Metrix sale - Mercury Update Conference Call Metrix sale: Mercury Update conference call transcript 17 December 2018, 2pm Transcribed by WEST Pages: 3 Start of Transcript Operator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Mercury update conference call. All participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key, followed by the number one, on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr Fraser Whineray, Mercury's chief executive. Please go ahead. Fraser Whineray: Thank you and good afternoon everyone. I'm Fraser Whineray, as you know. I'm joined here with Tim Thompson who's the head of investor relations for the business. Thank you for joining us on this conference call to just cover off any residual questions beyond what we provided on the release this morning that Mercury has entered into an agreement to sell its Metrix smart metering business here in New Zealand. So just a little bit of background. You will recall in the last 12 or 18 months we have looked at a couple of Australian smart metering opportunities. We were unsuccessful in those, and also grew to know a number of other participants in the market through that. It was through some of those connections that this opportunity ultimately arose. Metrix has been through a good period of growth in terms of rolling out its smart meters in predominantly the Auckland, but also some other places in New Zealand, and has also just completed a substantial investment in its core operating systems which puts it on a very strong footing. Ultimately, the intelliHUB Group, which is formed from a piece of Acumen coming from Origin, a piece of intelliHUB, which was a subsidiary of Landis and Gyr, a global metering manufacturer. Also, intelliHUB acquiring the rights to roll out trust powers smart meters here in New Zealand. This is sort of a fourth leg to that sequence which goes a long way to producing a leading Australasian smart metering business. Given it was non-core to us, represents about 5% of assets by value, we were comfortable in selling Metrix and then entering into an appropriate metering services agreement as part of that since half of Mercury's customers depend on Metrix's smart meter data. Strategically, it probably comes as no surprise. I think we're the last generator retailer to divest a metering business in Australasia. So many others have already undertaken this step. It's been good for us to have Metrix as part of our business in Mercury. We've done more with smart metering data than anyone else in Australasia actually through that time, through customer products and innovations. But now it's a good opportunity to create that as a partnership with the intelliHUB group, but not within our direct ownership and continue innovating at Mercury for our customers. So we welcome the opportunity for intelliHUB Group to buy this and then form that partnership going forward. So that's probably a fair enough introduction, and I'm happy to move into questions. I presume you've all received these three slides with the release which also cover off the annualised financial impacts for removing Metrix from our earnings going forward. So happy to take questions, thanks.
Metrix sale - Mercury Update conference call Transcript by West | 17 December 2018 | Page 1 of 3