SYDNEY--GDF Suez SA is looking to sell a major stake in its Australian electricity generation and retail business, as the French power group intensifies moves to cut debt and boost profit hurt by Europe's slow recovery from the global financial crisis, people familiar with the matter said.

GDF Suez has hired Deutsche Bank to find a buyer for around 30% of its International Power (Australia) Holdings Pty Ltd unit, which runs a coal-fired power plant in Victoria state along with two gas-fired power plants and a wind farm in South Australia state, the people said. The IPAH business also sells power and gas to more than 350,000 customers in Victoria.

Any deal would likely see GDF Suez retain a stake of around 40% in IPAH, the people said.

It comes more than six months after GDF Suez sold 28% of IPAH to Japan's Mitsui & Co., while the French power group has also been reducing its stakes in other assets globally that it considers to be noncore.

In August, the group sold 50% of its Portuguese power assets to Japanese trading house Marubeni. That deal came three months after it also sold a 20% stake in a giant dam in Brazil to Mitsui. Late 2012, GDF Suez also sold a 60% stake in a wind and solar power project Canada, to Mitsui and a consortium led by Fiera Axium Infrastructure.

GDF Suez outlined a strategy of selling assets in late 2012 to help it cut debt and protect profits at a time when European power demand was in the doldrums. The company has also suffered from a surge in supply of heavily subsidized renewable energy, ripples from the U.S. shale revolution and inconsistent government policy.

These challenges led the company to write down its assets by nearly 14.9 billion euros (US$20.2 billion) last year, mostly to reflect the drop in value of its power-generation assets in Europe.

Write to David Winning at david.winning@wsj.com and Geraldine Amiel at geraldine.amiel@wsj.com

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