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Big six supplier Npower has continued to suffer heavy financial losses in the last three months as the supplier waits for the recovery programme announced in August to take effect.
RWE’s interim results for its UK supply businesses for the first nine months of this year reveal a loss of £48 million, down £121 million from the £73 million profit it achieved in the same period last year.
Npower said the decline is due to the continuing impact of the billing system and process problems blamed for the poor financial performance revealed in its H1 results.
In August Npower revealed a 65 per cent reduction in domestic supply profits after 300,000 customers moved away from the supplier.
Npower set a target of the end of 2016 to turn around the supply business after announcing the replacement of Paul Massara as chief executive with Paul Coffey.
Coffey said: “As already shown in our first half results in August, 2015 continues to be very tough for npower’s domestic business.
“We have initiated a fundamental recovery programme in order to stabilise the business as early as possible whilst providing a more robust and effective operating basis to serve our customers in future.”
“At the end of the quarter RWE made a number of significant changes in Npower’s leadership.
“These changes in addition to the establishment of a chief recovery officer and programme office will provide the necessary capability to execute an effective and sustainable recovery.”
Npower said it has maintained the progress made earlier in the year in customer service with 98 per cent of customers receiving their bill on time.
Customer complaints also dropped by 15 per cent in quarter three.
Overall, RWE’s generation and retail businesses in the UK made a loss of £111 million in the first nine months of 2015, compared to a loss of £81 million in the same period of 2014.
RWE’s UK generation performance has continued to improve in the last three months, cutting the £154 million loss in the same period in 2014 to just a £63 million loss this year.
RWE said the improvement is due to higher revenues from more flexible power generation, energy efficiency improvements and a reduction in costs.
RWE’s UK generation sites also produced 11 per cent more energy than in the same period last year.
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