Centrica have announced that they are increasing their gas and power prices to reflect the increase in wholesale market prices. More importantly they have admitted that they are losing 10,000 customers a week. This may sound a lot but in fact it would take them 2 years to lose less than a fifth of their market share even at this rate. Centrica have a big problem in that they are short power and gas, they have more customers than contracts to supply them. If the market continues to rise then being short costs them more money. In fact the share prices of many of the utility companies reflect this with British Energy and International Power both long showing gains in recent weeks and Centrica and some of the Scottish companies showing losses. There is a simple solution to Centrica's problem that is to get themselves long in a rising market, they can do this by buying power in the form of contracts and or power stations. Or they can reduce the size of their customer base, reducing the need to satisfy their position. In reality they need to do a bit of both, they have missed out on power stations failing to pay up for Saltend. So the reduction customers whilst to the analysts may not look like smart business may in fact be financially smart.