Pure Planet edges towards profitability

Pure Planet co-founder Steven Day has told Utility Week his company is moving towards profitability following the app-based retailer’s latest published financial results.

In its results for the year ending 31 March 2020 the company revealed it had increased its revenue by more than £72 million to £157.3 million while slashing its annual losses by £3.3 million.

Its loss for the financial year was £13.7 million, compared to a previous loss of £17 million. The company’s net liabilities increased from £24 million to £37.7 million.

The supplier, which was founded in 2017, now serves more than 200,000 customers.

While he did not share details of how financial performance in the year to March 2021 compared, he said the company had fared well in the pandemic in terms of bad debt.

“Although bad debt has been a problem across the market for many people in many sectors, we have been pretty resilient,”  he told Utility Week.

He added that when the figures for 2020/21 are released Pure Planet’s losses will have “improved dramatically”.

Day cited a focus on technology as his company’s strategy to improve its financials.

He said: “As a company we are trying to do so many different things from how other companies have grown in the past. One of our aims was to get into profitable growth as soon as possible, and that has consequences for the way the finances of the business work.

“We did not want to end up in debt after debt, year after year, which some of our competitors have done as they have grown, even the long-standing ones.”

Day said recent market entrants tended to focus on existing business models which include telephone-based, large call centres. While he admitted this “tried and tested” model has worked well for some, it has been challenged by the rise of digital technology and automation, a model which has only been reinforced by Covid.

“Our view was that digital was the way forwards, utilising digital technologies. By that I mean things like our community which is run by 50,000 registered members who help each other. Around nine in 10 of the queries that go into that are answered by somebody else who’s also a member. By using the technology people can get an answer to a commonly-held question pretty quickly”, he said.

Day said Pure Planet’s digital chat service ‘WattBott’ is another example of how a shift to digital is helping to bring down costs.

“Using AI to help field a lot of the routine-type queries that come into an organisation like ours has made a massive difference, it’s transformative. That leaves the human interaction to be much more nuanced around the difficult things, around account management queries, payment issues and so on where it’s more difficult to automate and it’s more important to have human contact.”

Blue Marble

Additionally, the results show that the company spent £1.3 million on its proprietary Blue Marble platform. Day said a long-term ambition was to expand into foreign markets, much in the same way Octopus Energy has done with its own Kraken platform.

He continued: “One of the ideas for Pure Planet is potentially in time we will be able to take it overseas, into other territories perhaps and into other markets.

“With an eye to that possible future we helped ourselves to a design which could be lifted and shifted essentially, in terms of the technology, to other markets and potentially to other organisations as well who could possibly white label it.”

He acknowledged that while the idea was not unique because companies such as Ovo and Octopus have Kaluza and Kraken respectively, Blue Marble was built with a similar intent.

“If you are going to build something digital and you start with that intent and you look across the digital ecosystem of industries elsewhere in the world and in this country, it’s very easy to spot that once you have got it up and running somewhere, you can potentially take it somewhere else,” he added.