Vivant improves retail market performance

By Myrna M. Velasco – June 19, 2022, 8:00 PM
from Manila Bulletin

COREnergy, which is the power retailing arm of listed firm Vivant Corporation, is targeting to sustain upturn in capacity sales to contestable customers next year and for it to log further demand growth beyond 2023.

As indicated by Vivant President Emil Andre M. Garcia, “overall, the performance of retail segment can be sustained in 2023 and improve beyond 2023.”

He qualified that the big jump in patronage of the company’s suite of solutions in the retail electricity supplier (RES) market last year had been primarily from “the synergies between the three legs of our retail portfolio: retail electricity sales, engineering services; and solar rooftop solutions.”

Garcia stressed “it was a success in rolling it out, that really showed in last year’s performance,” although for 2022, he stated that it will be “a bit of a challenge as far as RES because of higher cost of fuel, spot market — but the other two legs (engineering services and solar rooftop solutions) will sustain its growth.”

COREnergy’s current portfolio of clients include semi-conductors, aggregates, poultry industry and schools. It also includes the services and capacities rendered to them are of varying proportions.

Prescriptively, these are within the consumption threshold of 500 kilowatts (kW) and up as instituted by the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) relative to the phased enforcement of Retail Competition and Open Access (RCOA) policy in the electricity sector.

One sphere that the company has been advancing to improve its services on the retail electricity market has been the digitalization of its processes, that way, there would be easier access and communication flow with its customers.

“COREnergy, for example, with so many retail customers that we have to serve, we’re going to make sure that our resources are properly aligned – that we can commit to doing a project by this date…so we use digitalization to make sure that our resources are properly allocated,” said Garcia.

He also noted “other things are also for the retail side again – where our interaction with our customers were based on portals, so it’s easier for them to see their usage, how much their savings are, etc – it’s more of the internal processes and customer interfaces that we’re looking at in terms of digitalization.”