Mercury deal wins customers
New loyalty offers saw Mercury, the partially state-owned energy company, add 11,000 customers in six months.
The Auckland-headquartered company, which was until recently known as Mighty River Power, became part of the Air New Zealand Airpoints programme in 2016, and said yesterday that almost 100,000 had registered for the programme.
Chief executive Fraser Whineray said customers were also seeking fixed price contracts, with around one in three of the company’s customers opting for the contracts.
‘‘This is the single-most successful retail offering in terms of uptake in the New Zealand electricity market, with 1-in-3 Mercury customers opting for the certainty of contracts.’’
Whineray said the churn rate of its customers - the number who change in any given period - dropped from 22 per cent a year ago to around 16 per cent, below the industry average.
Its electricity customers climbed by 11,000 to 387,000 at the end of 2016, while its dual fuel customers - who buy both electricity and gas from the company - rose 2000 to 43,000.
Mercury, which has nine hydroelectricity stations on the Waikato River, said favourable North Island hydro conditions - meaning it was wet - helped boost its underlying earnings by about 5 per cent in the six months to the end of December, 2016, compared to the same period in 2015.
Net profitafter tax rose to $113 million from $74m in the same period a year ago, and the company increased its interim dividend marginally to 5.8 cents a share. Mercury said it still intends to pay a total dividend for the financial year of 14.6c.
The first of the former state-owned electricity companies to be partially floated, Mercury has around 90,000 shareholders, but is 51 per cent owned by the Crown.
Shares in the company opened one cent lower yesterday morning, but are still up 19 per cent on a year ago.
The shares, which trade on both the NZX and Australia’s ASX exchanges, were sold to investors at $2.50 in May 2013, a sale delayed from 2012 because of legal challenges.