Centrica crashes to £1.1 bn loss

CENTRICA shares plunged another 15pc after it posted a £1.1bn loss.

In a bleak set of results, the owner of British Gas, which trades as Scottish Gas north of the Border, blamed the Government’s cap on energy bills and falling gas prices.

Its losses nearly doubled in the year to December 31, after a drop in revenues from £23.3bn to £22.7bn.

The results are likely to be the last annual set of numbers delivered by outgoing boss Iain Conn, 57, who has presided over an exodus of 3m British Gas customers since he took over in 2015.

Conn (below) said Centrica had faced a ‘challenging environment, most significantly the implementation of the UK default tariff cap and falling natural gas prices’.

The company has also been hit by competition from smaller rivals and said that outages at two British nuclear power plants last year had hurt profits.

However, Centrica said it had slowed the exodus of customers in 2019 to 286,000, roughly half that of 2018. And Conn has also sought to shift the company away from energy supply and towards providing consumer services and products.

He has also put its oil and gas operations up for sale.

But the grim figures sent Centrica’s shares plunging 15.3pc, or 12.96p, to 71.82p, wiping £750m off its value and bringing more pain for some 600,000 small shareholders.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: ‘Centrica is a turnaround story still in its infancy and the company’s full results show there is a long way to go.

‘It belongs to a group of large companies on the stock market which have gone from solid, dependable businesses to ones with big question marks over what they might look like in the future. It has a plan to get back on track but the journey will be bumpy.’

The Government’s cap on energy prices came into force at the beginning of last year, promising to bring down bills for customers on default tariffs. That has hit the amount energy firms are allowed to charge households and hammered profits. But customers have also been leaving the six biggest suppliers on the UK energy market in recent years, with experts hailing 2019 as the year that the groups’ stranglehold on the market was finally broken. SSE has been snapped up by one of the smaller challengers, Ovo Energy, which only entered the market a decade ago. Ovo and other challengers spent the second half of the last decade stealing customers away from the former giants, slashing Centrica’s market share from 24pc when Conn took over, to 19pc towards the end of last year, according to regulator Ofgem.

Mark Todd, co-founder of independent comparison site Energyhelpline, said: ‘British Gas is really struggling with the onslaught from small suppliers, the price cap, and falling natural gas prices hitting them hard.’