Christchurch City Holdings has rejected an unsolicited proposal from the Tōnui Consortium to take over the running of Lyttelton Port, ending a six week assessment that drew protests, a petition and a public argument about who should control the South Island’s biggest port.
The council owned investment company confirmed on Thursday that it would not progress the offer to commercial due diligence. The consortium brought together Dubai based DP World, one of the largest port operators in the world, and three Ngāi Tahu rūnanga, Ngāti Wheke, Ngāi Tūāhuriri and Te Taumutu. It had asked for a majority interest in a long term lease of the company that operates the port, reported at 30 years, while the wharves, land and other infrastructure stayed in public ownership.
Christchurch City Holdings chair Bryan Pearson said the offer did not clear the bar. His assessment of the proposal, as presented, was that it “does not meet the threshold for ongoing consideration and is not sufficiently compelling to warrant further detailed investigation”. He described the port as “a strategic asset for the city and region”.
Two things shaped the decision. The first was political. Christchurch City Council’s letter of expectation for 2026 and 2027, the annual instruction it gives its investment arm, does not support leasing the port and encourages keeping a directly employed workforce. That left very little room for a lease of any shape to survive an assessment, whatever its commercial terms.
The second was the port’s own trading position, which has improved sharply. Lyttelton Port Company reported a record result for the year to 30 June 2025, with revenue up 6.8 percent to $207 million, EBITDA up 21.1 percent to $63.4 million and underlying net profit after tax of $25.2 million, up 62.8 percent on the $15.5 million recorded a year earlier.
The half year that followed was stronger again. Revenue for the six months to 31 December 2025 reached $108.5 million, up $7.7 million or 7.6 percent, with net profit after tax of $14.6 million and EBITDA of $35.8 million. Bulk cargo carried the result, up 13 percent year on year, while container volumes slipped 4 percent to 208,829 twenty foot equivalent units. Chief executive Graeme Sumner said the growth demonstrated “the ongoing resilience of our bulk operations”, and that the cost base remained “carefully managed and aligned with the future needs of the organisation”.
Those numbers flow back to ratepayers as dividends. The port paid Christchurch City Holdings $11.49 million for the 2025 financial year, after $12.5 million the year before. A company earning record profits and paying steady dividends is a harder case to hand to an outside operator than one losing money, and the holding company said the improving performance was part of its thinking.
The consortium did not take the outcome quietly. In a statement reported by the New Zealand Herald, Tōnui said the offer had been mischaracterised from the start. “This was never a proposal to privatise Lyttelton Port. It was a genuine partnership that retained public ownership.” It questioned whether the process had been open at all, asking whether there was “ever a genuine opportunity for an alternative partnership model to be assessed on its commercial merits, or had the policy parameters for the decision already been set”.
Its wider complaint was that the city never got to weigh the two options against each other. The rejection, the consortium said, “wasn’t simply a choice between two commercial proposals. It was a decision not to compare two fundamentally different futures for the port.”
That argument turns on money the port still has to find. Lyttelton faces a large capital bill for its planned expansion at Te Awaparahi Bay, put at somewhere between $800 million and $900 million in reporting on the bid. The consortium’s pitch was that a partner would share the cost and the risk of that build, and bring in the operating experience of a company that runs more than 60 terminals worldwide. Without a partner, the funding falls to the port’s own balance sheet and, ultimately, to the council group that owns it.
Maritime and rail unions, which had campaigned against the bid for weeks, welcomed the decision but said the fight was not over. Rail and Maritime Transport Union Lyttelton branch secretary Mark Wilson said that “for too long, decisions around port expansion and daily operations have sidelined workforce expertise in favour of top down management”. Maritime Union Lyttelton branch secretary Gerard Loader said the unions remained “deeply concerned” about any future privatisation attempts, unmanaged port expansion and what he called the ongoing lack of genuine consultation with frontline workers and mana whenua. Both called for a governance overhaul at the port.
Christchurch city councillor Yani Johanson said the outcome “is a rejection of a proposal to effectively privatise the port and supports keeping strategic council assets in public ownership and control”.
Campaigners held their planned gathering outside the holding company’s Cambridge Terrace offices anyway, and a petition opposing DP World’s involvement gathered close to 1,200 signatures before the decision landed.
Lyttelton handles the freight that pays for much of the South Island, with billions of dollars of exports crossing its wharves each year and bulk imports including fuel, fertiliser and cement coming the other way. The ownership question is settled for now. The expansion question, and how a council group carrying that much debt intends to pay for it, is not.
What do you think? Should Lyttelton Port stay fully in council hands, or was a partner the cheapest way to fund the expansion? Leave a comment below and tell us how you see it.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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