UTILITIES SECTOR OUTLOOK REMAINS UPBEAT

KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 (Bernama) -- Malaysia’s utilities sector outlook remains upbeat, particularly as the renewable energy (RE) space has strong growth potential, with several key drivers set to boost its near-term performance.

In a note today, RHB Investment Bank Bhd said the long-term data centre (DC) growth story is crucial to Malaysia’s energy transition as DC electricity demand is needed to support the continuous upgrade in its transmission and distribution infrastructure.

“Electricity demand rose 6.2 per cent year-on-year in financial year 2024, largely driven by a pick-up from commercial and domestic segments. We believe near-term electricity demand growth will remain solid, backed by rising actual load utilisation from completed DC projects.

“As at FY2024, there are 18 DC projects completed with total cumulated capacity of 1.9 gigawatts (GWs) and we saw a slight uptick in actual load utilisation quarter-on-quarter to 405 megawatts (MWs) as of Dec 2024 from 248MWs as of September 2024,” it said.

According to the investment bank, Tenaga Nasional Bhd sees no slowdown in DC development projects and enquiries despite the latest US chip export restrictions as the bulk of the DC projects are non-artificial intelligence related.

“Also, these projects are guided to be from either China or China-backed entities,” it said.

In the recently concluded reporting quarter, RHB IB said nine companies under its coverage released their fourth quarter 2024 results; five booked numbers that were within estimates, two disappointed and another two beat forecasts.

-- BERNAMA