The group is reduced to begging the European Union to implement an emergency plan of measures to support its business, notably by guaranteeing order volumes that would enable it to stay afloat - no pun intended - over the next few years.
Inflation in the cost structure, rising interest rates and a US market that had long remained impervious to offshore wind energy - even when an opening seemed to present itself, the particular bidding mechanism transferred all the risk onto the operator - placed the Danish group in a critical situation.
The Trump administration has put a freeze on new development permits, and the two projects currently under construction off the US coast, Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind, will both be impacted by potential tariffs on steel and aluminum.
Orsted must therefore concentrate on Europe. Fortunately, the market there is more buoyant: the EU wants to at least double its installed offshore wind power capacity over the next ten years, while the UK intends to triple its capacity by 2030.
MarketScreener has long been warning of the substantial risks incurred by investors in the offshore wind sector.
The group - whose accounting system is excessively complex to decipher - achieved exactly the same sales in 2024 as it had ten years earlier.
However, what we could see was that over the decade, it paid out three times more in dividends than it generated in free cash flow. This, combined with net debt that quadrupled in the meantime, were two signals that, taken together, pointed to the difficult situation in which the company now finds itself.
