Énergie du Mali

Stock performance

History

Énergie du Mali (EDM-SA) is the national electricity utility, responsible for generating, transmitting, and distributing power since the early decades of independence. It has gone through several restructurings, including a period of partial private management in the early 2000s, and has been in chronic financial difficulty.

Business model

EDM-SA generates electricity from hydropower dams on the Niger and Senegal rivers, diesel and heavy-fuel-oil plants, and a growing number of solar plants, and imports power from neighboring countries. Its tariffs have long been set below the cost of oil-fired generation, leaving it dependent on government subsidies and running up large debts to fuel suppliers.

Market position

EDM-SA is Mali's dominant electricity supplier, though only a portion of the population, mainly in towns, has access to the grid.

Country impact

Severe power cuts in 2023 and 2024, when many neighborhoods of Bamako went without electricity for much of the day because EDM-SA could not pay for fuel, hit businesses and households hard and became a major political and economic issue for Mali's military-led government.