Mattan eyes listing in five years

Company wants to establish itself in renewable energy business first

KUALA LUMPUR: Mattan Engineering Sdn Bhd is looking at the possibility of a public listing in the medium term to raise the company’s profile.

Its executive chairman Levin Tan told Starbiz that a public listing could happen within the next five years once its presence is stronger in the renewable energy (RE) space.

“There are plans for that (public listing) but I would need to see how far the company can go first.

“We would like our presence to be strong here first and we are not a single discipline renewable energy company, we are into solar, biogas, mini hydro and also looking into biomass,” Tan said.

“We hope to see more direction from the government on this front also for the development of renewable energy in Malaysia.

“We would like to be known as a renewable energy company engineering-wise.

“Because if we only depend on a single discipline of RE, the risk is quite high. If the market saturates, then you will have a bit of a problem then you won’t have the expertise to divert into another RE segment,” he added.

He noted that to be a master in RE for solar alone is not good enough and the company needed to have more expertise in other fields of RE as a whole.

“Solar is the easiest to master as it is mostly plug and play.

“But you can’t say the same thing about biogas, because it involves civil, mechanical, biological and electrical (engineering) understanding.

“If I should ask the solar engineer to do biogas, he can’t because he doesn’t know how the bacteria reacts,” Tan said.

“RE doesn’t just consist of solar, and everyone talks about it because it is the easiest,” he added.

The company is also looking to capture opportunities in the Asean RE market moving forward particularly in Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Mattan is an engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning solutions provider for RE infrastructure and had yesterday launched its large-scale solar 50Mwac photovoltaic generation facility in Rembau, Negri Sembilan.

Construction of the Rm285mil solar power plant was completed in January 2019, the company said in its press release.

The plant has a 21-year power purchase agreement with Tenaga Nasional Bhd beginning from the date of its commercial operations, it added.

Tan said the plant has more than 170,000 solar panels installed over 170 acres.

Under the Asean RE map, Malaysia is targeted to achieve 18.3GW of RE capacity by 2025, including bioenergy (3.8GW), geothermal (0.1GW), hydropower (8.5GW), solar photovoltaic (5.8GW) and wind energy (0.1GW), the company said.