Gas giant Centrica set to announce heavy job losses

The company said half the jobs lost would be through redundancies.

LONDON, July 30 (Reuters) – Britain’s largest utility Centrica (LSE: CNA.L – news) will sell up to 1 billion pounds worth of upstream and wind assets by 2017 and reduce net headcount by around 4,000 staff in a strategy shift that will see it put more emphasis on energy supply and services.

Centrica reported its group revenue edged down by 2%, while pre-tax profit was up by 3% to £1bn.

Centrica is pleased to announce the appointment of Jeff Bell as Chief Financial Officer (‘CFO’) with effect from 1 August 2015, at which time he will also join Centrica plc’s Board.

Mr Conn, who took the helm of the troubled company at the start of the year, said Centrica would now focus on being “a customer-facing business”.

Its new investment plans reflected that while it said cost-savings would total £750m over five years.

Meanwhile, energy giant EDF announced £842m first year profit haul in the UK.

Ann Robinson, from price comparison website uSwitch, said: “The news that British Gas is predicting a surge in profits will be a hard pill to swallow for its customers, especially as so many went cold last winter to cope with sky-high bills”.

The cutbacks at Centrica – one of the big six domestic gas and electricity suppliers – is likely to cause a political storm as the British Gas arm doubled its profits to £528m.

“The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has confirmed that household bills should be lower if the energy market was truly competitive”.

“Given how much wholesale prices have fallen over the past two years, customers should be seeing double-digit percentage cuts to their bills”.