NEWS RELEASE 9 April 2014
$10 million in savings on offer for Mercury Energy customers Mercury Energy today announced an extra 2% Prompt Payment Discount (PPD) for its residential customers receiving their bills by email and paying by direct debit. General Manager, James Munro, said the extra discount (on top of Mercury’s standard 10% PPD) – on bills from 1 May 2014 – would apply to all residential customers who receive bills by email and pay by direct debit, including those on fixed-price contracts. “150,000 homes, which is over half of our residential customers, will either automatically get this discount or only need to make one small change to get it as they’re either already receiving their power bills by email, or paying by direct debit. If all our residential customers take up the offer they’ll save over $10 million in total every year.” “It’s really fast and simple to change to email billing or direct debit payment on our website (www.mercury.co.nz). We’ll also be communicating with customers in the coming days to make sure they know about the new discount and how to get it. It’s a simple way to reward customers by passing on our reduced costs that come from them choosing lower-cost billing and payment options.” “Last December we announced we would not increase our energy prices until April 2015 at the earliest. Now we are going further and passing on cost savings to customers in the form of a bigger discount. On top of that we recently announced results from our free online Good Energy Monitor service, showing how active users of 1 GEM are lowering their power bills .” “With this new discount and with GEM, a large number of Mercury customers will see their bills going down. The payback for us is that customers value these services and are more likely to stay with Mercury, which is important in this intensely competitive market.” ENDS www.mercury.co.nz For further information: Shannon Goldstone Communications Manager - Retail T 027 210 5337
1
Customers who most actively use GEM save 3.4% more power than customers who don’t use GEM.