Constellation: Too Early To Tell Of Any Impacts On Retail Competitive Intensity From Recent Cold Snaps

During an Exelon earnings call yesterday, Joseph Nigro, CEO of Constellation, said that it was too early to determine what, if any, impacts recent cold snaps would have on the competitive intensity in the retail business, but did report on two behaviors Constellation is seeing the market.

While too early to see what, if any, impact the current cold snap or the previous cold snap will have on competitive behavior, Nigro said, "What we have seen, though, from competitors, which is kind of interesting, is two things."

"One is, we've seen one of our large competitors back away in certain regions from selling a full, fixed price, full requirements product to their customers. And we will continue to do that as we have historically, and will honor obviously all the commitments we have. In addition to that, we've seen some of our competitors try to pass through costs that we've honored through our contractual arrangements with our customers, costs that we will bear. So I won't say we've seen the competitive aspect of the market change. And as I said, we'll remain disciplined, but we have seen some things from competitors that we haven't seen in the recent past, which may or may not lead to different outcomes in future," Nigro said

Exelon CEO Christopher Crane later added that, "our Constellation business provides a gen-to-load match advantage, and our discipline around bidding margins is proving wise again as we are starting to hear others taking on pain of recent months." Crane's comments were not specific to retail and may have included the load-following wholesale default service market

Nigro stressed that the retail market, "remains competitive," and that Constellation is, "going to remain disciplined to what we think is fair pricing and not just chase volume."

Constellation reported "stable" unit margins for its C&I customers