Mercury Interim Results 2024 Transcript

Mercury Interim Results Analyst Briefing 2024 20 February 2024 Start of Transcript Operator: Thank you for standing by and welcome to Mercury Interim Results Analyst Briefing 2024 conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After speakers' presentations there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time please press star one, one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. At this time I would like to introduce Vince Hawksworth, Chief Executive of Mercury Limited. Vince Hawksworth: Kia ora tatou. Welcome, everybody, to the Mercury 2024 Interim Results presentation. I'm Vince Hawksworth, Chief Executive, and I'm joined by William Meek, Chief Financial Officer. So we'll go to slide 3, our Business Performance and Major Events slide. First half, 4.5 terawatts of renewable generation. A big contribution there from Turitea full year and Kaiwera Downs Stage 1. In fact, hydro representing 46% of our generation in first half. So showing the importance of our portfolio expansion. Full year we're forecasting 8.8 terawatt hours. Important event in the first half was the migration of mass market customers under the Mercury brand onto the Gentrack platform. We now have a single retail platform and this will allow us to continue to grow our position as a leading multi-product utility retailer. As I mentioned, the reflection of Kaiwera Downs Stage 1 coming in on time and under budget means that that 43 MW, 147 GWh project made an important contribution in the first half. We also committed to OEC5, the new unit at Ngā Tamariki. That expansion will have annualised generation of 390 GWh and adds 46 MW, that commitment being important in growing some baseload into our portfolio. We've had some challenges on geothermal drilling and that campaign has been delayed and we're currently in the process of negotiating an alternative drilling contractor. When you add that all up what that means for us from an FY24 perspective is we're increasing guidance to $880 million from $835 million EBITDAF and we are announcing a $0.093 per share interim dividend and maintaining guidance at $0.233 per share, which is the 16th year of dividend growth. Page 1 of 19