Earnings were impacted by higher procurement costs.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf The energy company Eon is not one of the beneficiaries of the high electricity and gas prices. In fact, the energy prices at the Dax company will also be a burden in the second quarter, as can be seen from the half-year figures presented on Wednesday. However, the Essen-based company knows how to compensate for this – and confirms the business outlook for the current year.
In the meantime, some of the additional costs have been passed on to customers, “but they will only have a stabilizing effect on our result in the second half,” said CFO Marc Spieker on Wednesday. With the entry into force of the gas price levy, you will be able to pass on a further part of your costs from autumn.
As of August 1, the prices for Eon customers have risen by an average of 40 percent in the past few months (example NRW). Eon boss Leonhard Birnbaum did not want to say when presenting the balance sheet whether there would be another increase this year.
In the case of electricity, price increases of 17 percent were still limited, since the levy on the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) ceased to apply on July 1st. “But we have seen a significant increase in electricity prices, and if this were to last, we would have to make further adjustments here over the next year,” says Birnbaum. Eon supplies more than 50 million private and business customers with electricity and gas in Europe, 14 million in Germany alone.
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Nevertheless, the high price signals also had a positive effect, explained the Eon boss: “Gas is saved, and noticeably so. That is the order of the day.” Anyone who consumes less reduces demand and thus prices. This contributes to security of supply.
“If every household with natural gas reduced its consumption by 15 percent, you could save 40 terawatt hours of natural gas. That would be Hesse’s entire annual consumption,” calculates Birnbaum. That is why they expressly support both the gas savings plan of the European Union and that of the federal government.
Eon boss Birnbaum advocates reduced VAT
In the first half of this year, Germany has already saved a significant amount of gas, according to the Federal Network Agency 15 percent compared to the previous year. In view of the significant burdens on consumers, the Eon boss called for measures to relieve the burden: “We know very well what burdens this means for many of our customers. Further measures are therefore required, such as the abolition of the energy tax, a reduction to the reduced VAT rate for energy and targeted relief for customer groups that are particularly affected, who can no longer bear these price increases.” In the Customer Solutions division, the result falls to just over one due to the high procurement costs billion euros, 90 million less than in the previous year.
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At just under EUR 4.1 billion, adjusted Ebitda was around EUR 700 million below the previous year’s figure. Last year, Eon had benefited above all from positive special effects amounting to 600 million euros: the nuclear subsidiary Preussen Elektra received a one-off payment 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 nuclear phase-out.
However, the high electricity prices are still benefiting Eon with a view to its last remaining nuclear power plant Isar 2. In the non-core business, the supplier bundles the operation and dismantling of the German nuclear power plants, which are controlled by the Preussen Elektra unit, as well as the generation business in Turkey. “We are raising our forecast for non-core business by EUR 200 million to between EUR 0.8 billion and EUR 1 billion,” said Chief Financial Officer Spieker.
In the debate about a possible extension of the term, Eon again referred to politics. “We have been preparing for the decommissioning and dismantling of our nuclear power plants for years, both technically and organizationally,” said Spieker. “Should the federal government come to a reassessment of the situation as part of the ongoing stress test, we are ready to talk.”
In addition to nuclear power, business with energy infrastructure solutions also developed positively: the division’s profit rose by 23 percent to 313 million euros. Eon can also benefit from the self-sufficiency boom of homeowners. In the first half of the year, 20,000 solar and storage solutions and 40,000 modern heating solutions, primarily heat pumps, were sold in Europe. That is a total of 40 percent more than a year earlier. Birnbaum said on Wednesday that this means that the company is now the largest provider of sustainable energy solutions for private households throughout Europe.
“We have never seen such a great demand for smart and sustainable solutions from our customers,” said the Eon boss. However, the demand now far exceeds the company’s own supply capacities. The main culprits are problems in the supply chain and a lack of skilled workers who can also install the solar systems, heat pumps and storage tanks.
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