Earnings were impacted by higher procurement costs.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf The energy company Eon is not one of the beneficiaries of the energy price crisis. Although the company confirmed its forecast for the current year on Wednesday, the high prices for electricity and gas also weighed on the results of the Essen-based company in the second quarter.
“The current energy crisis makes it absolutely clear that we have to restructure the European energy system. To become independent from Russian gas. In order to ensure security of supply,” said Eon boss Leonhard Birnbaum in a statement.
At just under EUR 4.1 billion, adjusted Ebitda was around EUR 700 million below the previous year’s figure. Last year, Eon mainly benefited from positive special effects.
At that time, the nuclear subsidiary Preussen Elektra received a one-time payment of 600 million euros for the reversal of residual electricity volumes. From the end of December 2022, the income from the nuclear power division will finally disappear with the planned phase-out of nuclear power.
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The network business contributed the largest share of the profit with 2.7 billion euros. However, mild weather and higher costs for grid losses in Sweden and Central and Eastern Europe weighed on business here.
However, Eon is currently most concerned about the high procurement costs at the energy trading centers. In the customer solutions division, the result therefore fell to a good one billion euros, 90 million less than in the previous year.
Last year, Eon took over hundreds of thousands of customers from low-cost electricity providers who could no longer keep their deliveries due to the high prices and canceled contracts overnight. In order to supply these new customers, Eon had to buy electricity and gas at record prices on the stock exchange. Only some of the supply contracts are secured with long-term guarantees.
In June, the electricity price on the German spot market averaged around 315 euros per megawatt hour. A year earlier it was 75 euros. The increase in gas was also enormous.
Eon, in turn, uses this in its non-core business. In this area, Eon bundles the operation and dismantling of the German nuclear power plants, which are controlled by the Preussenelektra unit, as well as the generation business in Turkey.
“We are raising our forecast for the non-core business by 200 million euros to 0.8-1.0 billion euros,” said CFO Marc Spieker on Wednesday.
Business with energy infrastructure solutions also developed positively: the division’s profit rose by 23 percent to EUR 313 million. Eon can also benefit from the self-sufficiency boom of homeowners. In the first half of the year alone, 20,000 solar and storage solutions and 40,000 modern heating solutions, primarily heat pumps, were sold in Europe. A total of 40 percent more than a year earlier.
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