Whilst we struggle with bills, BG profits up.

Andy_WSM

Oh dear - I know the reaction this is going to get. :mad:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21598504

British Gas has said its profits have risen because a colder 2012 meant people used more gas.
It reported profits from residential energy supply of £606m for 2012, up 11% from the previous year. It said gas consumption had been up 12%.
Profits were up 16% to £312m at its residential services unit, which covers services such as repairing boilers.
Centrica, which owns British Gas, reported an adjusted operating profit of £2.7bn for 2012, up 14% from 2011.

We need to feel sorry for them though apparently:

Centrica chief executive Sam Laidlaw told the BBC that the firm's profit margins per household "actually went down", adding that the company had made just under £50 profit per customer household.

Oh, but wait!

Centrica's dividends to shareholders have risen 6% and the company is also returning £500m to them.

Not entirely shocking, but disgusting all the same...

MillicentBystander

Cue the usual wholly irrelevant comparisons to a well known/infamous grocer in order to justify these figures.....;)

bob_bank_spanker

The facts you quoted are accurate. Margins are slightly down, profits up due to increased consumption. Perhaps BG should run not for profit just for a year to help people out. People would still struggle to heat their homes, only £50 a year on average coming off the bill. Costs still increasing so this would assumedly be passed on. Pension funds hit by the lack of dividend received, and the exchequer hit by lack of tax revenue. Utopia!

MillicentBystander

If they hadn't been given a licence to print money in the first place by a shockingly inept Govt who privatised an industry with an existing customer base of millions then that £1.1 billion would have gone back to the Govt. coffers and maybe helped fund some much needed gas storage facilities.


This is such an easy business - just add £50 per household to your costs and take the money. There's absolutely no incentive for any of the Big 6 to closely monitor their costs (example: BG reportedly spent a half a billion pounds on an IT system that was so poor they sued the suppliers) because they are allowed to increase their prices with seemingly no real need to justify it.

ollski

Privatisation was 27 years ago, really is time to get over that one by now.

Andy_WSM

ollski wrote: »

Privatisation was 27 years ago, really is time to get over that one by now.

Decent regulation would help.

MillicentBystander

ollski wrote: »

Privatisation was 27 years ago, really is time to get over that one by now.

It would be far easier for me to do so if the Govt at the time and successive Govts of whatever hue had actually regulated this industry properly. They haven't so I will continue to not 'get over it'. They have ended up with an industry less trusted than the banking industry! Enough said.

PS If you work in this industry aren't you supposed to make that clear in your sig?

Cardew

MillicentBystander wrote: »

Cue the usual wholly irrelevant comparisons to a well known/infamous grocer in order to justify these figures.....;)

If you mean Tesco;) they are not such a good example for comparison this year. Their profits fell by over 10% and they only made a profit of £1,600,000,000.00 in the last 6 months!

Overall group trading profit dropped 10.5% to £1.6bn in the six months to 25 August;

I very much agree with this statement of yours:

There's absolutely no incentive for any of the Big 6 to closely monitor their costs

I wonder how much BG(and others) spend on commission paid to the comparison sites such as uswitch, compare the little furry animal etc etc - not to mention the masses of staff they employ to deal with the endless merry-go-round of people switching suppliers.

Nada666

Margins are DOWN. Misleading innumerate meaningless scaremongering headlines from the usual culprits. Shame on the BBC and others.

penrhyn

Green ecomentalists are well entrenched in the corridors of power and the EU. Along with landowners and the windmill cowboys out to make a fast buck.

grahamc2003

Andy_WSM wrote: »

Oh dear - I know the reaction this is going to get. :mad:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21598504




We need to feel sorry for them though apparently:





Oh, but wait!





Not entirely shocking, but disgusting all the same...

Whether bgas should be a private company or not is a separate question, but given that it is, then it has a legal duty to maximise profits for its owners. I'm sure if you owned a business (and it's likely you own a bit of bgas indirectly), you'd try to maximise your profits, and if you paid someone else to manage it (as is the case will all quoted companies), then you'd want them to maximise profits too. Sounds like your complaint isn't that bgas is a making a profit, but that the electicity supply industry shouldn't be structured around public companies - in which case I agree.

For many reasons, such a basic industry where every person has to make use of and is central to the whole economy and therefore indirectly controlled by government anyhow, the esi should be publicly owned (even with all the well documented drawbacks of publicly owned companies). But while it's privately owned, every company will try to maximise its profits, which are in any case determined and sanctioned indirectly by the government).