Mercury offers win customers
New loyalty offers helped Mercury Energy, 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 almost one-third of the company’s customers opting for these.
‘‘This is the single-most successful retail offering in terms of uptake in the New Zealand electricity market, with one in three Mercury customers opting for the certainty of contracts.’’
Whineray said the churn rate of its customers – the number who change in any given period – drop from 22 per cent a year ago to about 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 helped boost its underlying earnings by about 5 per cent in the six months to December 2016, compared with the same period in 2015.
Net profit after 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 stateowned electricity companies to be partially floated, Mercury has about 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 New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges, were sold to investors at $2.50 in May 2013, a sale delayed from 2012 because of legal challenges.