Lodestone Energy chief backs NZ IPO success despite Firmus collapse

Gary Holden, the managing director of Lodestone Energy, sat down with the Herald on the eve of his company's sharemarket listing with a message that cut against the prevailing mood: this will work. The solar energy firm's initial public offering was set to close the following day, and while the market had just watched an Australian artificial intelligence company called Firmus pull its IPO at the last moment as investor interest collapsed, Holden was unmoved by the cautionary tale.

"We feel that those amounts were set with the expectation that the market would be able to fulfil that, and there's nothing we've heard that would suggest that that range isn't still appropriate," he said. The confidence was measured but real. Holden acknowledged the uncertainty—"of course we will be waiting until the very last moment to find out for sure"—but he framed Lodestone as operating in fundamentally different terrain from the companies that had stumbled. IPOs, he noted, were rare events, but Lodestone occupied a different position entirely.

The company had been operating for five years and had already completed four private capital raises before attempting this public step. Over the preceding three weeks, Holden and his team had conducted an intensive roadshow across the country, meeting with potential investors and telling the story of how Lodestone had built itself into a solar farm operator. The company currently operated five or six farms and was preparing to scale to between 16 and 18 by 2032. The pitch was straightforward: Lodestone had positioned itself to build solar farms at a steady pace and sell their output to commercial and mass market electricity customers over the long term.

The timing aligned with structural shifts in the energy market. Solar panel costs had fallen dramatically over the past decade, and grid-scale battery prices had followed the same trajectory downward. New Zealand was undergoing the same energy transition happening globally—electrification of transport, conversion of cars to electric power, and surging electricity demand. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment projected that electricity demand would rise 21 percent between 2025 and 2035, driven by population growth, industrial electrification, and data centre expansion. Lodestone's strategy was to capture that demand with low-cost solar generation.

The company's customer base suggested the market was already convinced of the model's viability. Lodestone's commercial and industrial clients included The Warehouse Group, Inghams, Halls, Pink Batts, Open Country Dairy, and Briscoes. Crucially, most of the volume supplied under Lodestone's Virtual Rooftop Contracts was locked into longer-term agreements—five to 20 years—compared with the one- to three-year contracts that were standard across the industry. Those extended commitments provided revenue visibility and reduced the volatility that typically plagued energy companies.

The shareholding structure reflected Lodestone's journey to this point. Investment bank Jarden and its associated investors held the majority stake. Guy Haddleton, a New Zealand entrepreneur and billionaire, owned 5.7 percent. Sir Stephen Tindall, founder of The Warehouse, held 5.134 percent. Holden himself maintained a 6.15 percent stake. Post-listing, the company expected to have a much wider shareholder base, distributed across the retail and institutional investors who had engaged during the roadshow.

Holden's confidence rested on a simple proposition: Lodestone had already proven it could execute. It had raised capital repeatedly, built operational solar farms, secured long-term customer contracts with recognizable companies, and positioned itself ahead of a wave of electricity demand that was coming regardless of market sentiment. The Firmus collapse was a market event, not a reflection of the underlying economics of renewable energy in New Zealand. Whether the market would agree when the offer closed remained to be seen, but Holden was betting it would.