Vestas: Surety bonds for the renewable energy industry

Aims

Petter Lindblad in Vestas Group Treasury outlines the aims of the renewable energy group’s surety strategy. “We use bonds, i.e. letters of credit or bank guarantees, to support our trading relationship with certain of our customers.”  Vestas work with big wind farm projects and normally ask their customers to make advance and milestone payments. In return their customers sometimes seek assurances, in the form of a bond as payment and performance security. 

Our role

Our role at Atradius Surety is to work alongside the Group Treasury team at Vestas and to ensure a speedy, customised delivery in response to their bonding requests. 

Indeed, the speed of our service and our customer approach is one of the key areas that help us stand apart from many bond issuers, such as banks.

As Petter Lindblad explains: “We work with Atradius for a combination of reasons. Atradius’ good credit rating is important, as well as their competitive price and speed of delivery. Atradius tends to be quicker to provide a bond than banks. Our account manager has a good proactive relationship with us and I appreciate the swift response time to our requests.”

Because Vestas operates internationally, knowledge of local market practice and regulations specific to the various countries the company operates in is important. So is the ability to serve our customer in the language of their choice. We provide advance payment bonds for the majority of Vestas’ European customers from our offices in Denmark. However we are also responsive to their needs on various projects abroad. For example, our German office issues Vestas bonds in German for their German customers.
 

Outcomes

Atradius bonds are an important part of the financial instruments used by Vestas to promote smooth trade.  “We see an increasing need for issuing guarantees as our business is growing, but also that our customers increasingly invest in large projects and in emerging markets”, says Petter Lindblad. 

About Vestas 

With an HQ in Denmark, Vestas is the energy industry’s global partner on sustainable energy solutions. They design, manufacture, install, and service wind turbines across the globe, and with more than 118 GW of wind turbines in 81 countries, Vestas have installed more wind power than anyone else. Through their industry-leading smart data capabilities and unparalleled 104 GW of wind turbines under service, they use data to interpret, forecast, and exploit wind resources to deliver best-in-class wind power solutions. Together with their customers, Vestas’ more than 25,000 employees are bringing the world sustainable energy solutions to power a bright future.