DEWA's Nine-Month Profit Rises 11.7% to a Record Dh7.63 Billion

Revenue rose 3.3% to Dh25.74 billion from Dh24.92 billion. The company said electricity, water, district cooling and its other businesses all contributed to the growth. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation rose 2.1% to Dh13.43 billion, operating profit rose 2.3% to Dh8.52 billion and profit before tax was Dh8.37 billion.

DEWA is the only supplier of electricity and water in Dubai and one of the largest companies listed on the Dubai Financial Market, so its operating figures give a direct measure of how fast the emirate is growing. The results also show a gap between operating and bottom-line performance. Profit after tax grew about five times as fast as EBITDA and operating profit, and the results statement did not explain which items below operating profit caused the difference.

Growth was faster in the third quarter. Revenue for the three months to September rose 5.4% from a year earlier to Dh10.87 billion, and profit after tax rose 9.2% to Dh4.30 billion. Quarterly EBITDA was Dh6.11 billion and operating profit was Dh4.45 billion. DEWA paid shareholders a Dh3.1 billion dividend in October.

Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, the managing director and chief executive, said the results showed that the business model is resilient and its operations efficient. He repeated the utility's target of carbon neutrality by 2050.

The operating data point to steady growth in demand. DEWA generated 21.37 terawatt hours of electricity in the third quarter, up 4.13% from 20.53 terawatt hours a year earlier. Peak demand reached 11.682 gigawatts, up 2.55%. Clean-energy output rose about 16.3% to 3.22 terawatt hours from 2.77 terawatt hours, which was 15.1% of everything the utility produced in the quarter.

The company reported a 4.89% improvement in its gross heat rate for electricity and water, to 7,268 British thermal units per kilowatt hour. The heat rate measures how much fuel is needed to produce each unit of power, and a lower figure means less fuel per unit. In water, DEWA produced 43.99 billion imperial gallons of desalinated water in the quarter, and peak daily demand reached 483 million imperial gallons.

The customer base is also growing. DEWA had 1,380,844 customer accounts at the end of September, about 72,000 or 5.5% more than a year earlier.

At the end of the quarter, the utility's installed generating capacity was 19,029 megawatts. Of that, 4,910 megawatts came from clean sources, roughly a quarter of capacity, compared with 15.1% of quarterly output.