The Bank of Spain confirms the trend that began a little over a year ago, as a result of the new monetary policy focused on an unprecedented rise in financing costs. During the second quarter of 2023, Spanish banks continued to restrict the supply of credit, both for households and companies, and the drop in demand for loans also continued, albeit more calmly, considering the current context.

The point is that the body led by Pablo Hernández de Cos believes that the situation will continue during the second half of this year and that, therefore, it will be more difficult for families to access a mortgage since the banks will continue to increase the requirements. The fundamental reason given by the Bank of Spain? Quite simply, the rise in delinquency that has already begun to be seen in the system, although in a very timid way. Bank arrears, not only for households but also for companies, have accumulated two months on the rise, reaching levels of 3.59%, which are still very low, but the curve has turned around.

According to the Bank Loan Survey published this Tuesday by the regulator “both the granting criteria and the conditions applied to new loans would have continued to tighten, in a general way, for the fifth consecutive quarter”, although in a “more moderate way than the first quarter”.. This situation responds, says the Bank of Spain, to “an increase in the risks perceived by financial institutions, a lower tolerance for them, and the increase in financing costs for entities and a lower availability of funds”. In other words, the banks are already covering themselves against what may be to come and, for this reason, they prefer to avoid assuming more risk when, in addition, it is also more difficult for them to obtain financing in the markets after the ECB has closed the free liquidity bar that the sector had through the so-called TLTROs that they had to partially return at the end of June.

LESS CREDIT

Looking ahead to the second half of 2023, the agency believes that it will be even more difficult for households to access a mortgage, something that they justify by the rise in delinquency that “could favor, once again, a slight general tightening of credit conditions”, according to the Survey. Likewise, the banks believe that the fall in the demand for loans will also continue given interest rates that are much higher than a year ago, specifically some 400 basis points more..

However, and although the conditions have been tightened, the entities could lower somewhat the requirements that they ask of households in terms of consumer loans, with much higher margins or differentials for the banking sector than what they offer in mortgages, a much more competitive field. With data for the month of May (the latest available), the weighted average rate for granting consumer credit to households stood at 7.96% compared to 3.71% for mortgages, slightly more than double.

The Survey also includes other outstanding aspects regarding loans to companies. Construction companies (not including real estate) are the ones that have suffered a greater tightening of the requirements to access bank financing from January to June. In percentage, the Bank of Spain calculates it at 25%. Brick is followed by the real estate sector, both for homes and for other uses such as offices or warehouses; the manufacturing industry and already behind the industry and commerce.

The forecast for the second semester is that banks continue to tighten the approval criteria for the first companies mentioned, those linked to construction and non-residential real estate, but not for merchants and firms linked to industry, services or energy..

The feared slowdown that was going to occur in the second half of the year in the European and Spanish economy is beginning to show the first signs of appearance. This Monday, the PMI indices of the old continent confirmed that industry this month experienced the biggest contraction in the last three years, while the service sector, which is holding on to expansionary ground, is beginning to weaken due to the wave of inflation and the tightening of monetary policy.

Germany and France are the countries for which there are the first alerts, although S&P warns that the slowdown in the rest of the continent is evident. Total Eurozone business activity fell at the strongest pace in eight months in July, marking weakness at the start of the third quarter.. A deterioration in forward-looking indicators, such as expectations regarding future activity and the volumes of new orders received, also suggests the possibility that the economic slowdown will intensify in the coming months, prompting companies to backtrack on hiring,” the company warned.

The PMI indices prepared by Standard & Poor's set the difference between growth and contraction in any economic sector at 50 points. In July, the Eurozone manufacturing sector index stood at 42.9 points, its lowest in the last 38 months, that is, in more than three years; while that of the services sector stood at 51.1 points, the lowest level in the last six months. The combination of both left the total activity index at 48.9 points, in alert territory.

European companies have verified this month that demand has suffered in a general way and new orders have fallen at an increasing rate, which indicates that they will try to reduce their activity even more in the coming months. “The worsening of the loss of new orders in the industrial sector, where one of the most intense declines since 2009 has been recorded, was accompanied by the first drop in new orders received in the services sector in the last seven months,” they explained.

For this reason, the industrial sector has destroyed employment for the second consecutive month. In Spain, the affiliation data for July is not yet known, but it has emerged that different companies in the sector have had to resort to Temporary Employment Regulation Files (ERTE) due to the stoppage of activity, such as the Galician boilermaker Citic Censa -which is considering an ERTE for 60 workers for at least six months-, Tubos Reunidos -which has announced an ERTE for the staff of the Amurrio plant in Álava-, or ArcelorMittal , which declared a six-month ERTE for 7,000 employees in April.

In services there has been a growth in the workforce, but “the lowest in five months” and the rate of job creation has slowed sharply compared to the historically high rates registered in the second quarter.

recession alert

Given this scenario, the experts from the British consultancy Capital Economics warn that “the economy will continue in recession”, but even so “the labor market will remain stressed, with high wage growth and strong core inflation”, which will encourage Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, to continue raising interest rates this Thursday.

“Eurozone PMI suggests a contraction in economic activity at the start of the third quarter. In general, this is in line with a weakening trend in survey indicators in recent months and increases the risk of recession for the bloc (…) The risk of recession has increased. With expectations that production will weaken further, the outlook for the coming months is, at best, one of slowdown,” the ING experts point out.

Germany has suffered the most intense fall in industrial production since 2009 in the month -excluding the months of confinement due to the pandemic-, while the growth of the service sector suffered an “intense deceleration”, something similar to what happened in France, which registered a “particularly intense deceleration of total activity”.. “The rest of the region as a whole eked out very modest growth for the second month in a row, marking the weakest result so far this year and reflecting a sharpening slowdown in the manufacturing sector and weaker growth in demand for services.”

S&P believes that this downward trajectory that the Eurozone economy has begun will continue in the coming months, “as the service sector continues to lose momentum”, and as “the PMI new orders index and the service sector backlog index have fallen into contraction territory for the first time since the end of last year. These trends are especially pronounced in the manufacturing sector, suggesting that their decline is likely to continue as the second half of 2023 progresses.”

It is not surprising then that without being an economist, but a lawyer, he is in charge of the Ministry of Economy. Nor should it be surprising that, being part of the Peronist right, he was chosen by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, champion of a left-wing theoretical, for the October presidential elections, after going through the August primaries.. It should not even be surprising that this moment that Peronism as a whole was waiting for so much, supporting his candidacy, arrives with uncontrolled inflation and the country with negative reserves in the Central Bank.

Sergio Massa can do anything, until reality tells him “no”, as happened, for example, in the 2015 elections, in which he saw from the outside the ballotage won by Mauricio Macri. But, in the meantime, the 51-year-old politician is squaring the circle, because he is getting along worse and worse with President Alberto Fernández, former President Kirchner hates him and the Peronist left resists with a relatively token candidate, Juan Grabois, who will lose the primaries and will have to stand in the column before what many present as the best friend of the United States embassy in Argentina.

“Argentina has a dual thing in the relationship with the United States,” Massa said during an interview with this journalist on a tour of Washington DC in 2021.. Fernández de Kirchner's Chief of Staff for a year, Massa always took pains to cultivate his ties with power in the north, and that commitment is paying off.

It's not just that his candidacy reassures the White House, which sees him as a “rational Peronist,” but it's the Joe Biden administration, through his Western Hemisphere adviser.. Juan Sebastian González, Massa's main ally at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). There, many career officials tremble at the thought that they could be put in charge of the Argentine case, which has ostracized many in recent decades after colliding with an impossible economy and governments of all stripes.. There, Germany and Japan are fed up with Argentina and its unfulfilled promises, they demand toughness. Massa calls for flexibility after a fierce drought that caused the country to lose 20 billion dollars, and in this request he has Washington's understanding.

LIBERALISM

A Massa who at the age of 11 was dazzled by Raúl Alfonsín, the re-founder of Argentine democracy and a member of the Radical Civic Union (UCR), the historic rival of Peronism. A Massa who, as a teenager, fell in love with Álvaro Alsogaray's UCeDé, the party that in the 80s tried to install liberalism as a political option only to end up being engulfed by Peronism in its Menemist version. In other words, because of savage neoliberalism, according to the Kirchners, who during the ten years of Carlos Menem's government between 1989 and 1999 supported the main lines of his policies.

Massa will have to face the winner of the primaries in Juntos por el Cambio, the opposition coalition to Peronism, in October. His rival could be Patricia Bullrich, former Minister of Security and representative of the hardest wing. Or it could be Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, head of the Government of the city of Buenos Aires and a champion of moderation.. Rodríguez Larreta and Massa have been friends for decades, but the Buenos Aires mayor now alleges that their friendship has cooled and that they no longer see each other.

Massa's other important rival will be Javier Milei, a phenomenon that is difficult to classify: ultra-liberal, libertarian and often outrageous, he has the merit of having set up a discussion different from the usual in Argentina, returning to the stage some of Alsogaray's liberal proposals that dazzled Massa in the 1980s.. Milei promises dollars for everyone, and there are business and power ties that connect him to Massa.

“I'm going to confess something to you,” Massa told Michael Shifter, then president of the Washington think tank Inter American Dialogue, in 2021.. “For a long time my political career was marked by challenges to more. It happened to me that all the time more than enjoying my responsibility and my moment I thought about what was coming. I suppose that due to my frustrations and my own mistakes I learned to do well what I had to do and not think about tomorrow.”

The phrase is one of the most unlikely that has been heard in recent years in Argentine politics, because the truth is that, since he believed it was possible, Massa has not let a day go by without weaving the warp that he hopes will lead him to the presidency.

And there are people who warn that a President Massa would be a danger for Argentina.

“He is a person that I accused of corruption, of ties to drug trafficking. And if he wins, it would be repeating Argentine history. Again familism, again a man and a madness for power. Folie à deux means madness for two, here it is the madness of power”.

– And who are the two?

Massa and Malena. It is the corsi e ricorsi of Néstor and Cristina”.

The one speaking in Clarín is Elisa Carrió, leader of the Civic Coalition, a group of social democratic roots, a split from the UCR, which has functioned for more than 20 years as a kind of severe social conscience of the country.. She denounced the corruption of Kirchnerism when no one did, and if many former officials went to prison it was thanks to her.

When he talks about “Massa and Malena” he refers to Malena Galmarini, Massa's wife and daughter of a former Menem Sports Secretary. Galmarini has as much or more ambition than her husband, which is saying a lot. And Carrió sees in both the repetition of the tandem formed by Néstor and Cristina Kirchner from 2003. Galmarini today chairs the state drinking water company, Aysa, but aspires to be mayor of Tigre, a municipality north of Buenos Aires that was the first step in Massa's ascent as of December. There, seducing the middle classes with the installation of security cameras to reduce crime, he also began his admiration and relationship with Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York.

Luis Petri, Bullrich's vice-presidential candidate, put his finger on the sore spot in mid-2022. It was after the assumption of Massa as Minister of Economy: “It seemed like a transfer of command. What happened today is that Cristina Kirchner changed her political figurehead. Cristina took early retirement from a president.”

Sergio Massa, with his wife, Malena Galmarini, during an official act. BREAK WITH KIRCHNERISM

Quite a striking twist, though not unexpected. Massa had broken with Kirchnerism in 2013, when he founded the Frente Renovador and presented his own list outside Peronism in the midterm parliamentary elections.. He defeated the ruling party in the province of Buenos Aires, the country's main district, and his campaign manager was today's president Alberto Fernández, also at odds with the then president. Those elections determined the end of the Kirchnerist dream of “Cristina Eterna”, the indefinite re-election after reforming the Constitution.

Thus, just a decade ago, Massa was the idol of the middle classes and anti-Kirchnerism. They asked him about the Kirchnerists and he said that he would send them to prison, they asked him if he would ever return to Kirchnerism and he responded with false solemnity on television: “Never again, for me it is a finished stage.”

Never again is not a concept made for Massa. Everything can be expected of him because his ultimate goal is profoundly Peronist: to come to power by any means possible.. The more traditional Argentine business leaders, heirs to a culture of a closed and protectionist economy, view it sympathetically.. It is not by chance, crony capitalism is one of the labels most frequently attached to the minister and candidate. To the man who believes that the Casa Rosada is possible, even though inflation is 130% per year, even though poverty exceeds 40%. Stranger things have been seen in Argentina.

Globalization, although it is mainly an economic concept and an intrinsic characteristic of our economy, has a high social component. According to the World Economic Forum, it is the process by which people and goods move easily across the borders of different countries.. It is characterized by the non-existence of barriers -or the fact that they are scarce- that slow down the flow of products and services between nations, allowing, in practice, the integration of markets.. The theory is simple and its advantages are clear: global trade reduces costs, spreads knowledge and helps economies of scale.

Supporting its rise by relevant positions such as that of Ronald Reagan in his 1988 speech: “Here, in the United States, we must take a moment to recognize that one of the key factors behind our great prosperity is the policy of open trade, which allows Americans to freely exchange goods and services with free people around the world.”. And, later, Bill Clinton ratified that “it is very important that China enters the WTO to guarantee that its markets are open for us and thus we will open our markets to China to promote stability and peace in the world, increasing exchanges to the maximum”.

An unstoppable phenomenon, which some economic analysts dared to say was responsible for between 5% and 10% of world GDP, that is, more than Japan's economy.

Globalization has projected an evident positive impact by boosting social well-being in developing countries, but it has also caused the relocation of industries with job losses and changes in lifestyles in the places of origin.. In reaction to this last effect, some countries opted to reduce corporate taxes to attract global investment, thereby giving governments less revenue to spend on social welfare policies.. A vicious circle that, together with economic stagnation, surrounded Western governments, and many of their political leaders felt that globalization made them vulnerable and benefited only a minority.

The financial crisis, followed by Brexit, the Trump era in the United States, which started a trade war, continued by the harsh episode of the pandemic, and finally the war in Ukraine left globalization in shock, or perhaps dead.

However, there is a part of globalization that has been oblivious to all these circumstances.. Faced with the globalization of products that reached its peak in 2008, the globalization of services has not stopped growing, currently representing around 15% of world GDP. They include a high demand from developed nations for all types of intermediation, starting from traditional service sectors such as finance and insurance, with increasing diversification into new areas such as information technology and business process outsourcing in healthcare, education, tourism, and creative industries.

This new globalization does not link production and logistics chains, making it more difficult to build entry barriers since the development of digital platforms allows companies to offer their services to a global client.

We are simply facing a new way of approaching business and this is observed in all areas, including culture.. Hollywood and American pop face alternatives such as Bollywood productions, Instagram videos and Turkish soap operas. One of the most watched music events is the famous South Korean Squid Game, while the world's most downloaded app is TikTok and the largest online fashion retailer is Shein.

The consequence of all this boom is that global data traffic, which skyrocketed during the pandemic, continues to grow, and is expected to reach some 780 exabytes by 2026, a figure that will more than triple that of what we thought was a record year in 2020.

The seventh art, cinema, is a good precursor of our society and the film The God Must Be Crazy (Botswana, 1980) is a good reflection. It is a comedy written and directed by Jaime Uys, which narrates how one day a classic Coca-Cola glass bottle falls from a plane on an isolated tribe of bushmen who live happily in the Kalahari desert, and from there a series of problems are unleashed based on the globalization of our western customs, chaos that ends when they get rid of the western symbol.

Essentially, we are facing two globalizations, or better, facing a new globalization with two speeds, a slow, controlled one, the globalization of products, where governments pay attention that it does not threaten the social welfare of its citizens; and rapid, accelerated globalization, that of services with unstoppable growth that leverages development. End of the old globalization, long live the new.

The battle of the Galician wind power is about to reach Madrid. The trickle of sentences that the Superior Court of Justice of Galicia (TSXG) has handed down in recent months, issuing the suspension of administrative authorizations for wind farms granted by the Xunta, has put renewable developers on guard who are already working with their legal teams to bring cases to the Supreme Court.

The prosecution of the wind farms in the Galician territory has occurred as a result of complaints from regional environmental groups, mainly two, the Petón do Lobo platform and the Association for the Ecological Defense of Galicia (Adega).. The second threatened to take legal action with some thirty projects promoted in the region, something that has set off alarm bells in the wind industry given the alignment with the clamor of environmentalists that the Chamber of the Galician TSJ that judges these processes has maintained.

In January 2022, the electric company of Portuguese origin EDP already received a blow from the Galician Justice that stopped the repowering (process to modernize existing parks and install others with greater capacity) of one of its wind farms. But in recent months there has been an escalation of complaints by these activist groups that have resulted in one judicial setback after another for the promoters. The native companies Greenalia and Engasa were the first and, more recently, the Galician court overturned Naturgy's administrative authorization to build a wind farm in Lugo, as this media reported.

The ruling against Naturgy is precisely the one that worries the wind sector the most. And it is that in it the Galician court appealed to the “principle of equality” and “legal certainty” to knock down the gas company's project, understanding that what the plaintiff association requested was equivalent to what was claimed in the cases of Greenalia and Engasa and, therefore, the magistrates concluded that they should “now follow the same solution”. In short, an argument that, if maintained, will mean the systematic halt of all the parks that come to court.

With this background, several promoters have activated their legal teams to undertake an extraordinary appeal before the Supreme Court, which is known as an appeal, since the TSXG has dismissed the appeals that these companies have been filing against the precautionary suspension of the administrative and environmental permits for their parks.

In the sector it has drawn attention that the Galician court is going over the authorizations granted by the Xunta, ultimately contravening an administrative act. It's not common. For example, when on January 25 hundreds of renewable projects had to accredit the environmental impact declaration (DIA), some of those that did not succeed appealed the negative DIA in the courts.. The general criterion of the autonomous courts was to give priority to the administrative act and not declare the precautionary measures requested by the promoters so as not to immediately lose their access points to the network.

The climate of tension that exists around the windmills in Galicia, the fourth autonomous region by installed wind power, has long dominated the business debate. In the last sectoral forum organized by the Wind Energy Association (AEE) in Madrid at the end of June, Jorge Barredo, Naturgy's general director of Renewables, anticipated: “The judicialization is going to bring down permits and it is going to go further and further.”

PREPA entered the debate last week when it published a statement in which it criticized the situation in the region: “Some anti-wind collectives, protected by interpretations of the law, lead to the structural blockade of the relevant efforts, delaying the processes sine die and eliminating any certainty for companies that have to invest in the territory”.

According to ESA estimates, the one-year delay in the processing of a 50 MW wind farm in Galicia (similar dimensions to the one that has paralyzed Naturgy) has a cost for the Galician and Spanish economy of 77.1 million euros. Among the impacts calculated by the wind power association is a cut of 2.8 million during the first year in income for municipalities, the Xunta and the tenants of the land where the park is located, as well as 734,000 euros per year in collections in the following 25 years.

The amazing paragraph appears lost as if nothing on page 59 of what has been made public of the Addendum. This is officially called “the second phase of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan of the Kingdom of Spain” and it is the request for an extra 94,000 million from Brussels to ensure the around 160,000 million allocated to Spain in European funds.. The Government quickly requested the 70,000 million grants in 2021, but the loan chapter was missing.

The unusual paragraph of the public document presented by the first vice president, Nadia Calviño, reads as follows: «It has been agreed with the European Commission to take advantage of the Addendum to: correct typographical errors and inconsistencies in the wording between the different parts of the Council Implementation Decision in 13 cases; the adaptation of the wording of the milestones to the new circumstances in 13 cases and; the adjustment of the calendar to the new context in 44 cases. In addition, 5 new milestones have been added to the plan». In other words, the Ministry has introduced 70 changes to the original plan without negotiating them with the opposition, despite sending the document last June in the run-up to the electoral campaign with effects of deployment in the next legislature.

What are those changes? In the 192 pages of the public document there is not a trace and it is that the elections are noticeable in this whole episode of launching the positive and hiding the negative.

On the one hand, the Addendum was presented in full pre-campaign as an indicator that the Government obtains European funds on a blanket. On the other, it was decided not to reveal the changes that it implies, because it would be publicly admitting before the elections the failures of the plan that must be renegotiated. One of them is, as this newspaper published last Monday, the renegotiation of how to finance the maintenance of highways and roads after having renounced “due to the elections” to impose the promised payment for use so that “those who pollute pay”. The Prime Minister himself, Pedro Sánchez, confirmed it on the last day of the campaign after finally admitting that he has this payment plan in his commitments with the EU. But there are another 69 changes.

The consultants that follow the execution of the funds point out that there is a failure behind the scenes of these hidden modifications. “Once the deadline for the fulfillment of certain commitments of the Plan set for December 2022 has expired, the Addendum provides for including the delay of 70 reform milestones and investment objectives -which have not been specified- justified in the concurrence of objective circumstances that make it difficult to comply”, says the so-called Radar Next Generation EU that EY Insights sends to its clients.

For her part, Paloma Baena, from Llorente y Cuenca, points out that the bulk of the changes is “extension of the terms of those milestones and objectives that are considered difficult to achieve within the initially agreed term”. And he agrees that “of all these changes, no detailed information has been provided so far.”

Sources from the Ministry of Economy decline to explain to this newspaper the changes requested from Brussels: “They are in the documentation delivered to the European Commission”. And why not reveal them now if, according to the above paragraph, there is already an “agreement” on them with Brussels? In the Ministry they respond that we must wait for formal validation from the Commission. On the other hand, in the community Executive they assure this newspaper that there is no such agreement, because the Addendum is still in the process of evaluation and that, in addition, it can be extended beyond the two months established to assess the request of Spain for the electoral change. The European commissioner, Paolo Gentiloni, knows from the mouth of Alberto Núñez Feijóo himself that Calviño is hiding information from him and both he and his colleague Valdis Dombrovskis are willing, according to the sources consulted, that, if there is a possible change of government, their analysis period be extended to allow time for changes.

This Addendum is an accumulation of government errors. It should have been requested from the start, as the astute Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi did at the time.. There were two reasons: the first, to collect double the advance in 2021. In August of that year, Spain received the first transfer from the European Commission charged to the funds as an advance and it was limited to 9,000 million, because that was equivalent to the stipulated 13% of the requested funds: 70,000 million grants at that time without the current additional 94,000 million. Instead, on those same dates, Rome received 24,900 million, because Draghi has already requested the entire set of the plan assigned to his country, including loans. In other words, presenting it so late deprived Spain of an extra 10,000 million in 2021.

The second mistake is that the conditions of the EU loans respond to the rates of the moment and are currently much worse than when Draghi and half a dozen other countries, including Portugal, applied two years before Calviño.

The advantage of doing it now, yes, is to take advantage to change errors in the plan and gain time given the slow execution. According to a study by EY Insigths, Spain is the first country to request money from Brussels, but the twelfth in execution until the end of 2022.

For their part, Llorente y Cuenca maintains that precisely the presentation of the Addendum has contributed to slowing down the already desperately slow execution. “Thus, if during 2021 20,620 million were committed and during the two semesters of 2022 they exceeded 14,000 million, the volume of funds committed during the first semester of 2023 has dropped to only 7,770 million (…) The clearest reasons for this slowdown seem to be the prolonged final negotiation of the Addendum”.

Whoever manages to govern after the elections of 23-J will have to straighten the course, avoid so much desert contest (5,670 million without adjudication for now) and put an end to such an unpresentable lack of transparency.

Not even a mild winter with a general drop in gas prices has succeeded in tarnishing Naturgy's results. The first Spanish gas company has closed a golden first semester in which it has managed to compensate for the cut in sales with higher margins, an equation that has resulted in an increase in profit to 1,045 million euros between January and June, 87.6% more than in the same period of the previous year, when the company earned 557 million.

The progress of the company's business has not been unrelated to the situation at the start of the year. After the historic rise in gas and electricity prices in 2022, fueled by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the first half of 2023 brought a reduction in energy prices that in Europe were affected by lower demand due to mild temperatures, which translated into full reserves. Average gas prices in the main markets showed significant corrections, with declines of up to 41.8% compared to the same period last year.

All these factors favored a drop in group sales to 12,054 million euros, 28% less than in the first six months of 2022 (16,737 million). In parallel, the gross operating profit (ebitda) improved significantly, more than 39%, standing at 2,849 million, according to the semi-annual results that Naturgy has transferred to the market on Monday.

Naturgy pursued three objectives in the first six months of the year: debt, dividend and investments. The company has reduced its net liabilities from the 12,070 million that it carried at the end of 2022 to 10,752 million as of June 30, 2023. In addition, the group made investments amounting to 839 million in the period. Within the framework of the recent review of its strategic plan, the gas company has revised its shareholder remuneration upwards and will pay a first interim dividend of 0.50 euros per share on August 7, 2023 results, 66% more than the one distributed in August of last year.

In Spain, Naturgy's Generation activity boosted the result, with higher margins in the thermal segment (which includes combined cycles) and a 34% increase in ebitda in the Renewable Generation area, up to 235 million in the period, a positive evolution that is explained by the increase in installed capacity and production in Spain, especially in the gas company's hydraulic plants, which multiplied its production by 2.3 times. “This was partially offset by lower regulated revenues (new parameters for the 2023-25 semi-period) and lower sales prices,” the company has stated.

In its half-yearly report, Naturgy has highlighted the group's commitment to biomethane. The company currently operates 2 megawatts (MW) of capacity on this renewable gas, reaching a production of 117 megawatt hours (MWh) during the first half of 2023 and is advancing several additional projects in Spain. In addition, two hydrogen projects are underway, in Meirama (30MW) and La Robla (280MW), and “a portfolio of additional options is being evaluated.”