Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Stew Hamilton. I'm the Chief Executive for Mercury. I'm here today with Richard Hopkins, Chief Financial Officer, and with Paul Ruediger, who's Head of Business Performance and Investor Relations. It's wonderful to have you here as we talk through the full-year results for FY 2025. We're sitting in a wet Auckland, and that is great for a hydro generator's perspective, but equally, we'll try and talk loud if the rain falls too heavily on the roof. We'll kick off with the first slide, or slide number three. This is really a repeat of the work that we introduced in our refresh strategy in June. It was wonderful to have an awesome group of people join us down in Rotorua in June, where we had the chance to share our new refresh strategy, and that shows how we were targeting the biggest drivers of value.
The strategy outlines a strong investment proposition for Mercury. Firstly, we have a capable team that's leveraging our superior portfolio due to not only our asset location, but our hydro river peaking. We've got a fantastic customer scale and our efficiency that enables us to unlock value. We shared at the Investor Day the growth opportunities in front of us and the plan to deliver more value in 2030. We have the best pipeline of wind prospects and have some exciting geothermal options. We also have a team with proven execution, not only in geothermal and wind, but also in hydro projects. Through this, we continue to deliver attractive returns for our owners, and our strategy is produced one which produces a better Mercury today, where we're building for tomorrow, and also brighter together.
Now, looking ahead, or looking backwards at our FY 2025 performance in what was one of the most challenging hydro years on record, we were able to deliver steady performance. With reduced production of 10%, we achieved an FY 2025 EBITDA of $786 million. This compared to our originally guided $820 million and our most recent guidance update in April of $760 million. We were then able to provide an ordinary full-year dividend of $0.24 per share, which produces a 17th consecutive year of dividend growth. Our customer scale and efficiency enabled us to unlock more value, and our total connections grew to 906,000 on the back of our multi-product offering and also produced value from our retail scale as we completed this integration synergies.
Our positive momentum in generation delivery continues with three major builds simultaneously in construction, stretching from the top of the North in New Zealand to the bottom of the South. A $1 billion investment will produce 1.1 TWh additional renewable energy. We entered into long-term electricity agreements with Fonterra and Visy, and our TY contract started in January. We continue to build a strong sales pipeline, which gives us the confidence to continue to keep building. We continue to build and strengthen our social license and had a great result through the year of no post-pay creditless connections for customers in hardship. Looking ahead, our refresh strategy will continue to deliver value with a focus on productivity and a focus on executing our build program.
With that, we provided an FY 2026 guidance of EBITDA of $1 billion with a dividend of $0.25 per share and a stay-in-business CapEx guidance of $150 million. In June, we also shared our plan to accelerate generation development. That plan is now in motion, and we intend to deliver 3.5 TWh in-year generation by 2030. Our refresh strategy places a focus on the priorities that will deliver greatest value. The first two components of our strategy, our aspirations around [Foreign language] and customer, are really all about how we use our prospecting and execution of a pipeline, combining it with a customer electrification demand that leads to commercial outcomes.
The second two components are really how we engage with our partners and our next-gen people to deliver that value, all delivering in a commercial outcome which results in returns for our owners that enable investment back into growth, again demonstrating better today, building tomorrow, brighter together. Our executive team is forming and is hitting the ground running. We have a structure that's now aligned with the key aspects of our strategy. We've developed our plans, working very closely with our board, and setting up our team to deliver on that performance. The heart of who we are is our people. I'm very proud of the continued and sustained improvement in our safety performance over FY 2025 and the disciplined delivery of not only plant safety, but also process safety performance. There's no doubt that it has been a tough year for many in New Zealand.
That extends to our customers and our people. For our people, we've actually made really good progress, particularly against our gender pay equity ratio, and yet recent organizational and workforce changes have had an impact on our cultural index score and our progress towards our target for people leaders of ethnicity. We have work to do in that space. Through delivery of a safer environment and growing our people, we will accelerate our performance. Through that, we are simplifying our organizational structures, we're aligning our company scorecard targets to our strategy, and better linking that to pay for performance, and we're also leaning in and enhancing the use of artificial intelligence tools so our people can continue to focus on the highest value work. I'll now hand over to Richard to talk through some of the financial numbers.
Thanks, Stew, and [Foreign language] , everyone. It's great to be here for my sort of first year-end results at Mercury. Let me start by talking through the FY 2025 financial performance. Starting off with trading margin, that's down $75 million from prior year. Really, as Stew touched on already, linked to the less generation, and that's been partially offset by improved sales. Underlying operating expenditure was flat on prior year, but we had increased costs from two areas: organizational changes, which are enabling us to get to the $370 million OpEx looking forwards, and also well maintenance. This explains the EBITDA movement. The NPAT itself was impacted by fair value adjustments on non-hedge accounted derivatives. The key bits that Stew 's also touched on are the investment that we've been making in growth, particularly on OEC5, KD2, and [Foreign language], and two of these are going to be starting operations in 2026.
Dividends up 3%, representing the 17th consecutive year of dividend growth. Turning to the next slide, looking at the EBITDA bridge. From $877 million last year, the largest impact was the reduction in generation volume, costing $159 million. Mass market yields increased by $6 a megawatt-hour; CNI yields increased by $13 a megawatt-hour. A big focus for the year was signing these long-term contracts that Stew touched on already, so Fonterra, Visy, and New Zealand Aluminium Smelter (TY) all at fair prices. Telco continued to make good progress, adding over 30,000 connections, whilst yields reduced slightly. The telecom business continues to make a meaningful contribution to Mercury, both in margin but also in reduced customer churn. Price increase of $7 million was largely driven by trading gains. We expect to normalize back to historic levels, partially offset by the increased geothermal royalty costs.
Under our long-term agreements on royalty costs, they're based on a three-year weighted rolling average linked to historical spot prices. That's royalty costs going up, particularly for the Rotorua JV. We'll cover OpEx on the next slide. The key takeaway for me from this slide is it's a good trading performance above the $760 million that we'd indicated in April, and that really comes down to careful yield management and targeted contracting, which really cushioned the result and set us up well for 2026. Turning now to the next slide, the critical areas of focus for the future success. Ultimately, underlying operating costs were the same as similar to last year, and we really do see this as peak OpEx.
We're focused on reducing our costs to the $370 million, as we discussed at Investor Day, and we had some additional restructuring costs during the year as we managed our employee numbers down. The cash flow waterfall shows that we reinvested 56% of our earnings back into the business, a clear signal of our commitment to growth, even in a challenging hydro year. This reinvestment funded both our major growth projects and our critical stay-in-business work, ensuring operational resilience and future earnings uplift. Despite the hydrology challenge, we increased capital spend. We also maintained our progressive dividend policy, marking our 17th consecutive year of dividend growth. This reflects the underlying strength of our integrated business model, disciplined capital allocation, and confidence in future cash generation as new projects come online.
As you can see in the PAC, debt increased by $230 million during the year, and I'm going to talk about that a bit more when I go through our credit position. This next slide really runs through how we've enhanced our assets, and it's a quick review of where we invested our capital in FY 2025. We advanced major hydro resilient projects, including Arapuni Left Abutment and strengthening and Taupo Control Gates. Geothermal investment included two injection wells, one in Tikitere and Rotorua for $30 million. Other generation CapEx included $46 million in critical generation assets, such as the refurbishment of the Karapiro third unit and intake gates replacement. With that, I'm going to hand back to Stew to talk through the next few slides.
Thank you, Richard. The FY 2025 bought into the impact and the drop of gas supply in New Zealand, and in combination with the dry periods that we experienced, it sent signals to the market to take action, and we'll talk about that action that was taken soon. The left side of this chart, or this slide with the charts down the left-hand side, shows the gas situation and harsh reality. Decline in gas returns and also the reuse or the more greater use of coal generation being substituted for the gas can be shown. On the right side, the market maintained energy security during a volatile hydrology period. We had near record low hydrology in the early parts of FY 2025 that coincided with the high gas prices.
This resulted in high electricity spot prices, and we saw a strong market response that included a combination of demand-side gas deals, increased thermal generation, demand response from industrials like New Zealand Aluminium Smelter (TY), until we saw high hydro inflows later in the financial year. Early focus on winter 2025 from energy security from all sector participants, and the above-average inflows from May 2025 have lowered electricity spot prices and set us up well now to get through winter '25. The year had two very significant dry spells, and we learned a lot and bolstered our ability to manage that volatility. This chart shows the hydrology in Lake Taupo through the year, the yellow line being FY 2025 compared to the average line in grey and what was FY 2024 in blue. The table, in particular, if you look at the second line down, shows the Waikato inflows.
Firstly, before we came into FY 2024, there were pretty dry conditions that carried over into this current formative FY 2025 financial year. That saw us starting Lake Taupo 103 GWh below average in terms of storage. The dry period persisted through the start of FY 2025, and you can see that middle line there with July being down by 137 GWh, August down by 89 GWh compared to average, meaning that our net position and our exposure grew over that quarter, which is shown on the middle line of that chart. Inflows then recovered in October, but then we started to see what would be a six-month very dry period and actually some of the lowest inflows on record.
You can see that our net position, though, improved later in that quarter, and as we hit the start of calendar year 2025, we managed Lake Taupo levels and utilized other mechanisms very well to bring our net position to balance. You can see the last six months of FY 2025, our net position has been managed extremely well. We have since experienced strong inflows, particularly in Q4, that's providing tailwinds into FY 2026. In fact, our hydro generation had a record of 566 gigawatt-hours for the month of July due to strong Waikato inflows, due to great asset management and the work that's been done with AI to optimize and make the weather more efficient. That's above average hydro generation to date through July and August of 160.52 gigawatt-hours.
When you combine that with the Taupo storage level being 77 gigawatt-hours above average, it gives us a 290 gigawatt-hour tailwind heading into FY 2026. One of our core approaches to future value is this and our ability to execute long-term deals and develop a robust sales pipeline to drive renewables investment. Over the year, the New Zealand Aluminium Smelter long-term agreement became operational. That underpins our Kaua’ukaua Downs II wind farm project in Southland. We're very excited about our Visy deal in terms of a long-term 10 and 20-year deal with Visy and also proud to be supporting the electrification of Fonterra. Those three contracts represent a total of about one terawatt-hour of electricity per year, which provides a solid, robust sales pipeline to drive further investment in generation development. We are now in the process of commissioning the third unit of our Karapiro station.
Combined with AI Digital River, that has lifted our mean hydro generation to 4,140 gigawatt-hours per year, and we're now moved to the design and development of the next phase of our rehabilitation on the hydro system on the Waikato River as we head upriver to Maraetai, Ohakuri, and Atiamuri. We are making excellent progress with our current three generation development projects in construction, firstly with OEC5 at Ngatamariki. There is a small risk to delay due to equipment delivery and some construction challenges, but we are being conservative in our assumptions for production, and this will provide a very strong baseload for winter 2026. Our wind projects that are both in play, our plan for power production over the middle of next year, will deliver good value through FY 2026 and into FY 2027.
We are making great progress on our OpEx per connection target as well on the customer side of the business. We're targeting a 30% reduction in OpEx spend by FY 2028. We've delivered 11% of that already. We've maintained energy connections flat whilst continuing to grow our telco connections. That was up by about $32,000 relative to the prior comparable period, driven mainly by cross-sale opportunity. In fact, we've lifted the ship with two or more products by nearly 5%, and that's up to now 38%. There's no doubt that the confidence in the sector's capability to provide secure, affordable, and renewable energy took a big hit in 2024. Despite that, New Zealand's energy system or electricity system is still ranked in the top 10 globally against the trilemma. We continue to provide support for our customers.
The best thing we can actually do is to build at pace and to firm it. We and the sector are making great strides here. There's a number of activities which are captured on the slide and really making sure that Mercury is doing both those in terms of building at pace and entering into mechanisms which firm our renewable generation projects. We're particularly proud of the work we're doing to support those most vulnerable. Our customer care program has seen our post-pay creditless connections drop to zero for the year. For all of our customers that we work with, we're aiming to deliver greater clarity, greater control, and then care for those customers through targeted support for those in hardship.
With regards to the Electricity Authority and the ComCom Energy Task Force, this morning they released an update in terms of the progress they're making against a couple of initiatives planned there. We've been engaged with that group and supportive of the review. We've also been supporting a number of independent analysts in looking at the solutions for the problem, and that's the key thing, is making sure that the solutions that have been developed are actually addressing the core problem, and that is that we need more energy, we need it firmed, and we need transparency of those prices for customers in order to manage that risk. On that front, there's two key things that we see as being priorities for policy solutions. The first is around firming generation that's ultimately needed to keep our lights on.
That is the number one priority, and we're pleased to enter into the strategic Huntly firming option as a key part of providing that firming for New Zealand's system. The second is around boosting hedge market to enable a vibrant competition. We've seen the EA and the ComCom come out this morning talking more about that. We're generally supportive of work that creates a vibrant hedge market. However, if it goes to the space of more intrusive options like separation, we struggle to see how that actually addresses the problem and will not result in more energy projects being built or being funded. We have one terawatt-hour in construction at the moment with delivery through the next year and into FY 2027. We have received consent for our BES, for our battery energy storage solution.
We'll look at lodging consent for Maharangi II wind farm this year, and we're progressing other projects in our pipeline that will see us head towards 3.5 terawatt-hours by 2030. Firming is a critical focus of our wholesale management team and underpins our growth. This slide shows two bars. On the left-hand side is our portfolio need for capacity requirements. This is our firming requirement to 2030. That requires about 330 MW of capacity in order to support our growth plan. The right-hand side is a stacked chart which shows how we're growing that capacity requirement. It starts at the bottom by having a renewable diversity. We're ticking lots of boxes in that space by building in the north and the south. Our hydro refurbishment program is enhancing our capacity, also providing a good level of capacity.
Our portfolio of flex continues to add to that capacity through hot water heater system and our mass market trials, including time of use pricing. The contracting flexibility through projects and mechanisms like the Genesis Huntly firming option and some of our generation following sales provide the next part of that stack bar. Ultimately, we have a 300 megawatt Fukamaru battery energy storage system option, which is now consented, which will enable us to have a fourth lever to unlock a significant portion of what we require to firm our growth plan to 2030. Geothermal growth prospects are extremely exciting. Two months ago, we shared our aspiration for an additional five terawatt-hours. We've now deployed a team of capable people into this area with the mission of initially prospecting the first three terawatt-hours across seven opportunities.
Those we plan to share more details of over the next six to nine months as they come to fruition and look to make sure we provide the details in order for us to ultimately take those prospects and turn them into executable options.
Okay, let me pick it up now with the balance sheet. Our debt to EBITDA on an S&P adjusted basis is 2.5, right in the middle of our two to three times target range for maintaining a BBB+ rating. This multiple reflects a combination of the temporarily lower EBITDA from weak hydrology and the higher net debt as we progress our three major growth projects. We've got $600 million in undrawn facilities, boosted by the $400 million Aussie green bond issuance in March. We've also got a dividend reinvestment plan in place. For the final dividend, we're going to offer the 2% discount and expect to raise about $60 million through the DRP, including Crown participation. Looking forward, it's going to be about $100 million a year through the DRP, supporting investment funding while preserving balance sheet flexibility.
This disciplined approach to balance sheet management is exactly what we set out at Investor Day, enabling us to fund growth while maintaining attractive returns to shareholders. Now turning to our final slide, the 2026 guidance. After a challenging hydro year in 2025, 2026 is looking much more positive. EBITDA guidance to market is $1 billion. As Stew 's touched on, July has seen record generation for Mercury, driven by starting the year with a higher lake level and 86th percentile inflows since the 1st of July. Together, this accounts for guidance being $50 million above our normalized expectation for EBITDA of $950 million. We're forecasting total generation for the year to be around 9,260 GW-hours across the whole portfolio. Bridging from the $786 million last year, we had $114 million from normalizing to mean hydro generation and trading gains.
We've built in $17 million from OEC and KD2 in the first year. We've conservatively excluded OEC5's generation for the commissioning period. We've got $7 million from yield growth across sales channels, offset by risk mitigation, roll-off required generation, and direct costs. We've got the $26 million worth of cost reductions, which are in line with the commitment we made to you at Investor Day, plus the $50 million of above-average hydro as outlined. Dividend guidance, we've increased $0.25 per share, up 4.25%, reflecting confidence in earnings growth. Our stay-in-business guidance is $150 million and remains in line with our long-term CapEx commitments. Growth CapEx is going to be around $600 million, focused on completing OEC5, KD2, and [Foreign language], plus network upgrades and hydro resilience projects.
We expect to see net debt finish at around $2.4 billion and for our debt to EBITDA multiple to be lower than we've seen this year. Overall, great to have some more water. We're going to work hard to deliver strong shareholder returns and really looking forward to having a couple of new projects going live this financial year.
Thanks, Richard. Yeah, I agree. It's been a challenging year from a hydrology perspective, but we've managed it extremely well. The winter 2024 is behind us. We're building at pace. We're investing in those projects and supporting it through firming. That's ultimately delivering competitive prices. We'll see continued electrification and demand growth. That growth then creates the pipeline for us to continue to drive generation development, particularly in our geothermal and wind prospects. Ultimately, we will use and create value from our great people. We've got great opportunities ahead of us. We've got a great plan and now we aim to deliver. With that, we'll hand over to Paul to open up to questions.
Hello, everyone. If you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand and I'll bring you on screen and just unmute. First question of today is from Grant Swanepoel. Like to unmute, Grant?
Yep, I'm unmuted now. Hi guys, thanks so much. I know you touched on the geothermal opportunity of 5 TWh. It's not a month since your Investor Day. It seems to be a high priority for you. Can you give any update on whether that is firming up quite well? Would you be able to give some sort of early indication sometime in the near future on maybe 1.5 TWh that is achievable, or is this something we are just going to wait until everything is done?
Good morning, Grant. We'll definitely provide updates as we progress. We're certainly not going to hold on to it and do a reveal once the 5 TWh is there. It's a massive priority both for me, for our executive team, and for the board. It's exciting. We can see the opportunities there. We just want to progress those initial prospecting opportunities to the space where we can then share the details with you. There's probably a few horizons of those projects. There's sort of an initial short-term, medium-term set of options which we think we can progress at a reasonable pace. Those we'll share probably, if not later this year, certainly in the early part of next year in terms of where we see them sit.
There are the medium to longer-term prospects which we'll probably be a little less transparent about in the short term until we actually firm those up. As they develop, we will share them with you and others.
That's a great timeline. Thanks. You did touch on the Frontier report that comes out next month. Is there anything you're hearing from government that scares you other than maybe separation or some sort of capacity market?
Yeah, we're like you. We haven't heard a lot of information coming out. We note the Minister of Energy, Simon Watts, comment over the last week talking about surgical intervention. We'll wait to see what that looks like. We've been engaging pretty heavily. We had a good opportunity to talk to the Frontier team. There's no doubt through that discussion there was a lot of focus on firming. We're pretty happy with the work that the industry has been doing with the market mechanisms that are at play through the strategic Huntly firming option. From what we can make out, I think government and others have been pretty supportive of the work that's been done collaboratively across the sector to do that.
Ultimately, like you, we don't know quite what's coming out, but we certainly continue to advocate for our position and also make sure that we're working on the things that we actually think are going to solve the problems, which is to build generation at pace and to firm it.
Thanks. Hopefully, Watts is a good surgeon. The 50 MW you signed with Genesis, would you have wanted more, or is this just you paying to keep this capacity around for longer term and it's more a good market?
Yeah, you said we signed up to the 50 MW. This is the strategic Huntly firming option. As we head into next year, we still have some of the previous HFO live for us. I think as we head into FY 2026 now, we have about 65 MW of the HFO available to us. Our team in the wholesale markets part of the business are utilizing that. Even last week when it was pretty cold, they were calling some of that to support our portfolio and manage it. We see it definitely adds value to the sector, but it absolutely adds value for our portfolio as well. We do have the option to go further and take on more. We'll consider that. It does become part of that stack, which was on one of the slides looking at how we firm our renewable portfolio. We'll watch that pretty closely.
It's adding value for us now, and Tim Thompson and the team will consider whether we need to grow it beyond that.
Just to clarify that, does that mean from January next year you'll have the last of the 65 HFO plus the 50 of this new one?
No, no, it's total 65.
Just 15 HFO.
Okay. My final question, just in terms of your guidance of $1 billion, great number. What is the trading gain assumed in that?
That's dropped down back to normalized levels, so around the 18 level.
Thank you very much. That's it from me. Thank you, team.
Thanks, Grant.
Next, we have Vignesh Nair. You'd like to unmute?
Hi, good morning, Stew and Richard. Thanks for the presentation. A couple of questions. First, just on the guidance, FY 2026 sort of includes $7 million in yield and portfolio impacts. Just wondering if you can talk to that a little bit more. The performance this year was quite strong. Just wondering if prices are beginning to moderate, I suppose, in FY 2026.
Yeah, look, there's a bit of work going on across our mass market and also our CNI side there. There are a few things that make that up, but not too much more information we're providing on that at this point.
Okay, are you able to provide what the kind of, I suppose, net back is your inflation you've got or price increase you've got into 2026 at all? Is it sort of in line with CPI, below, or slightly above?
I think using CPI is a good basis for that, Vignesh.
Okay, just the next question on upgrades. You've got Taupo Control Gate and Arapuni. You've talked to, I think, $120 million in spend for Arapuni. I don't think there was a firm number on the Taupo Gates upgrade. Just wondering if we can get some more information on the cost there.
Nice. That project is still in a solutioning phase, so we haven't yet. We've got a broad understanding of the cost, but until we actually settle on the solution and do the detailed engineering, we won't have the specific cost number. Expectation, though, over the next 10 years is to continue to maintain the overall standard business CapEx and that $150 million per year to the window.
Do you know when you'll get some color on what that'll look like?
I think the team's still pretty early phase of engaging with Iwi and Hapu in that space, and we'll need to do a fair bit of work. I think it's still going to be a good one or two years out before we get a good understanding of that.
Okay, sure. Just finally, on the OpEx, I assume you've baked in the Genesis, your premiums for the HFOs into the guidance into next year. Is that fair?
That's correct, yeah.
Is that included in the energy margin, or is it in the OpEx line?
Shows up in energy margin.
Okay, cool. That's all from me. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Vignesh.
Next, we have Andrew Harvey Green. Can I unmute, Andrew?
Go ahead, Andrew.
Andrew, you can unmute if you like. I'll just take him off screen for a moment, but come back to you, Andrew. Next, we have Joshua Dale from Craigs . You want to unmute?
Morning, guys. Can you hear me okay?
Yes, we can. Morning, Joshua.
Brilliant. Morning. Stew, you mentioned just before you learned a lot and bolstered your ability to manage the hydro volatility. Just curious, if you rewound the clock 12 months, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
The team has done a whole lot of work around understanding what's the, how do we manage the lake level and how do we make sure we come into the start of the year in a right position. There's a fair bit of work that's been done around our portfolio settings to make sure that we are in a good position, particularly as we hit the start of the calendar year and make sure that we're set up to succeed in that space.
There's been quite a lot of work that's really in the wholesale team in particular with Sun & Co to make sure that we're in a better position heading into future years. It has obviously helped in times like now when we have a bit more water, but there's been a lot of work to make sure that even if we go through dry periods, and I think dry periods are probably a better thing to talk about than dry years now. We tend to, as you look at the last year, we had a couple of those periods. Making sure that we're better set up with our portfolio and with our contracting to manage our net positioning through that time is critical.
Okay, I think that, sorry, repeat for me.
It was that position through the middle of the slide, actually looking at that and actually how we manage. Look, it helps a lot as we got to the end of the year that we had some rain, but actually managing that net position really closely and making sure you don't get out of whack takes a lot of thinking and a lot of effort, and it's really important for our earnings.
Brilliant, thanks. You probably saw a context announcement yesterday around looking at increasing battery capacity. You've got a 150 MW battery in the pipeline. Slide 22 today suggests you could go to 300. It looks like there's a lot of industry capacity in the pipeline with regard to batteries. When does it start to become uneconomic in your view?
Yeah, I think the big thing here, Joshua, is that we want to get projects that are ready to go, but they don't have to go. We need to make sure that they go and they have a good, they stand up well economically. I think batteries is certainly one of the more challenging ones to get standing up. The main thing for us is getting that portfolio there, looking at the market, looking at what's coming, and then making really smart investment decisions at the time. That's what we're going to try and do right across not only our batteries, but our whole development portfolio, is really look, you know, take very smart decisions the best we can at the time, looking forward and seeing what others are doing that say all of them are NPV positive and actually sort of support a wider portfolio as well.
Those of us will have a choice, right, in terms of capacity requirements. That stacks on page on slide 22. Grid scale batteries, building them ourselves is a choice, but equally we can contract for that capacity in other ways too.
Thank you. Last question around your OpEx targets. I know you were fairly clear at your Investor Day. You've just reported $396. You're hoping to stay flat at $370 over each of the next three years. It does seem like a fairly abrupt drop with no transition or annualization of savings. Just curious what the movements are there.
Yeah, look, when we've sort of talked through this result, there are some one-offs in there. We talked about the well piece, and then we've also talked about restructuring costs, and there was quite a few million dollars' worth of that. Actually, a lot of the heavy lifting and hard work was done in the final quarter of the year to get our org in place. A lot of the savings is actually going to come through people in the reduction headcount we're having, and also just sort of careful management of our costs and prioritization of things going through. We think we're in good shape to deliver that $370 million. Things can go bump in the night and might do, but we think we've got a really good, credible plan, and most of that is already baked in.
There's not a lot of annualization that we're going to be doing through the year. We've got things in place for the start of this year.
Okay, thanks, guys, and well done on a good year.
Thanks, Joshua.
Thank you. Next, we have Steve Hudson from Macquarie. Like to unmute, Steve.
Steve and Andrew.
Hi, guys. Can you hear me?
Hi.
Yes, we can.
Yes.
Hi. That was the first challenge I've got. I probably should have asked this at the Investor Day, but obviously there's quite a bit going on on the supercritical geothermal side of things in New Zealand with the government's beheading some pilot drilling right now, I understand, and GNS sort of talking about 32,000 GWh of supercritical lying beneath the existing conventional. Why are you guys so much more excited about the medium to low temperature stuff and not this?
I'd say it's purely the availability of the technology and the likelihood of overcoming the technical challenges to deliver on that. The reason why we're so excited about in the short to medium term, the high to medium temperature geothermal is because the technical solutions already exist. For us, it's basically prospecting those options and delivering and executing on those, and we've got a strong level of confidence in delivering that. That's certainly a key profile of focus for us. I mentioned before the sort of horizons you go, horizon one, two, three, the kind of in the horizons one and two, it's very much building on our current assets. Horizon two is more about pushing out to some greenfields prospects. Over in horizon three is more the supercritical, right? We are very supportive of it.
Eventually, one of our best project managers has been supplanted into government to support the project management of the first well being drilled. We're supportive of it. It's just that the timeframes are longer, and we need to make sure that we're working on all three of those horizons to deliver value for our owners in the short, medium, and long term.
Thanks, Steve. How much of the five TWh would be supercritical?
Zero.
Okay. Just in terms of the HFO working capital requirement, can we take your share of the 600,000 tons of coal that's going to backstop those transactions? Your share of $160 million as your working capital commitment to that product in the next financial year?
I'll hand over to the accounting team.
I think of it as being a derivative. I think that's my answer to that. We put effectively the cost of the availability through our books.
Right. I think Contact was sort of taking it as a working capital adjustment. Anyway, I can take that off stream.
Yeah, I'll ask something.
Just on the Manawa Energy hedge, you've got sort of the first taste of what that looks like rolling off 250 GWh a year now. What are you assuming in terms of the headwind from those roll-offs? Because we can see obviously the fair value adjustment in your accounts is fairly large on that contract, but presumably you're making some assumption in this guidance and you're targeting it does on what the headwind will be as that CFD rolls off. I just wondered if you can give us some steer for what you're assuming.
Yeah, so look, the Manawa deal became effectively less positive than it was because it struck at a price sub $100. That's what you're seeing coming through the accounts. As we look forward, from a pricing perspective, it's going to become less positive as we head towards an ASX pricing in October 2026 going forward. That's also covered through the CFD adjustment.
Does that dollar for dollar hit your EBITDA or is there something below the line?
It hits EBITDA.
Dollar for dollar?
Yeah.
If we assume kind of two TWh, as you say, closer to $100 million rather than say $150 million or $160 million, there's $120 million of EBITDA drag per annum when it's fully rolled off, you know, in three years' time. Is that correct?
Yes, it is, but we think that when we've packed that all into our guidance, when we look out at the $1.15- $1.25 that we announced, that's all baked into that already. We continue to see EBITDA growth through that.
Okay, thanks, Richard.
That's all we have for question time.
Andrew didn't want to have another go.
Andrew had a little bit of a technical issue, so he couldn't ask us a question.
Very good.
Okay, thanks everybody. I look forward to catching up over this afternoon and over the next couple of days. It's exciting to be here. I really appreciate the support of Paul Ruediger through this and Richard Hopkins as we build a new executive team and look forward to the results flowing in FY2026.