BY BUSINESS EDITOR
MBABANE – The Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC) is looking for suppliers to express their interest in 31 of their services.
This was mentioned by EEC in their recently published Expression Of Interest (EOI) where the company was calling for locally registered suppliers to show interest in the tender.
EEC said the purpose of this EOI is to register suitably qualified suppliers and service providers into the EEC vendor database to be contacted through requests for quotations and selective tendering as and when the need arises for any of the listed product categories.
Worth noting, EEC reserves the right to employ the open tender process to increase competition for any of the categories listed.
They said A preliminary evaluation will be undertaken to determine whether tenders are complete and responsive to the basic instructions and requirements of the tender document.
“A binary approach (Yes or No) will be used when evaluating the submission of eligibility documents. A Tenderer who fails to submit any of the listed documents may be disqualified from further evaluation,” added EEC.
The increase in tariffs pre-COVID-19 hiked Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC) revenues to over E2 billion.
This was detailed in EEC’s tariffs review application. The actual revenue for EEC, for 2021/22 was E 2 342 393 181. EEC said this was purely revenue from electricity sales. The approval was for revenue of E 2.425bn for year one of the multi-year price determination (MYPD).
EEC said these revenues were based on a two-year average tariff increase hence the total revenue for 2021/22 in the application was higher than the revenue required which was E248 135 236. They said in the 2022/23 financial year the total revenue to be collected is lower than the revenue required.
The net effect over the two years should be zero. “An overall reduction of 3.4 per cent was observed in the actual sales units compared to the budget. This is due to a decrease in sales units for the time of use (TOU) customers caused by dwindling business in the financial years 2020/21 and 2021/22 as a result of the COVID-19 strict regulations and the prevalent political unrest in the country.
The TOU sales saw a reduction of nine per cent from the anticipated sales units. A few other big customers have ventured into their own solar generation, and this has also promulgated the reduction in sales. Significant reduction in consumption was also noted with the small commercial (S3) cadre of customers for similar reasons as above. This saw a reduction of eight per cent compared to the budget,” mentioned EEC in the application.
However, the domestic customers’ consumption increased by 6.5 per cent. EEC said this was due to the significant increase in the number of customers through the rural electrification scheme. They said the operating profit for the company was E139 million as opposed to what was budgeted from the core business (loss of E17m).
“This was mainly because of lower costs since there were activity implementation challenges due to the effects of the pandemic (some contractors closing shop) and also the political unrest experienced during this period. Due to Covid-19 some of the ongoing projects happening in the country were affected because of the restrictions and lockdowns that the pandemic brought. All this affected the business negatively especially in terms of projects implementation therefore some of the projects did not materialise,” added EEC.
EEC Managing Director (MD) Ernest Mkhonta added that the total budget for distribution was E398m and the total money spent was E391m.
He said the main reason for this was due to under expenditure on both planned and unplanned maintenance, hence some set targets could not be met. Heavy rains and the June 2021 unrest affected implementation of planned maintenance.
