CBS in 1995 and became CBS Corporation in 1997. In 1998, CBS established a brand licensing subsidiary Westinghouse Licensing Corporation (Westinghouse Electric Corporation). Then the Power Generation Business Unit was sold to Germany’s Siemens, and in 1999 CBS sold its nuclear power businesses to British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL). In 2006, BNFL sold Westinghouse to Toshiba.
