Tokyo Gas Sees It Losing Market Share Due to Liberalisation

Tokyo Gas Co expects its market share to fall by a double digit amount over the long term as it loses its monopoly on retail city gas sales in its service districts next year, the head of Japan's biggest city gas supplier said on Thursday.

 

Next April, city gas suppliers will lose their monopoly on the retail city gas market, one year after the retail power market was opened to full competition on April 1.

 

A major provider of natural gas to Tokyo and the surrounding regions, Tokyo Gas (TOG.BE) lat month projected a market share loss of about 10 percent by 2020/21, taking into account the liberalisation of the currently regulated city gas sector.

 

In the longer run, without any timeframe, the company could lose around 20-30 percent of city gas sales to new entrants, Tokyo Gas President Michiaki Hirose told reporters. Tokyo Gas currently has about 11 million city gas customers in total.

 

Meanwhile, Tokyo Gas is aiming to become No.1 among the new power entrants to the now liberalised retail power market and already has more than 240,000 retail customers who switched to its power supplies from Tokyo Electric.

 

Hirose said the company is targeting 400,000 retail power customers by the end of March 2017, with a plan to raise the number to about 1 million by around 2020.


(Reporting by Osamu Tsukimori, editing by David Evans)