Cash bonuses a shrewd move
Thumbs up from shareholders body
Air New Zealand and Auckland Airport’s decision to pay their staff cash bonuses when the times are good is a clever move.
Not only does it keep workers on the ground happy it also helps keep a lid on wage rises which can eat into the bottom line when times are not so good. Bonuses can be taken away when profits fall with plenty of justification but wages don’t often get cut.
Air New Zealand’s financials show while the company was happy to cough up $1700 for 8500 staff its wage growth has been limited.
According to t he airline’s financials its labour costs increased 3.6 per cent to $44 million while its employee numbers grew 3.4 per cent to 10,890 in the year to June 30.
Chief executive Christopher Luxon said it was the third year in a row the company had paid out a performance bonus to staff who were not part of its short-term incentive scheme.
The company wanted all staff to participate in the upside when it did well. But future bonus payments would depend on it continuing to deliver returns to its investors.
Luxon said salary increases tended to be more market based but also pointed to the large number of staff who earned more t han $ 100,000 — around one third.
Auckland Airport is paying staff a $900 bonus.
New Zealand Shareholders Association chairman John Hawkins said it didn’t have a problem with companies paying out bonuses to staff.
“It is useful to incentivise staff.”
Hawkins said it was good to see profits being spread to all staff not just those at the top and it showed big corporates were catching up with what was done at smaller companies.
Hawkins said while the bonus meant shareholders got less in one sense, seeing that as a negative would be a short-term view.
“If a company had unhappy staff it is highly unlikely to be as profitable as they are.”
Power plan
If Richard Prosser was being serious when saying NZ First would nationalise the country’s listed-energy companies, the threat rang hollow on the sharemarket. The NZ First MP told a BusinessNZ conference in Welli ngton on Wednesday his party would bring electricity assets back under a simple state-owned, state-controlled umbrella.
“That means if you have shares in Contact [Energy] — get rid of them,” Prosser told those gathered.
Few investors heeded the warning, and shortly after Prosser’s remark Contact shares were trading flat at $5.57. They closed yesterday at $5.55.
The share price was down for the day a negligible 2c — although by market close NZ First leader Winston Peters had issued a statement saying Prosser’s comment was a “throwaway line that was not fully explained”.
“Had he had the time, he would have explained that the buyback of power companies would be at an appropriate time in the future. That is, we would only be buying back shares when they became available,” Peters said.
Out of the big four energy retailers to report in the past 10 days, Craigs Investment Partners’ Mark Lister sees Contact as the pick of the bunch.
“The result was a bit weak, but that was expected so it wasn’t a big deal.
“Anyway, the positives we saw on the capital management front more than offset it. Contact guided to a 2018 dividend of 32c per share, which is a healthy 23 per cent increase from this year, and comes on the back of a longawaited move to pay out a greater share of earnings,” he said.
Lister scored Contact an A grade, gave Mercury and Meridian a “solid B+” and Genesis a C+.
Devon expands
Boutique investment firm Devon Funds Management is expanding its senior team.
Mark Brown, currently head of Australasian equities at ANZ, is joining as chief investment officer.
Brown will have responsibility for Devon’s New Zealand-only equity funds, and will assist portfolio manager Chris Gaskin with management of the Devon Australasian portfolios when he joins in January 2018.
Richard O’Brien, previously head of investments at Sovereign Insurance, has joined the wider group in a senior management role.