Tauranga-based electricity company TrustPower has reported a fall in customer numbers and profits but says its performance was satisfactory given the operating environment.
TrustPower announced a $123.4 million after tax profit for the year ended March 31, 2013 to the NZX on Friday afternoon.
The result was 6 per cent down on 2012's $131.7 million profit and slightly less than what had been predicted by financial analysts.
Craigs Investment Partners head of private wealth research Mark Lister said Craigs had expected TrustPower to earn around $300 million over the year but the final earnings figure was $294.8 million.
"Customer numbers have slipped a little bit and also their residential customers haven't used as much power as they were expected to," Mr Lister said.
TrustPower chief executive Vince Hawksworth acknowledged the company had sustained a net loss of 3000 customers over the year but said this number was below the market average.
"We're doing something right in that we're maintaining our customers better than our competitors, and in fact if you look at pure losses this year we lost about 26,000 and we gained about 22,000 roughly ... the year before we lost 35,000, so we actually lost a lot less customers in the last year than we did in the year before."
Mr Hawksworth said his focus in the coming year would be on growing customer numbers in a profitable way.
However, the drop in customer numbers was only partially responsible for the reduced profit position, Mr Hawksworth said.
"The two issues are slightly lower sales because of the less customers but the major issue has been the lower volume of hydro than we had in the year before. Simply, it didn't rain as much in the places we wanted it to rain and that's the nature of the beast."
Mr Hawksworth said the year's highlights included the commencement of the Snowtown Stage 2 wind farm build in South Australia, the success of the company's new customer billing system, and the approval of a change to the Rakaia River Water Conservation Order, which will allow the company to distribute water from Lake Coleridge to irrigation groups.
Mr Lister said the Snowtown project looked to be progressing very well and would likely strengthen TrustPower's profit statements in the coming years.
However, this year's financial report was a little weaker than TrustPower's competitor Contact Energy, he said.
- Bay of Plenty Times
