Good morning, and thank you for joining the Freightways FY 2026 announcement. We will begin with a presentation by the Freightways management team, followed by a Q and A session. For the first part of this presentation, clients will be in a listen-only mode with cameras off. If you would like to ask a question, please select the Raise Hand button to be placed in the virtual queue. The Raise Hand button can be found at the bottom of your Zoom screen or within the React button. Now, I will hand across to the Freightways management team. Mark, over to you.
Thanks, Kiara, and welcome everybody to the Freightways FY 2026 full-year presentation. Around the table you have got some familiar faces that you have seen at most of the other full-year and half-year presentations. Stephan Deschamps, our CFO. Neil Wilson, who looks after the Australian portfolio and Big Chill. Aaron Stubbing, who looks after the New Zealand Express businesses. Just make the point, largely the same executive team that Freightways has had for many years and has overseen almost a doubling of Freightways over the last seven years. So really nice to see that continuity, but great success in the business over that period of time. I will cover off an overview and just a few of the key points we see up front, and then hand over to Stephan to talk you through the numbers in terms of P&L performance and balance sheet.
The businesses over the past year have done rather well in a pretty complex economic environment. When we talk about a complex economic environment, I guess what we had at the start of 2026 was still the tail end of a three-year recession. We had the start of a recovery as we came in post-Christmas, around November, December. Quarter three actually looked relatively promising, and it was probably that little sweet spot of economic activity in New Zealand in particular. Then we had that abruptly halted by the war in the Middle East, rapid escalation of fuel prices, diesel prices, which nudged around NZD 4 a liter here in New Zealand. It really put a damper on consumer behavior, and the number of items ultimately flowing through the networks. The focus for our businesses, regardless of the economic environment, had been on improving margins.
It is pleasing to see that we have made progress across most businesses. There is a number where we still have a bit of work to do, but a little bit of organic growth along with our pricing strategies has enabled us to keep our margins intact and improve them to some degree in many of the businesses. Similar story to half year. Economy services had higher demand, so these are road-based services as opposed to overnight air freight. They are local hub-and-spoke services as opposed to point to point across town. Generally, if customers move from a premium overnight service, generally we have been able to capture that in another brand with a road freight express service. The Aussie businesses, Allied Express in particular, continued to shoot the lights out. Really impressive contribution from Allied.
A lot of the same customer growth, so a lot of growth out of that existing base that they have. Welcoming the VTFE business into Freightways from the start of February. Pleasingly, I guess through the course of that year, balance sheet still in mid-range of policy after the acquisition of VT Express. I will hand over to Stephan to talk through the highlights and talk through the financials.
Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. If you look at this summary of FY 2026, most of the indicators seem really good. Pretty much every line of the P&L has increased double digit. Revenue is 13.5%. NPAT, 17%, driven by lower interest spend on top of the economic recovery we had in the first half of the year. The story looks really good. As we are going to see, what is happening behind that is a little bit more complex and contrasted. One thing which is clear, though, is that Australia is becoming a more significant part of our activity. It was about a third of our revenue and profit a couple of years ago. We are now increasing to 40%, and we are expecting that trend to continue. The center of gravity keeps moving slowly from New Zealand to Australia.
If we look at the key numbers, our revenue now is almost NZD 1.5 billion. As Mark mentioned, we acquired VTFE in Australia from February, so that was a small contributor to that revenue increase. Even without that, we would have a double-digit increase. The main drivers behind that are price increases, market share gain, and a level of organic growth. The EBIT margin, which is our focus, has seen some limited improvement. Again, the story behind that is quite contrasted and I will come back to that, but we have two groups of businesses with very different results. I think overall, we were hoping that FY 2026 was going to be a normal year without pandemic, without recession, and it did not quite turn out like that.
If I were going to use a sport analogy that Mark really enjoys, I would probably walk away from rugby and talk about American football. It is not quite a game of two halves, but it is a game of three good quarters and one bad one. If we look at some of the drivers on the following slide, you can see what Mark alluded to. In New Zealand, the first three quarters of the year saw a reasonably steady economic recovery and good activity that was building up. When the war in Iran started and fuel prices drove to a significant high, we have seen a significant impact on economic activity in New Zealand, and all that recovery pretty much ground to a halt.
Even though fuel prices have come back down since the peak of the war, we have not seen a resumption of that economic growth in New Zealand.
In Australia, the slowdown took a little bit more time to appear, but as we looked at all our businesses by the end of the year, that was becoming more significant. On the next slide, we will talk about margins, which we have mentioned over the last three years as a key focus of ours. Behind a reasonably flat headline, as I mentioned, you really have two groups of businesses. Our most premium businesses in New Zealand continue to be impacted by the economic environment, and New Zealand Couriers and Big Chill in particular, have seen a decline in margin last year. In Australia, we saw the same thing with TIMG, which is driven largely by a slowdown of digitization activity.
On the more pleasing side, all the other businesses have seen a level of improvement of margins as price increases and stronger activity, combined with a controlled cost base, allowed them to deliver significant gains. Some of the names you can see on this slide, Post Haste, DX Mail, and Allied Express, had very solid margin improvement. These margins remain a focus of ours this year and in the coming years. In terms of balance sheets, our debt was slightly higher, reflecting the acquisition of VTFE in February for slightly more than AUD 70 million. But the measure we use for our gearing, which is net debt over EBITDA, was stable at 2.4 x. I should stress that we are using post IFRS 16 numbers. If you use pre IFRS 16, we are standing at about 1.5.
Mark mentioned our capital management policies, so maybe to remind everyone of that very quickly. We want to keep our net debt to EBITDA between two and 3 x post IFRS 16. We are at 2.4 x now, so we have a significant headroom from a debt point of view. If we were to consider an acquisition that is significantly larger than the debt headroom we have, we would use a combination of debt and equity to fulfill that acquisition. On the basis of a strong balance sheet, we decided to increase our dividend by NZD 0.05 for the full-year, which is a 12.5% increase. So we will be paying NZD 0.45 for the entire year, which is a final dividend of NZD 0.24. We are fully imputed in New Zealand, and we are about 49% franked in Australia.
I will hand back to Mark to look at some of the details of the activity by segment.
Thanks, Stephan. I will talk through the numbers, and Aaron and Neil will come in with a bit of color in and around the NZEP and the Aussie landscape. In terms of Express, as Stephan mentioned, reflective of the overall result, really strong revenue growth there. Same customer growth, particularly in that Q2, Q3, and through most of the year for Allied Express as well. All businesses managed to pick up market share gains. Each brand is very focused on a niche. We know the types of customers that are attracted to that niche and that suit that particular service. As a result of that focus, we have had really good results, really for quite a number of years in terms of winning either new business to market or business off competitors.
The price increases are well executed at the start of the year and have been again in FY 2027, and the five months contribution of VTFE was around about NZD 40 million to the revenue line. As Stephan mentioned, the growth of Allied Express and Post Haste, DX in particular, has been really strong, top line and bottom line. So they have all, I guess, lived in niches where there is good demand for their services. Allied Express is benefiting from tailwinds that come with big and bulky purchases. So, a lot of e-commerce emerging businesses that are selling flat pack furniture, sporting goods, some of the larger items that we transport through the Allied network.
Post Haste really benefiting from being experts in that express two-day inter island road service and next day North Island, and have attracted a reasonable amount of the e-commerce volumes that have come through cross-border as well. DX Mail, who have not only picked up market share, but have also made their operation a lot more efficient through the use of AI and technology, to improve the way they sort mail, to make postie runs more efficient, and are getting really good leverage out of those initiatives. Big Chill had a positive Q2 and Q3, so we just started to see a little bit of lift there. Big Chill are quite exposed to what is happening in the hospitality markets, generally handling more premium food through those channels into hospo, into QSRs, into supermarkets. But you really did see the impact.
As soon as the price of fuel went up and took money out of the pockets of consumers, you saw that fall down again. The fuel costs through that quarter had a one-off impact on earnings. As the fuel price went up, and I will talk later, we have adjusted the way we run our fuel surcharge mechanisms, but you do get a one-off impact, and we did have this year as the fuel price went up and our surcharge lagged and came a little bit later. So that affected margins in March and April slightly. Hand over to Aaron to talk a bit about just what has happened on that New Zealand Express landscape.
Yeah. Good morning, everyone. For New Zealand EP, the volume grew by 5.1% for the year. The same customer volume had three positive quarters, and as Mark alluded to earlier, the fourth quarter was quite tough and we saw some softening. The economy services continue to outperform the premium offerings, and that is just reflective of that cost-conscious marketplace that we are operating in. We had strong contributions from e-commerce and healthcare. It should be noted, though, that e-commerce growth has flattened over the last couple of months, and we think primarily this is down to the fuel increase and some movement between the channels.
Morning, all. Just from a Big Chill perspective, up until February, as Mark talked about, we did see a gradual improvement in customer volumes across the transport division. Unfortunately, when the war started in February, that came to an abrupt halt.
You can actually see a direct correlation between the fuel prices that we were charging and also the lower customer volumes coming through. To offset that, new business wins have been particularly important. The team has done a really good job both protecting existing customers as well as securing a number of good business wins, particularly on selected routes. As you see on the slide, overall item growth of 3%, most of that was through net market share gains, which was quite pleasing to see. 3PL continues to deliver well, and slightly ahead of where we expected, sitting at 87% nationwide. We have got a small amount of capacity at Ruakura. However, Auckland and Christchurch are pretty well full.
The Big Chill team are still actively engaged with customers, having a think about where the next best option might be to position a new 3PL location with a number of strategic locations being considered. The next point I want to talk about was the fact that the transport industry generally has a north-south volume bias. Big Chill traditionally have also suffered from that, so that they have less volume coming from the South Island back to Auckland. The team have really focused on managing utilization levels and margins, and using better data analytics to target new business efforts on improving yield on those low utilization routes, and that has been quite successful.
The last point I had on Big Chill was that during the year, Big Chill opened a new branch in New Plymouth, which has been really successful, both in terms of on-time performance improvement stats, but also they have secured a couple of decent new business wins out of that. As a result, we are now having a think about where we can expand to next, with the logical options being most likely Nelson, Tauranga or Invercargill. As Mark talked about, Allied Express performed really well with a 20% lift in volume year-on-year. In the last couple of years, we have invested in much larger sales teams than what Allied have traditionally offered, and that has paid some really good dividends, both in terms of new business wins, but also increasing the share of wallet that we receive from existing customers.
Allied are another business that have developed much stronger margin reporting, and this has allowed them to reposition themselves in certain market segments. As a result, extra volumes are being realized. An example of that would be that in FY 2026, Allied realigned prices and services in the 22- 50 kg parcel market, and that generated really solid growth from our existing customers, which was pleasing to see. That volume has necessitated the need for some extra facilities in Campbellfield and Victoria. For example, we have added a 12,000 m² facility. However, apart from that, the extra volume that we have carried was largely handled within the existing infrastructure. As a result, as has been talked about, Allied produced a really good result in FY 2026.
The last point was that in the last couple of months, we have seen some softening of volumes in express package, both across Allied and VTFE. When I look at that sector by sector, probably the most notable sectors are building and construction, car parts. Some key e-commerce customers, their volumes seem to have dropped a little bit in the last six weeks. Just an update around the air freight. I think as we talked about at our last update, Airwork, our JV partner in Parcelair, was placed into receivership in July 2025. Since then, the business has operated as a going concern under the control of the receivers while they try and work through a potential sale process.
During that time, both of our Airwork suppliers, being Airwork and Texel Air, have performed really well in the year with quite high on-time performance reliability, which has been pleasing. We expect that by the end of the year we will have transitioned away from the 737-400 fleet that we operate to one where we are using 737-800 instead. The advantages that offers us is that 800s are newer, they are more fuel efficient, and they have a higher payload capacity. For example, a 737-800 can take 21 ton of product, whereas a 400 takes 18, so you are getting a better payload in each aircraft. There are a few one-off costs to transition to that newer fleet. However, that has already been allowed for in the FY 2026 result. Other than that, the ongoing costs of operating 800s are pretty much in line with what we are currently incurring.
Thanks, Neil. In terms of information management and waste renewal, a pretty flat result here. Really revenue flat. There were improvements in some of the revenue streams within the division, so pricing in particular. Through waste renewal, the document destruction revenues grew 4%. Medical waste was up another 7%, and e-waste up by 10%. E-waste generally is taking devices which have data on them, laptops, servers, hard drives, etc. Either recommissioning those that can be sold or completely destroying them and selling the commodity parts. So it is certainly a growth part of the waste renewal sector. Document storage volumes grew slightly, mainly pricing, offsetting pretty flat volume. The decrease was really around that digitization piece. So we will talk a little bit more about that later. Really, that was the one piece that declined from where we had been in FY 2025.
Paper prices a little bit lower, 8% lower. Paper pricing impacts our business far less than it used to many years ago, where we were heavily reliant on paper sales to prop up revenue. Such a much smaller part of our revenue base these days. Pleasingly, the Shred-X reset that we have talked about is largely complete. Neil will talk about some of the margin improvement that we are getting through Shred-X as a result of those initiatives.
Yeah. As Mark said, it has been a year of reset, if you like, for Shred-X. There has been a number of key initiatives which the team have implemented, aimed at improving overall returns. As you can see from that graph, which shows the six-month rolling EBITA margin, that has been delivered successful growth both in terms of EBITA percentage as well as overall performance. The business is mainly focused on productivity improvements, with the key wins being around improving run density. There has been a network project looking at the way that we service customers, and that has resulted in a much improved run density, which in turn has lowered the number of drivers that we need to service our customers. They have also automated a number of manual labor processes which have reduced staff numbers. Revenue they have also looked at.
There has been an increased focus on margin improvement, both through pricing and also exiting some low-margin work. An example of that would be that during the year, we removed pay-for rebates which had been paid to printers. Traditionally in the Australian market, there was rebates offered to Australian printing industries which were very low on negative margin for us, so we removed those in July 2026. The team have also grown e-waste and ITAD volumes. The introduction of the fuel surcharge in January this year has been really important. It was new for Shred-X and the timing was good. So it has been quite important in terms of protecting their margins. Lastly, and pleasingly, Shred-X have had an absolute focus on improving reporting and around the health and safety, and their performance has improved in that area.
As a result, they have managed to reduce the cost of weekly cover the premiums that they have been paying. Horizon Three approach we operate across Freightways is particularly relevant for TIMG, both in Australia and New Zealand. That is largely because that industry or the information management industry is going through quite a period of changing dynamics. I think it is important to note that overall, we are still seeing growth in our core archive and media business, which is our Horizon One opportunity, obviously. But it has slowed, hence why developing faster-growing Horizon Two and Three opportunities is really important. The focus therefore around our traditional core archive and media business is running as lean and an efficient as business as possible and taking a yield management approach to each warehouse individually.
Where warehouses are full, as organic growth requires, we are pulling pricing and document destruction levers to make sure that the utilization overall remains high. Where warehouse utilization is lower than what we like, that is where we are focusing our new business efforts to try and fill spare capacity. With that lean approach in mind, TIMG Australia have just undertaken a restructure in July 2026, which has rationalized a further 17 positions, which we will see the benefit of in FY 2027. That running lean approach is an ongoing thing that we have. Running lean on our core business, but then investing cash into our Horizon Two and Three business opportunities. As that little graph there shows, digital earnings, particularly in Australia, have continued to scale.
The slight dip you see there in FY 2026 is the finishing of a multi-year digitization project for a very large government department in Australia. They still have a fairly full list of digitalization opportunities which we are looking to realize. An example of how much the business has changed. If you look at digital and litigation support together for TIMG Australia, that is just under 40% of their revenue now. As you can see, the Horizon Two business is scaling and it is changing the overall mix of revenue for our information management division. The current focus for digital is around consultative selling. We have a team now engaging with customers to understand what they are holding in physical archive boxes.
The privacy laws in particular are opening up new opportunities around that because it is a requirement that businesses understand the personal information that they are holding around individuals.
Often where they have had archive boxes in storage for a long period of time, there is a bit of a knowledge gap there. There is an opportunity for us to digitize information to give customers better visibility around what they are storing. From a Horizon Three perspective, stocker in New Zealand has continued to scale nicely, and as a result, we launch that in Australia in FY 2027. Lastly, we are market testing a number of new H3 products which utilize AI tools to assist with data storage and extraction. That is at the market test stage where we are engaging with customers. We have a few interesting concepts around AI with what we can do with data, and it is just a matter of validating that with the market to make sure that they are products that we can scale.
Thanks, Neil. Just in terms of future investments, there is a couple of key facilities that we wanted to talk to. Aaron will cover off those, and then we will talk a little bit about Australia and the M&A opportunities we see there.
Right. Our Christchurch Airport extension is well advanced. It is an extension of the building and our automation. It will reunite our EP brands back under one roof and provide about 50% operational capacity, which is approximately 10 years of growth for us. The automation equipment arrives next week, so that is quite exciting, and we have targeted to be fully operational by quarter two of 2027. It allows us a little bit of time in that process to pause the automation construction and ensure we focus on our service delivery during that peak season. Then we have Palmerston North, which is a new build. The EP brands are currently based nearer the CBD, but we will move them out to the airport to cohabitate with Parceline, our line-haul operator.
The new site will provide operational facilities and faster transit times while providing about another 10 years of capacity in terms of Palmerston North growth. The completion is due prior to Christmas, but we will move in in quarter one in 2027, once again, just to avoid any compromise of service during the peak season.
Thanks, Aaron. In terms of Australia, really, as Stephan talked about, the size of Aussie in comparison to Freightways has really accelerated through the period that we have had Allied Express and then VTFE at the organic growth that we have managed to get out of Allied over that period as well. Reality is, within Australia, the express market is probably six to seven times as big as the New Zealand express market. Below the top three Tier 1 players that cover the entire country with massive fleets and tend to provide air and road services, it really is a pretty fragmented landscape. We have spent a long time over the last three to four years looking around about 70-odd opportunities and businesses. Some good, some bad, some ugly. There is a real mix there.
I think it has given us really good institutional knowledge of the way that the Australian express industry operates. We have got a really good feel for the niches that the various players operate within. Those niches can be a geography, they can be a freight size, they could be a speed in terms of overnight, two-day or longer, intrastate and interstate. It could be certain verticals, could be certain industry verticals, medical, construction, et cetera. Getting a good grip on the range of opportunity there and understanding which of those are complementary or fit really well to an Allied Express or a VTFE has been really valuable learning for us. I think the reality is, given the market shares we have in some of the niches we operate in New Zealand, we know that acquiring further in New Zealand in express, for example, is highly unlikely.
We do expect to deploy more capital over time into Australia, but manage that within the capital management policy that Stephan outlined earlier. In terms of M&A, I think from that screening of around 70 businesses, we have got ourselves down to a relatively tight shortlist. There is about a dozen companies that we think could be a good fit, either as bolt-ons or as close adjacencies for Allied Express or VTFE. That is really where we will focus our attention over the next year or so. In terms of outlook, it has been an interesting seven years, I think when we have reflected back over the growth that Freightways has had over that period of time, and you think about the number of world events and macro events that have impacted businesses from COVID, labor shortages, three years of recession and fuel crisis.
I think last year, and in fact through much of that period, our businesses have proven to be really resilient. We are diversified across two different countries. We are diversified through information management, waste renewal and express. In particular, over the last three years of soft economic activity, we have still been able to play our own game. Market share wins have been really important for us. But in this year, we just started to see a little bit of that same customer activity become positive, which was a nice tailwind, albeit for a fairly short period of time. We think those same customer volumes will remain soft as long as fuel prices remain elevated.
I think the evidence we have seen over the last four months or so is that the money coming out of the pockets of consumers and going into the fuel pump has meant that they are spending less, and they are buying less of the products that we might move around our networks. We think that will probably remain until fuel prices come down and then really remain at a sustained lower level than they are today. The pace of recovery will also be dependent just on how the relative economies are going in Australia and New Zealand. Stephan pointed earlier to the higher interest rates in Aussie in particular and slowly moving up in New Zealand.
That will have an impact, particularly on the New Zealand businesses, where we are pretty broad-based and sit across most of the industries that you find operating in the New Zealand economy. We think it will be softer for longer again until fuel prices drop and maybe slightly more positive economic conditions over in Australia. The capacity we get in Christchurch and Palmy, those are key hubs for us. Everything that goes in and out of the South Island fundamentally travels through Christchurch. Everything in and out of the lower North Island travels through Palmerston North. They are quite strategic investments in capacity and the optimism, I guess, we see around the growth through the NZEP businesses. Evolve is still trucking along, so we expect that we will spend around about another NZD 5 million this year, which should largely complete that project.
Margin improvement is still a focus, as Neil talked about. TIMG Australia is a key area in terms of having the Horizon One operations as lean as we can make them and putting our investment into scaling Horizon Two and discovering Horizon Three. We will keep growing the EP presence in Australia. We are represented in B2B and B2C now, presents really good opportunities for us to keep expanding, both organically through having new business sales teams that are going out and winning market share, as well as having a proactive approach to M&A, where we can look for the right kind of business that has the right fit that can complement two very good businesses we have in Allied Express and VTFE. That brings the presentation part to a close. I will hand back to Kiara, who can manage any questions that you may have.
Thank you, Mark. We will now begin the Q and A session. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please select the Raise Hand button at the bottom of your Zoom screen within the React button to be placed in the virtual queue. After your name is announced, please unmute yourself, state your name, company, and ask your question. Our first question comes from Andy Bowley. Andy, please go ahead and unmute yourself.
Thank you, and morning, guys. A few questions from me, really focusing on the volume backdrop across the New Zealand and Australian parcels businesses. The first of which, and it is really, I guess, a clarification question. Allied Express, you talked about 20% volume growth network items through the course of FY 2026. The chart on figure 17 looks like it was 20% in the first half, but at the first half presentation, we were only talking about 14% growth. Just curious as to which one is right and whether there is any explanation for the differential.
Yeah. The 20% is correct for the full-year, Andy. There is a number of initiatives we have had through the business just in the terms of analytics and the way we are measuring that. Allied get a lot of multi-part consignment items that go through the business as well. As we have refined that, yeah, the 20% for the full-year piece was accurate.
That is great. In the context of the comments that you make about both Allied and VTFE over the last six weeks in terms of a softening of demand, can you tell us what that means? Are we talking a material softening versus what you saw in Q4, which was clearly slower from an Allied point of view? Are we seeing negative same customer volumes or please clarify.
Yeah. The biggest piece, probably for Allied, one of their very large customers is taking a slightly different approach to the market. What they're seeing in that market is quite heavy discounting from a number of their competitors, and they've just decided not to play that game. So they're doing less in the way of promotions, pushing out a bit less volume. They're a pretty big part of the Allied base, so we've seen their volumes slightly lower than they would have been in the prior corresponding period. For other customers as a whole, they're still positive trading, but at a far lower level of growth than we had seen previously. That one very large customer does make quite an impact there. Effectively, they will ride out, I guess, some of the discounting that's going on by competitors. With VTFE and the B2B Sorry, yes?
Sorry, you carry on, Mark.
Yeah. I'm just going to talk about VTFE and the B2B space. So they have seen impacts, particularly in that construction sector, with volumes coming off quite a bit. So that part of it has dropped a lot from the prior comparative quarter where we didn't own the business, but if you look at their trading through that period. Same customer volumes for VTFE are negative, just like they are in New Zealand for the NZEP businesses through that last quarter and over the last six weeks.
The drop—
It's—
—is quite comparable what we saw in New Zealand a few years back in construction.
Okay. VTFE, just focusing in on that. In terms of the 5 months that you've owned it, we've seen volumes fall overall versus the prior year?
In, particularly in Q4. Yes.
Okay. If we package all of that up, both VTFE and Allied in terms of current run rate, are we up or are we down?
Allied s lightly, VTFE down. We haven't combined them. They're quite different revenue per items and—
Yeah.
—quite different profiles of freight, so we haven't done a combination of those two.
Great. Just on VTFE, can you talk about New South Wales and the solution there, please?
Yeah. We will talk about Queensland and New South Wales. Queensland, very quickly, what we have done in Queensland is established a startup delivery network using the Allied Express facility. Allied Express run a big facility in Brisbane. VTFE are establishing their own fleet in a portion of that building, and that is enabling them to deliver the volumes that they pick up in Melbourne and transport interstate into Queensland through the Brisbane metro area, and then use an agent for the balance of Queensland. That, in terms of a sort of a startup Queensland operation, lost a bit of money in the first couple of months as we got established, and then operated at breakeven in June, and we expect to grow from there. We have put some sales resource into Queensland.
In terms of New South Wales, as we have talked about with VTFE, it is the one state that they do not have a partner for, so they do not pick up any volume out of Melbourne and deliver that into New South Wales because they have not had a partner there. The job that we have been focused on is either, A, finding the right partner or finding an acquisition opportunity in New South Wales that allows us to get up and running. There is a couple of opportunities there. We are actively talking to them and I would like to think that during the course of FY 2027, VTFE have added New South Wales into the lanes that they can deliver to.
That is great. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. I will leave it there.
Thanks, Andy.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Wade Gardiner. Wade, please go ahead and unmute yourself to ask your question.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Sorry, can you just clarify what you said at the end there about New South Wales and the timing of when you'd expect to find a partner or some sort of channel?
Yeah. We'd like to think that we'll have a channel either that we own or that we can partner with during FY 2027, so during this year.
Right, but nothing imminent. You wouldn't expect it within the first half necessarily?
Not necessarily in the first half.
Okay. The other question I had was just around the fuel surcharge impact. Can you just confirm what the impact was in the New Zealand business? I know in Australia, the Australian business, it's a different system.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Has that been sort of an ongoing impact in Australia, or has it sort of reset and you are happy that there is no ongoing impact there?
Yeah. No ongoing impact on Australia. Again, depending on the customer and the contracts, a little bit of impact early on March, April, but that is largely been caught up now. In New Zealand, look, we estimated around a couple of million impact in terms of margin, and that was at the point where fuel went up and then our surcharge came in on a lag. What we have done is shortened that lag now to a week. So in the future, any sudden movements in fuel price, our pricing will follow within a week rather than the two-month lag that we have had for about 20-odd years.
Okay. Cool. That is all from me. Thank you.
Thanks, Wade.
Our next question comes from Marcus Curley. Marcus, please go ahead and unmute yourself to ask your question.
Good morning, team. I just wondered if we could start with the transport margin outcome for the year, which was relatively flat. Could you give us any color in terms of what was happening in New Zealand versus Australia from a margin perspective?
Sure. I tried to mention that, but roughly in New Zealand the biggest impact would be NZEP. On the negative side would be NZEP and Big Chill. The premium end of the market remains under a lot of pressure, and we've seen drops of margins. That's because of the size of NZEP and Big Chill, that's probably why the overall number doesn't look better. If you look at some of the other businesses in New Zealand, Post Haste, DX, we've seen margin increase of 50 - 150 basis points roughly. In Australia, Allied grew significantly, and so did Shred-X and Med-X. Contrasting that, TIMG, because of the lack of digitization work, was lower than it was the previous year. Quite a contrasted picture depending on where you look.
Yeah. The one other point, Marcus. Small, but the VTFE margin sits at a fundamentally lower margin than Allied Express.
As we expand into New South Wales, there's investment going into that, so that margin will probably continue to reduce a bit until we're in a more BAU state of the market.
Sorry, could you give any specifics in terms of what the Allied margin movement was in the year? Was it up?
It was up, yeah, by about 100 basis points from memory.
Okay, great. Thank you. In the guidance, just staying on the margin topic, putting—
We do not give guidance.
Yeah. Or lack of guidance maybe is a better description. What is your sort of I know that there is a bullet on margins, but can you be a little bit more specific in terms of whether you are anticipating, excluding fuel, for the core businesses, any noticeable improvement in margin this year?
I will go first and then let Stephan fill in. I think had we not seen the stampeding of consumer demand and the high fuel prices, yes, we would have expected further margin accretion. I think that was part of the plan we have had. We have had a good price increase. I think the impact of those underlying volumes, that will be the piece for us to watch and how long that goes for.
Yeah. I would have said the same thing. Before the war in the Middle East, I would have been positive about the year. What we've seen in the last quarter makes me a bit nervous about what this year is going to look like.
Okay. Understood. On VTFE, it looked like on an EBITDA basis it contributed just over a couple million NZD for the period you owned it. Could you give us an updated—
Four.
—view. Sorry.
About NZD 4 million, I think. EBITA level.
EBITA was NZD 4 million. Okay.
NZD 4 million, yeah.
Okay. Sorry. There was a bit of interest in that—
Yeah.
—division.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. How would you still feel comfortable with what you guided at the time of the result? I think it sort of was implying about sort of 10-ish, yeah 10 or 11 on a run rate basis.
Yeah. It was around about NZD 10 million on a run rate basis. I think it will end up being a little bit softer than that possibly, Marcus. Again, it is a bit how long is a piece of string in terms of that pressure with fuel prices. We are investing a little bit, just in that Queensland. In Queensland, as I said, kind of breakeven where we would be making a little bit of money with agents only, breakeven with our costs of operating. That should grow as we start to pick up some new business up in that Queensland market.
Construction and building is quite a significant share of the portfolio of customer of VTFE. As Mark mentioned earlier, it has been impacted by the economic conditions in Australia. I think the best way to think about it is to look at what happened in New Zealand probably two, three years back, and you have probably about the same magnitude.
Okay. Then just finally, you mentioned Evolve at NZD 5 million for the year. Could you just update us? Is that the end of Evolve this year? What is just an updated view on the ongoing cost for FY 2028?
No. There is probably another year of investment in FY 2028 for Evolve, which is also when we should start seeing the benefits flowing through. In terms of ongoing cost, it is probably around a couple of million, but that will be FY 2029. I think this year and next year we will still see implementation spend, which then will be gone, and it is just the ongoing roughly a couple of million, I think.
Yeah. That project is taking a little bit longer, or the scope is a little bit bigger. How would you—
Yeah.
How are you thinking about that?
It's a combination. It's quite a complex project to implement because we are doing that across a number of businesses that have different practices, so there's a lot of work to make that effective. So we've been a bit more cautious in rolling out the new system to the businesses than what we were originally planning, and that's what you're seeing in the probably extended timeline and slightly higher cost.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ian Munro. Ian, please unmute yourself to ask your question.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. With respect to New Zealand Express, I guess post-balance date performance, are we right in thinking that kind of resembling the fourth quarter performance into July and August, or is there reason to believe that maybe the comps have trended a little bit more negative, based on your commentary? Secondly, how did the conditions in the fourth quarter sort of impact your attitude towards pricing in Express in New Zealand on a sort of weighted basis? Can you perhaps give us a little bit of color as to where the, I guess, the pricing mechanisms have been set? Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely. I think a little bit weaker than the fourth quarter on the chart. So over these last sort of six weeks, July not too bad. Winter's always a quieter period, but yeah, slightly lower than you would've seen in Q4 in terms of the volumes. In terms of pricing, no, we've really stuck to our guns on that, Ian. We communicated the price increase round about May, didn't we?
Yes.
Implemented as of 1st of July. In terms of where we're sitting today, we think probably bang on track in terms of achieving the 75% of the headline rate—
Yeah.
—which is what we normally seek to achieve. So yeah, in terms of pricing, we've pushed it. Certainly the guys are conscious of keeping hold of volume, where there is good margin. So those kind of things we have done for many, many years. But yeah, I think the team have done a particularly good job at pushing through and executing that price increase.
Thank you. Just maybe focusing on the Allied business, noting your capacity investment up around Campbellfield. Just how are you kind of feeling about the capacity in the business at the moment, ability to chase market share growth? I am just kind of assuming that the comp sales are around that sort of 10%-20%. How to maintain that elevated position, kind of how you are saying about market share opportunities.
Yeah.
Just generally competitive intensity—
Yeah.
—of things as well in that segment.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think in FY 2026, and probably the tail end of FY 2025, we picked up quite a bit of share of wallet, because of the expanded facilities and because of the sort systems we had. Also because we simplified our pricing in some places. We had so many surcharges prior. The team simplified that, and that helped them win business ironically without actually lowering a price, just making it easier for platforms to accommodate. We won't get the same level of that share or wallet type gain that we got out of the existing base because that's largely been achieved. But in terms of capacity, look, we're pretty happy with where we are, Ian. In Queensland, we have plenty of space in that facility. It's a large one that we rented with the idea that it would last us a good 10 years.
Campbellfield and Vic has given us the opportunity, you could probably double the amount of volume through the combined depots. In New South Wales, we had about 20% of the depot which was just racked and holding product for some customers, really just to pay a bit of rent. We've taken that racking out to free up that part of the depot, so that frees up about 20% of the floor space in Sydney. The reality is, if we keep getting the volume either through new business or same customer growth in Sydney, the natural thing for us to do would just be to take on a satellite depot, of X thousand square meters at an incremental cost just to situate couriers and help us get through. Similar thing to what we do over here in New Zealand as we're growing, open up another satellite.
It's a marginal cost on the existing cost base and use that to grow. We're pretty happy with the capacity we have in the Allied footprint, and we're pretty focused on the niches that we know we can go out and win.
Very good. Thanks, Mark.
Thanks, Ian.
Thank you. I will just remind our attendees, if you did want to ask any questions, you can please use the raise hand function found at the bottom of your Zoom screen within the React button. I will just pause briefly to see if we have any additional questions. As there are no additional questions, Mark, I will hand back to you for closing remarks.
Okay. Thanks very much everyone for dialing in. Just like to finish by thanking all of our teams across Australia and New Zealand. It is a big team now, just over 6,000 employees and contractors that work as part of the Freightways family, and really it is down to the service that those people have provided across all of our businesses that has helped us have the year that we have had to win business, take a market share in periods of fluctuating economic performance from a macro sense. So yeah, to all of those people out there, thank you. And to all of those that support us, thank you, too. Cheers.