"There's something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?"
"E.ON has just announced profits of £4.9BILLION for the first 6 months of the year. That's £27,071,823 a day, £18,800 a minute, and an increase of 40% on last year.' while most ordinary people can't afford to pay their ridiculously increased energy bills."
Ah yes, but that's the German parent company of the multinational vertically integrated energy conglomerate, not E.On Next Energy Limited which is one of the smallest subsidiaries operating as a domestic energy supplier here in the UK.
So almost all of that profit comes from oil and gas and very little of it comes via the domestic energy customers.
One would hope that these big energy multinationals could use the unprecedented profits to subsidise 'the little guy' lower down the food chain, but that's not how it works. Fortunately, the Exchequer has been taking a windfall tax off the top of some of the profits (those directly accrued in the UK market) which ultimately did subsidise the EBSS and the price caps last year.
Just for the sake of fairness you might like to know the Profit and Loss figures for E.On Next Energy Ltd for 2020 and 2021 - these are the latest figures published by Companies House.
2020 - Turnover was £185.62 million. Operating profit was actually a loss of £44.73 million.
2021 - Turnover was £2741 million. Operating profit was again a net loss of £213.83 million.
Turnover was significantly increased by the market costs of energy and by the increase in customer numbers attributed to E.On Next taking over as Supplier of Last Resort from several failed smaller energy companies.
In 2020, E.On Next Energy Ltd made a
net loss of approximately £27 per customer. For 2021, that figure was a
net loss of about £387 per customer.
So the 'excess profits' further up the supply chain are certainly not attributable to our domestic energy charges, although our domestic energy prices are a consequence of the situation in the global energy market. The newspapers and media love giving us those big headline figures, but a little context would show a more realistic picture when it comes to us domestic consumers.
There are lot's of things 'wrong with this country', I agree. The way the energy market works certainly needs rethinking, but on the whole I'd much rather be in this country than some I could think of!
