The group’s new figures are particularly exciting for shareholders in the current situation.
(Photo: Reuters)
Dusseldorf The Düsseldorf-based energy group Uniper reported a net loss of more than twelve billion euros for the first half of the year. The German subsidiary of the Finnish energy group Fortum posted adjusted earnings (EBIT) of minus 564 million euros. The company announced on Wednesday morning. In the same period of the previous year, Uniper had presented adjusted earnings of EUR 580 million. Uniper expects a negative result for the year as a whole.
The high net loss is partly due to already known write-downs on Uniper’s Russia-related businesses – for example for the Baltic Sea gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 and power plants in Russia. The largest part, however, is related to gas supply cuts from Russia.
Uniper only expects an improvement in the coming years. CFO Tiina Tuomela said in a statement: “We expect earnings to improve in 2023 and are aiming to break even from 2024.”
Uniper is Germany’s largest gas importer and is currently in a precarious position: The company gets large parts of its gas from old contracts with the Russian gas giant Gazprom. But he hasn’t been delivering the contractually guaranteed gas quantities to Germany for months.
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This situation causes Uniper to lose billions. Because the company has old contracts with gas customers. This means that Uniper has to buy the missing gas expensively on the market and sell it on to its own customers at low prices. These customers include more than 100 municipal utilities and industrial companies.
Because of the dramatic situation, the German federal government put together an aid package for Uniper in July, which will initially give the company 7.7 billion euros. In addition, the state is taking a 30 percent stake in the energy supplier. Uniper wants to have the stabilization package approved by the shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting in the fall.
Uniper: Loss of up to 100 million euros per day due to gas supply cutbacks
Since then, the situation has worsened again. Because now Gazprom is no longer even delivering 40 percent of the promised quantities through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, as it did at the beginning of July, but only 20 percent. The losses for Uniper are all the greater.
As recently as July, Uniper had announced that it was currently paying up to a billion euros a month. Uniper boss Klaus-Dieter Maubach had said that a total of six billion euros would be lost by the end of September.
This statement should no longer apply in view of the renewed gas throttling from Russia. The analyst Guido Hoymann from Metzler Bank estimates that Uniper is currently making losses of between 80 and 100 million euros per day – that would correspond to a minus of 2.4 to 3 billion per month. By the end of September, so many billions of euros in losses could accumulate.
>> Read also: That’s how dependent Gazprom is on Europe
The bill by the end of September is important because a gas levy will take effect from October, which is intended to relieve Uniper and other gas importers. Uniper and competing companies were able to submit an application to explain how high their loss is due to the lack of deliveries to Russia and will be reimbursed for 90 percent of these costs from October. To make this possible, the consumer gas price in Germany will increase by 2.419 cents per kilowatt hour.
A total of twelve companies have applied for compensation of 34 billion euros from the levy. A large part of this sum is likely to be attributable to Uniper alone.
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