Good afternoon. Electricidade de Moçambique reported a net profit of about $113m for 2025. Look closely, and the figure flatters the company. Almost all of it, some $111m, came as dividends from the firms EDM holds stakes in, most of it from CEZA, the company set up to take over Portugal's share of the Cahora Bassa scheme. The operating result, what EDM earns from buying, moving and selling electricity, was only about $32m, a margin of 3.5% on revenue. Strip out the dividends, and the business of keeping the lights on barely covers its costs.
That income is an advantage, of course. Most African utilities would be glad of a dependable dividend arriving each year from a stake in a large hydro asset. The trouble is what the money is doing: rather than funding expansion, it's filling the gap the core business can't cover, so that EDM can report a profit at all.
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EDM has been tasked with delivering the government's promise of electricity for every Mozambican by 2030. The chairman, Joaquim Ou-chim, talks of 58 administrative posts still to reach, but that measures territory on a map, not households with power. The real yardstick sits in the government's own National Energy Compact, drawn up for the World Bank's Mission 300. It puts access at 60.1% in 2024, though EDM now claims about 70%, and says reaching everyone by 2030 will take another 4.9m connections: about 423,000 a year on the grid, and 435,000 a year off it.
In 2024, EDM made about 412,000 on-grid connections, close to the annual rate required. Off-grid, however, where the poorest and most scattered households are, it managed 140,000, less than a third of the pace needed. Off-grid is meant to deliver 29% of what remains, the part EDM finds hardest and least profitable, and it's the part falling furthest behind.
