The main power utility PPC appears set to miss a bailout-required market share contraction target for the end of 2016 as a result of a market share gain measuring approximately one percentage point in December, early – still unofficial – market data has indicated. PPC had also added half a percentage point to its market share a month earlier.
The latest data showed that the utility’s market share for the end of December will rise to a level of just below 90 percent after ending November at 88.66 percent and October at 87.99 percent.
These gains suggests that PPC will miss the bailout-related market contraction target of 87.42 by the end of 2016 as part of a downward trajectory through which the utility’s market share is expected to drop to less than 50 percent by 2020. PPC’s market share is expected to fall to 75.24 percent by the end of 2017, 62.24 percent by the end of 2018 and 49.24 percent by the end of 2019.
The utility’s gain of nearly two percentage points over the last couple of months of 2016 will add weight to a demand by the country’s creditors for PPC to offer greater electricity amounts through the recently introduced NOME auctions, a bailout requirement seeking to break the utility’s dominance by offering other traders access to the utility’s low-cost lignite and hydropower sources.
The creditors want NOME electricity percentage amounts of previous years compounded to ensuing years.
Interestingly, PPC’s market share gains at the end of 2016 coincided with electricity amounts secured by independent suppliers at the inaugural NOME auction last October and promotional campaigns launched by these rival suppliers.
As was recently reported by energypress, PPC’s chief executive Manolis Panagiotakis has admitted that the utility is striving, through a series of discount offers to clients, to delay its market share contraction while it prepares to carve out and sell new supply subsidiaries as a means of reducing its market share. PPC is pushing for its split-and-sale plan as an alternative to the just-introduced NOME auctions, which the utility would like to have scrapped.