Mercury NZ Limited - Interim Results Analyst Briefing 22 February 2022 Start of Transcript Operator: Thank you all for standing by and welcome to the Mercury Interim Results Analyst Briefing for 2022. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers’ presentation there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time you will need to press star one on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to Chief Executive Mr Vince Hawksworth. Thank you, please go ahead. Vince Hawksworth: Kia ora tātou and welcome to Mercury's Half Year 2022 Results. I am Vince Hawksworth, and I am joined by our Chief Financial Officer William Meek. If we turn to slide 3 in the pack, half year '22 reflects significant change for Mercury and creates a platform for future growth. We have seen major events occur. Completion of the Tilt New Zealand acquisition where we have acquired their five operating wind farms. Which when you combined that with Turitea North, make Mercury New Zealand's largest wind generator. Turitea North now in full operating mode with all 33 turbines generating, and the Southern section with civil works well advanced now. Looking at a completion in mid-calendar '23. Of course the half year also saw us move through the acquisition process of Trustpower. We are getting close to the completion of that deal, the High Court decision being positive. Now we're in the ‘giving effect to’ phase, which should see us complete the second quarter of cal-'22. All of these things being put together provide that really important platform for the decarbonisation of New Zealand. At an EBITDAF level, the $242 million result was obviously down. It reflects a number of moving parts, which we will go into in some more detail shortly. But lower hydro generation, the outage at Kawerau, and the impacts of the retirement of the Norske Skog plant all had impacts. Of course with some offsets by the added wind generation. Importantly, in a period of extremely low hydro in-flows we were able to maintain our lake storage to be able to deal for lower - higher prices, and lower in-flows in the second half. That’s a notable change from last year. We talk about Thrive as our evolving culture and the way we want to work. But importantly it also delivers financially. We are on-target for our $30 million, made up of both revenue and cost elements. The important thing will be sustaining that changing way of work through future years. Page 1 of 18