Fedco wins order to turnaround Nigerian discom's operations

Electricity distribution franchisee Fedco on Monday announced that it has won an order to turnaround the business and technical operations of the Port Harcourt Electricity Distribution Company (PHEDC) of Nigeria.

The Feedback Energy Distribution Company (Fedco), a subsidiary of the Gurugram-based Feedback Infra, will be the technical services partner for PHEDC for five years, Fedco said in a statement.

As a distribution franchisee in rural Odisha, Fedco has a successful record of reducing aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses by 30 per cent over five years of operations, it said.

"PHEDC has 680,000 consumers across four Nigerian states, with a combined area of 50,000 sq km and a total population of 14 million," the statement said.

"Fedco's role is to turnaround the business and technical operations of PHEDC in these five years by lowering their AT&C losses," it said.

"In this, it will be transferring the best practices that Fedco has developed during its five years of serving more than 550,000 consumers in Odisha, bringing AT&C losses down by 30 percentage points and now 1 million consumers in Madhya Pradesh," it added.

Fedco has a singular record in Odisha in bridging the rural-urban divide and taking up distribution in non-urban, "problem" areas. It is predominantly a rural utility in the state with only 10 per cent of its operating area in urban segments.

"Against stiff competition from more established foreign discoms, we have won this mandate from PHEDC to partner with them and improve their work. We look forward to achieving similar, if not better results, in Nigeria than what we have achieved in India," Fedco Managing Director Devtosh Chaturvedi said in a statement.

Four months earlier, Fedco won a similar mandate to improve the technological operations of the distribution company of Enugu state in Nigeria, the statement added.

--IANS

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