Skyline Enterprises, the Queenstown company that runs the Bob’s Peak gondola and the luge tracks that carry several million riders a year, has more than doubled its annual profit and will pay shareholders the biggest dividend in its history.
The company reported net profit after tax of $86.1 million for the 12 months to the end of March 2026, a jump of 112 percent on the prior year, on revenue of about $239 million, up 15 percent. Shareholders will receive a dividend of 85 cents a share. The result was released to the market on 23 July and reported by Tourism Ticker, the NZ Herald and the Otago Daily Times.
The lift in profit is far steeper than the lift in revenue, which points to a result shaped by more than ticket sales alone. Skyline is also part way through selling its Christchurch Casinos business for $102 million, a transaction that has been working through regulatory approval and that sits alongside the trading numbers rather than inside them.
What is not in doubt is the trading story underneath. Skyline Queenstown, the group’s flagship, has been running with international visitor numbers back above where they sat in 2019, before the border closed. For a business that spent the pandemic years watching an empty gondola line, that is the milestone that matters.
Chief executive Geoff McDonald pointed to a shift in where the visitors are coming from. He said more Americans were coming through than before, and that conflict in the Middle East involving Iran was changing the destinations travellers were choosing, which was helping New Zealand fill its shoulder season, the quieter months either side of peak summer and peak ski.
Official figures back the American part of that up. In Stats NZ international travel data for March 2026, 15 percent of the 358,900 overseas visitor arrivals came from the United States, compared with 13 percent in March 2019. In April 2026 the United States accounted for 9 percent of 288,500 arrivals, against 8 percent in April 2019. The share is small in absolute terms next to Australia, but American visitors spend heavily and stay longer than most, and Queenstown is where a large number of them end up.
The broader recovery is real but not spectacular. The most recent Stats NZ release, published on 14 July, counted 203,300 overseas visitor arrivals in May 2026, up 12,700 on May 2025. The biggest increases came from China, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. That is steady growth rather than a boom, which makes Skyline’s result look less like a rising tide lifting every tourism operator and more like a company that has spent heavily on its main asset and is now collecting on it.
That spending has been substantial. Skyline has been rebuilding the top of Bob’s Peak since 2018 in a programme now costed at around $300 million. Along the way it has installed a 10 seater Doppelmayr gondola, added a four seater chairlift, upgraded the luge tracks, built a 397 space multi storey car park and replaced both the base and top gondola terminals. The newest piece, an extension building with an expanded viewing deck and a redesigned Stratosfare restaurant, opened to visitors on 16 March this year. The company has said the full redevelopment of the top complex is due to be finished by early 2029.
The casino exit is the other half of the story, and it is a less comfortable one. Christchurch Casino agreed in August 2025 to pay a penalty of $5.06 million after the Department of Internal Affairs took High Court proceedings over breaches of anti money laundering and countering financing of terrorism law. The casino admitted all seven causes of action. RNZ reported that the failures ran from December 2018 to December 2023 and included not maintaining a compliant compliance programme, not adequately monitoring accounts and not carrying out enhanced customer due diligence where it was required. Internal Affairs identified 24 sample customers who between them moved just under $56.2 million in transactions that should have been checked more closely and were not. The casino was not accused of laundering money itself.
Skyline agreed to sell the business to an Australian buyer, which has not been publicly named, with settlement expected in the middle of this year subject to regulatory approvals. The NBR reported that the group is still waiting on the $102 million. For a company whose brand rests on family tourism, walking away from gaming and putting the proceeds into gondolas and luge tracks is a tidy piece of repositioning.
Skyline has been pruning elsewhere too. In April it confirmed it was exiting mountain biking at its Rotorua operation, where it had run the gravity park lift access for years, saying it would use the space for new visitor experiences. The group also licenses its luge concept offshore, with tracks in Singapore, Canada and South Korea among others, and that international arm has been a growth engine in its own right.
Skyline is not on the NZX. Its shares trade on the Unlisted market, USX, and a large slice of the register is held by Otago and Southland families and trusts who have owned stock for decades. An 85 cent dividend on that register sends real money into the lower South Island rather than into an index fund, which is part of why the result gets attention locally in a way that a similar sized listed company’s would not.
The caution for anyone reading the number as a pure trading result is that a doubling of profit off a 15 percent revenue lift is not repeatable. Casino cash arrives once. The redevelopment still has three years and a lot of capital to run. And the American surge that McDonald describes is being driven partly by geopolitics that could turn again quickly, as the petrol price at New Zealand pumps has just demonstrated. Skyline has had an excellent year. The interesting question is what the year after the casino money looks like.
Have you been up the Queenstown gondola since the new building opened, and was it worth the ticket price? Tell us what you think 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 🙂
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