You are Élodie Faure, head of public affairs at Hélios Énergie, a French gas and power retailer. The regulator has just opened ninety days of consultation on a consumer-protection rule written for the teaser-rate discounters, and it catches Hélios too. Before you spend a euro of the campaign budget, you must decide where Hélios stands on the draft.
The situation
Hélios, based in Bordeaux and founded in 2007, is France's third-largest non-incumbent retailer: 3.1 million residential and small-business customers in Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie, €4.6 billion of revenue, 2,800 staff and a 6.5% operating margin. It made its name by refusing the games its rivals played: consistent, disclosed prices, no teaser rates, no auto-renewal traps. That fair-price promise is worth, by internal estimates, about €180 million of advantage in winning customers.
On 14 April the Commission de Régulation de l'Énergie (CRE) published a draft Consumer Energy Protection rule, aimed at the discount retailers whose auto-renewal traps filled the complaint files all winter. Comments close on 13 July; the sector's trade association, the Union Française de l'Énergie, wants a single industry position by 30 May.
As drafted, the rule hits Hélios three ways. A price cap set below wholesale hedging cost would cut the operating margin from 6.5% to about 3.8%: some €124 million of operating profit a year. A ban on early-exit fees removes about €38 million a year of contract revenue and would lift churn from 14% to 21%. New disclosure and reporting duties cost €22 million to build and €9 million a year to run.
Doing nothing is a choice too: with no submission, the draft would likely pass close to its current text. And the CRE has signalled that an obstructive campaign would push the Ministry to legislate the rule directly, with no room left to negotiate. You have a four-person team, €1.6 million and about twelve weeks.