| CEER Publishes its Monitoring Report on the Performance of European Retail Markets in 2018 21 November 2019 Today, the Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) has published its Monitoring Report on the Performance of European Retail Markets in 2018. The ACER-CEER “Annual Report of the Results of Monitoring the Internal Electricity and Natural Gas Markets”, published in October 2019, includes retail and consumer-focused volumes. This CEER report provides further analysis on some of the most important aspects of retail electricity and gas markets, allowing a more in-depth and comprehensive understanding of their performance and evolution. The topics addressed are also highly relevant to the implementation of the “Clean Energy for All Europeans ” package. Some important findings include: • In 2018, there was an overall increase in the number of EU nationwide suppliers, in comparison to 2017.
• Regarding market concentration, there has been an overall improvement across the past six years in both electricity and gas markets for household consumers across Member States (MS). Overall, household markets for gas and electricity are more concentrated than non-household markets and further effort is still required to improve the market structure.
• Supplier switching rates for household and non-household customers still differ significantly across MS.
• There is a positive trend in terms of offer variety in Europe: electricity consumers in 22 out of 27 MS have five or more options which is four more than last year. Usually, variety of offers and liberalisation go hand in hand. The variety of gas offers is generally lower than the offers for electricity. Nevertheless, the trend is positive in this segment, too.
• For the first time, data on the availability of bundled products have been collected: in the electricity sector bundled products are more disseminated than in gas. 18 out of 27 regulators indicated the existence of bundled products in the electricity segment while this number is only 8 of 23 for gas.
• Some kind of price intervention is still in place for household customers in almost half of the responding countries in electricity and in gas. In the non-household segment, the trend for all countries is the decrease of the share of non-household customers under regulated prices and their future removal. Major topics covered include: • Market Structure: Numbers of suppliers; entry/exit activity; market concentration;
• Customer Switching Activity: switching between suppliers and to different contracts in the same supplier; analysis of the types of offers available;
• Intervention in price setting and price regulation in Europe as well as roadmaps for price deregulation in selected countries. The Report also contains two case studies that allow for a detailed look at retail energy market developments in Spain and France. This report is part of European energy regulators’ core task of monitoring energy markets and contributes to CEER’s efforts to improve markets for the benefit of consumers. | 
