Turners Automotive Group has capped off its tenth consecutive year of growth with a record full-year profit, reinforcing a five-year target to lift earnings to 100 million dollars by 2031. The integrated used-car, finance and insurance group released its FY26 result to the NZX on Thursday morning, pointing to net profit before tax of around 63 million dollars before a one-off goodwill writedown on its EC Credit Collection business.
The Auckland-headquartered company has steadily worked its way up the NZX during a period when much of the listed market has been knocked around by softer consumer demand and a sluggish economy. Group chief executive Todd Hunter and chief financial officer Aaron Saunders presented the FY26 numbers to investors at a Microsoft Teams webcast at 10.30am, where management argued the latest result vindicates a strategy of bolting more services on to the core used-car business.
Turners now sells roughly 40,000 vehicles a year through its branch network, runs a finance book of about 536 million dollars covering around 35,000 customers, and writes about 46 million dollars of annual insurance premiums across 200,000 policies. That spread of activity has shielded the group as new-vehicle registrations have slipped and household budgets have tightened, with management telling the market that the integrated platform is becoming harder for smaller rivals to compete against as more independent dealers exit the market.
The FY26 NPBT of around 63 million dollars sits above the company’s earlier 60 million dollar guidance, which had already been considered a stretch when it was set in late 2025. Excluding the goodwill adjustment of between 7 million and 9 million dollars relating to EC Credit, the underlying trading result is the strongest in Turners’ history. The half-year result published in November showed revenue up 5 percent to 219 million dollars, EBIT up 10 percent to 34.1 million dollars and net profit after tax up 13 percent to 21.9 million dollars, and the second half has clearly carried that momentum through.
Investors have been rewarded along the way. Turners runs a quarterly dividend policy that pays out between 60 and 70 percent of net profit. An interim dividend of 8 cents per share was declared in November, and the company already lifted its third-quarter dividend to 9 cents in April. The full-year payout is expected to push past the 29 cents shareholders received for FY25 and is on track to exceed 32 cents based on company guidance, which would be a 60 percent lift on the 20 cents paid five years ago.
Today’s release was paired with refreshed medium-term targets that take the FY28 NPBT goal of 65 million dollars off the table by signalling it will be hit a year earlier in FY27, and reaffirm a new headline target of 100 million dollars NPBT by FY31. That implies organic earnings growth of roughly 50 percent over the next five years, on top of what is already a record base. Management is leaning on planned new Auto Retail branch openings, continued expansion of the finance book, a direct-to-consumer push in insurance and regional growth in its automotive servicing arm TSR to do the heavy lifting, with bolt-on acquisitions adjacent to the used-car ecosystem expected to add a modest top-up.
Brokerage Forsyth Barr summed up the strategy refresh under the heading “Targets Shift a Gear Higher” in a note circulated after Turners’ investor day in March, pointing out that this is now the fourth medium-term profit target the company has published since listing, and that management has beaten each of the previous three. The new 100 million dollar number is the most ambitious of the lot.
The growth ambition rests partly on a wider structural shift in the New Zealand auto market. New-vehicle sales have come off the highs of the post-pandemic boom while household budgets have been squeezed by higher interest rates, pushing more buyers towards the secondhand market. At the same time the number of small independent dealers has been declining for years, leaving larger operators with the scale to absorb extra finance, insurance and servicing volumes to pick up share. Turners’ integrated model, with its own branch network, finance arm Oxford, MTF dealer finance, insurance brands DPL and Autosure, and the EC Credit and TSR collections and servicing arms, is being pitched as the dominant version of that scaled-up playbook.
Culture also got a mention in today’s release. More than two thirds of the company’s 350-strong team are now shareholders, something chairman Grant Baker and Mr Hunter have been talking up for several years as part of what they call an “ownership mindset”. The flat share register at the senior management level has also helped Turners hold staff during a period when other listed companies have warned about wage and turnover pressure.
The FY26 result will be one of a handful of bright spots in what has otherwise been a difficult reporting season for the NZX. Air New Zealand has flagged a loss of up to 390 million dollars, Gentrack shares have been smacked by deal slippage, and the property sector is still working through a backlog of unsold townhouses. Against that backdrop, a domestically focused mid-cap that has just printed a record number, lifted its dividend and pushed up its own five-year target stands out.
The Turners announcement is available in full on the NZX under code TRA, and a recording of the investor webcast will be posted to the company’s investor relations site in the coming days.
What do you make of Turners’ run as the rest of the NZX wobbles, and is 100 million dollars by 2031 a realistic target or is management getting ahead of itself? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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