OREANDA-NEWS. May 21, 2015. Today we’ve published our full-year results statement which sets out the financial performance of the SSE group as a whole for the 12 months to 31 March 2015.

SSE is a large and diverse business which does a lot more than just supply energy to UK households. It’s been a challenging year for the group with broadly flat profits and difficult decisions being made.

I know that many of our customers will want to understand what these numbers mean for them, their bills and our service. In our Energy Supply business, where we sell energy to customers, profit numbers can be volatile and are subject to big percentage changes from one year to the next, which is why we tend to focus on the medium term average to smooth out the natural peaks and troughs.

Following a difficult 2013/14, our profit margin across the whole of Energy Supply returned to a more typical level of 4.6%. For household customers, we made around ?68 of profit on a typical dual fuel bill of ?1158; from that profit we pay tax and interest.

We’ve also said today that we expect to see a reduction in Energy Supply profits in the year ahead as we’ve taken further action to bring down costs for our customers. In January we announced our second price cut in 13 months, as well as extending our already unprecedented price cap commitment to July 2016. This will mean our customers will not have seen a price increase for more than two and a half years. Prices will, in fact, have fallen twice in that time.

What’s more, last year we invested around ?110m in our Retail business to improve our services for customers. We’re upgrading our digital channels to make their lives easier, developing our smart metering programme which will give real-time information on energy usage and bills and we’re introducing a new call back service to hold a customer’s place in the queue and call them back when they reach the front.

Alongside this we’re developing new products – our two years free unlimited broadband offer was recently described by consumer champion Martin Lewis as ‘the simplest, cheapest deal I can remember for a long time’.

Although it is disappointing to report a higher number of complaints to third parties than last year, I’m encouraged by the fact that this is starting to come down and that we continue to lead the industry, accounting for less than 2% of all complaints to the Ombudsman and retaining our uSwitch award for complaint handling. I believe this is testament to the culture at SSE of doing more for customers; our people really care and bend over backwards to ensure we put things right when problems do occur.

Looking ahead to 2015/16, it’s clear there will be more challenges. It’s a fiercely competitive market and we need to continually strive to offer great value and service to win and retain customers to a greater extent than we did last year. We now have a new government and will soon start to learn the outcomes of the CMA investigation into the energy market – both will have ideas about how to take the market forward and we will continue to engage constructively with them to identify changes that are in the genuine interest of customers.

Fundamentally, as a UK-listed company, SSE is committed to doing the right things in order to meet the needs of our customers and earn a fair profit. And it is with that positive, customer-centric approach that we will face whatever challenges 2015/16 may bring.