CHRONOLOGY-Competition in German retail energy
(Latest from E.ON, Flexstrom, Yello, Toptarif, Verivox)
July 3 (Reuters) - More German households have switched electricity and gas suppliers under a European Union rule, from July 1, 2007, which gave consumers a choice of supplier.
Following is a chronology of customer switches and price trends in the market of 40 million households in Europe's biggest economy.
Latest entries are marked ***
July - Big utility E.ON*** (EONGn.DE) with millions of customers says it is offering a saver bonus for those who reduce their power consumption by at least 10 percent over one year. The bonuses are between 20 and 100 euros ($28.04-140.2), depending on individual usage.
June - Six-year old retail market newcomer Flexstrom*** says it has amassed 100 million euros for acquisitions, for example in solar energy generation. It has won 350,000 customers with a strategy based on cheap prepaid power supply.
June - EnBW's Yello*** discount brand teams up with Google to help householders install power meters on their PCs to monitor their usage along with business and weather news. Yello, which was the first unit of a big integrated utility group to trade nationwide, in its tenth year has 1.4 million customers.
June - Internet portal Toptarif***, which monitors prices and encourages supplier switches says gas prices will be cut by an average 10 percent by some 233 local gas suppliers from July onwards, representing a third of all household gas users.
Those reducing prices include big companies such as RWE (RWEG.DE), EWE and Gasag.
Retail gas prices keep falling as a result of falling crude oil, to which gas is index-linked with a time lag of six months.
Some 711 companies in the first half of the year already made cuts by around 14.6 percent, Toptarif said.
Another portal, Verivox***, warns however that oil's price recovery since the spring will mean that gas prices may go up again between five and 10 percent at the end of the year 2009.
The cuts in gas are not matched in power where prices increases have amounted to over 8 percent in the year to date.
Providers have cited last year's rallies in the wholesale market for power, which have yet to be pass on to end consumers.
RWE and E.ON have said at their results conferences that they only see the possibility of price cuts in the medium term. And EnBW from July has raised prices again by nearly 8 percent. (Reporting by Vera Eckert)
