Chief executive Roger Gray came on board in April last year when the company’s financial and health and safety performances were foundering and a costly container terminal automation project had still not been successfully implemented six years on.
He attributed the improvements to higher trade volumes, a recovery in cruise ship visits, and higher pricing to shipping lines and cargo-owners. The automation project was abandoned shortly after he arrived. The port, which also got a largely new board of directors around this time, had to write off $65m.
More than 170,000 cruise passengers arrived in Auckland in FY23 as the industry recovered post-Covid.
The business has changed its name to Port of Auckland from Ports of Auckland, to reflect the 2018 sale of its Ōnehunga seaport.
“We continued to have very strong volumes in roll-on-roll-off, bulk and multi-cargo sectors, and we’re in the process of turning round the container terminal,” Gray told the Herald.
In the second half of the financial year, there had been 8 per cent growth in full container trade which signalled importers were returning to the port, he said.
Port of Auckland is the country’s main imports gateway but lost a lot of import container business to Port of Tauranga due to its container handling under-performance in the consumer demand shipping frenzy of pandemic days.
New Auckland mayor Wayne Brown campaigned for election last year on returning port land to public use.
Gray said the port was continuing to work with Brown and his office on a review of a “port land handback”.
“So importers are coming back to the port. It will be interesting to see where that volume is coming from, I can’t see that yet, but we are certainly seeing good strong growth in laden (container) volumes and of course we charge more for those than empty (ones).”
Gray said cruise ship visits contributed around 10 per cent of the growth in profit year on year.
“This is not a story about ‘cruise is back’ and (propping) the result is up. This is across-the-board improved profitability.”
Gray said he was particularly proud of the improvement in the port’s health and safety record, which had been the subject of a damning independent report commissioned by former Auckland mayor Phil Goff, after a string of fatalities and serious incidents.
During the year, the port won the New Zealand Workplace Health and Safety Award for collaboration with the Maritime Union and third-party stevedores C3 Ltd and Wallace Investments for the country’s first Stevedoring Code of Practice.
But Gray said efforts to improve the health and safety performance “were nowhere near finished”.
Along with a much-improved relationship with the port’s labour unions, Gray also noted the port had started a $1.5m investment in harbour health initiatives over the next 15 years. This followed the January settlement of an ongoing dispute about port dredging and disposal consents. The settlement will allow the port to handle bigger ships.
The name change to Port of Auckland would be a “soft” brand change, he said.
“I’m very pleased to see the revenue growth and trading result. We gave guidance at the half (year) to council that we would end with (underlying) net profit of $42m to $45m and we achieved 45.2m, that’s an 80 per cent improvement and about a $10m improvement on our budget.
“We thought trading would end up at $35m, but it’s $45.2m.”
The port today employs 774 people, around 70 more than in FY22 when it was short of stevedores due to layoffs during the failed container terminal automation project.
Andrea Fox joined the Herald as a senior business journalist in 2018 and specialises in writing about the dairy industry, agribusiness, exporting and the logistics sector and supply chains.
