CEZ Distributie CEO anticipates 17% turnover decline in 2009

Doina Vornicu, the new chief executive officer of CEZ Distributie, says the yearend can no longer bring declines surpassing those registered so far, when the quantity of supplied energy dropped by 16% from the first nine months of last year.
Vornicu puts the company’s 2009 turnover at around 670m RON (160m euros), down almost 17% from 2008.
The company decided not to modify this year’s investment budgets, but has instead cut the number of employees by 173 since the start of the year.
“We anticipate we’ve already hit a certain threshold and we do not believe we’ll fall beyond it. We do not believe things will get worse in 2010 and I’m saying this taking into account the behaviour surveys we’re conducting and energy demand for next year,” explains Vornicu, who took over CEZ Distributie’s management on 1 July, 2009.
She says CEZ Distributie supplied 5.2 TWh of energy in the first nine months of this year, down 16% from the same period of last year. “Electricity consumption has largely become volatile. Some companies closed down, others cut their consumption. We have fields of business that were seriously hurt, such as the petrochemical industry. As for household consumers, we saw no change,” Vornicu says.
CEZ serves around 1.3 million customers after having taken the majority stake in former Electrica Oltenia in 2005.
Despite falling supplied energy quantities, CEZ Distributie had an investment budget similar with last year’s and for 2010 plans to raise it by almost 50%.
Vornicu says the company started taking anti-crisis measures as soon as the first crisis signs emerged, in 2008, with one of the most interesting strategies being the setting up of a true elite force specialised in identifying illegal electricity consumption.
“We started restructuring and reorganisation programmes as early as 2007, which inevitably led to personnel cuts,” said Vornicu. Still, one of the most important measures set to be applied on the long term and probably have the biggest impact over employees is the automation of electric substations. “Thus, while in 2008 we had 2,026 employees, we now have 1,853, a number that will gradually go down once the substations are automated”, says Vornicu.
Besides substation automation, Vornicu has another target, namely the implementation of performance-based wages.