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Construction giant Fletcher Building has ousted Telecom as New Zealand's second biggest company by revenue.
Deloitte and Management magazine, in their annual Top 200 Awards, last night named Fletcher Building the country's second largest company, with revenue of $5.9 billion, about $60 million more than former second-place holder Telecom.
The ranking caps five years of bumper growth for Fletcher Building.
Former chief executive Ralph Waters oversaw a rise in the company's net profits from $93 million in 2002 to $379 million last year. This month the company announced a full-year net profit of $484 million, up 28 per cent from the year before.
Judges of the Top 200's Company of the Year category, in which Fletcher was also a finalist, said they were impressed with the way the company had coped with the transition to new chief executive Jonathan Ling, with no hitches or slowdown during the changeover.
Shareholders will also be happy - this year's lift in earnings enabled Fletcher to make its eleventh consecutive dividend increase, with a final dividend of 23c per share. The total dividend for the year was 45c per share.
Elsewhere in the rankings, Fonterra remains the country's biggest business by far, with revenue of $13.8 billion. The Top 200 list ranks companies by revenue rather than profit - the dairy co-operative records a zero profit because the money it makes is returned to farmers in pay-outs.
The rankings of most of the country's 20 largest companies changed very little from last year, with no new companies breaking into the top 20.
The biggest leap within the top 20 was from Foodstuffs South Island, which jumped from 16th last year to 10th.
Meridian Energy suffered the biggest drop, falling from 11th to 17th.
Combined profits from the Top 200 companies was up from $7.4 billion last year to $9.3 billion, buoyed largely by Telecom's $2.1 billion gain on the sale of the Yellow Pages.
Organisers said strong international commodity prices and a buoyant domestic economy had joined forces to lift the combined revenue of the Top 200, up by 7.34 per cent this year.
This is the eighteenth year the Top 200 Awards have been handed out.
