Centrica loses 110,000 UK customers first 4 months of 2018

Centrica said it lost 110,000 customers in the UK in the first four months of the year, although it said the “Beast from the East” snowstorm in February helped increase customer demand in a tough competitive environment.

The company on Monday faces a tough annual meeting of shareholders who have seen the value of their stock halve in the last four years.

In a trading statement, Centrica said revenue growth is expected to be weighted towards the second half of year and remained on track to achieve 2018 group targets set out in its 2017 results announcement.

Although the colder-than-usual weather helped boost demand, Centrica said this was offset by "an exceptionally high number of central heating boiler breakdowns during the extreme cold weather in February and March".

The company said it repaired 145,000 boilers in a week, "our busiest week ever and more than twice the normal weekly number".

"We did experience an increase in services customer complaints following the cold weather which have now returned to more normal levels, although additional call-out costs due to the cold weather are expected to result in UK services H1 2018 adjusted operating profit being lower than in H1 2017," Centrica said.

It added that full year production from Spirit Energy was now expected to be in lower half of 2018 targeted range of 50m-55m barrels of oil as a result of unplanned outages at Morecambe Bay and production issues on certain non-operated fields in Norway.

Centrica said nuclear volumes would also be negatively impacted by the recently announced extended outage at one of the reactors at the Hunterston B plant.

The company, which faces a UK government-imposed price cap, said it assumed temporary tariff cap would be in place at end of 2018, adding that it currently had 3.8m customers on its standard variable tariff, down from 4.3m at end of 2017. It expected to reduce this to around 3m by end of 2018.

Chief executive Iain Conn said while the outcome of regulations on the cap remained uncertain, Centrica would continue to "participate actively in the consultation process".