Meralco sees slower sales growth in first quarter of 2019

Danessa Rivera (The Philippine Star) - March 20, 2019 - 12:00am

https://www.philstar.com/business/2019/03/20/1902862/meralco-sees-slower-sales-growth-first-quarter-2019

MANILA, Philippines — Coming from a high base last year, Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) expects sales to rise slowly in the first quarter due to cooler temperature during the period.

The power distributor sees energy sales growing by around 2.5 percent from January to March, Meralco president and chief executive officer Oscar Reyes said in an interview yesterday.

“We’re still waiting for the month to finish but it’ll probably be around two and a half percent (at end-March),” he said.

 “As I said, we’re coming from a high base. We had exponential growth last year,” Reyes added.

Energy sales rose nine percent to 10,145 gigawatt-hours (gwh) in the first quarter last year, driven by increased consumption from existing customers and new customers as well as higher temperature.

For the first two months this year, the power distributor reported a two percent hike in sales volume.

“Well, I think we’re seeing February year-to-date sales growth to be around a little over two percent, but that is against a high base of 2018. In the first two months, growth has been in the area of two plus percent,” Reyes said.

Growth will still be driven by rising demand from Meralco’s industrial and commercial customers.

For residential customers, inflation worries have tapered off since the start of the year, which is a good sign for sales.

Reyes said demand from that segment was not as strong as the other customer segments “probably because of slightly cooler temperature and probably due to some concerns  as a result of rising inflation during the last quarter of 2018.”

“But inflation has gone down significantly. That should relieve consumers,” Reyes said.

In September last year, inflation peaked to a nine-year high at 6.7 percent as supply disruptions in the aftermath of Typhoon Ompong pushed food prices up.

Inflation was steady at 6.7 percent in October then eased to six percent and 5.1 percent in November and December, respectively.

It slowed further to 4.4 percent in January and to year-low 3.8 percent in February.