Andrew von Dadelszen Former Regional Councillor

The Annual General Meeting of the Port of Tauranga was another upbeat event, with POT reporting a compound 24 per cent growth during the past 20 years.

It has ranked as the best performing company on the NZX for the past 15 years. And the positive news for investors is that this stellar performance is continuing, with group net profit after tax up 19 per cent for the first quarter of the current year. This truly is a great company - keeping it simple and doing it well.

My one concern was to hear the board chairman say that he isn't considering a share split. Technically a share split doesn't add anything to a company's bottom line, but it does tend to add shareholder wealth, and this should be a major consideration for any Board of Directors. New Zealanders have an aversion to paying more than $10 per share, and to split POT shares in a three for one (reducing the effective share price from the current $12.90 to $4.30) would inevitably increase the number of shareholder investors (increasing liquidity), which would likely kick the price of the shares up to around $5 per share. That would give a price boost of over $2 (based on the current price), and increase the market capitalisation by more than $28m. This seems a no brainer to me, with absolutely no downside.

My other concern from the AGM was to hear that the Ngati Ruahine appeal to the Environment Court for the dredging consent was at least partly funded by taxpayers, via the Ministry for the Environment. This hapu seems to be trying to hold the port company to ransom (especially as it has since taken this to the High Court, and now on to the Court of Appeal), and it appears to be just another vexatious money grab. The port has already spent more than $2.5m on this dredging consent, and this process is holding back sound economic business, at a time that we all need business growth. I also hear that iwi are still asking our local ratepayers to give them a four per cent shareholding in the port (from the regional council's 54.94 per cent shareholding). This grievance industry knows no bounds!

If you have a view on these or any other local government issues, I invite you to email me: andrew@vond.co.nz or visit www.vond.co.nz