Lyttelton Port Company has closed its financial year with a record net profit of $35 million, up 40 percent on the $25 million it returned a year earlier, and the growth came from coal, cars and bulk cargo rather than from the shipping containers the port is best known for.
The company released its unaudited result for the 12 months to 30 June 2026 on Thursday. Revenue rose 9 percent to $226 million, and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation lifted 22 percent to $77 million. Operating expenses grew 4 percent to $149 million, which is the gap that did most of the work. Money coming in the door rose more than twice as fast as the cost of running the place, and the profit line moved accordingly.
It is the second consecutive record year for the port, which is owned by Christchurch City Holdings on behalf of Christchurch City Council. In the year to June 2025 the company reported revenue of $207 million and a net profit of $25.2 million, itself up almost 63 percent on the year before that, according to its 2025 result.
What is unusual about the latest year is where the money came from. Container volumes, the trade most people picture when they think of a modern port, went sideways. Lyttelton handled 427,462 twenty foot equivalent units, down from 431,556 the year before, a fall of just under 1 percent. A flat container book would normally cap a port’s earnings. This time it did not.
Bulk cargo carried the result instead. Total bulk trades rose 9 percent to 3,830,379 tonnes. Within that, dry bulk was up 19 percent, coal was up 14 percent and bulk fuel was up 3 percent. Vehicle volumes climbed 11 percent to 39,138 units, up from 35,233, which is a reasonable proxy for how many new and used cars Canterbury and the wider South Island were buying over the year.
The coal figure is worth pausing on, because it is not a Canterbury product and it is not an import. Lyttelton runs the country’s largest coal export facility. The coal arrives by train from the West Coast, up to seven trains a day, is stockpiled on the wharf and is then loaded onto ships bound for offshore steel mills, according to the company’s own description of the operation. So a 14 percent lift in coal through Lyttelton is really a story about West Coast mining volumes and the state of the global steel market, arriving at a Christchurch balance sheet by way of the Midland Line.
Not everything went up. Log exports fell 17 percent, which the company put down to elevated shipping costs. That matches what forest owners around the country have been reporting through the year, with the cost of getting logs onto a vessel bound for China eating into what is left for the grower. Logs are one of the more volatile lines through any New Zealand port, and Lyttelton has now had two soft years in a row on that trade.
Chief executive Graeme Sumner said the result came from work across the business. “Our team has worked hard to improve our operational performance and keep a tight rein on both capital and operating costs,” he said in the company’s results announcement.
Chair Barry Bragg said the year showed the value of a disciplined focus on performance. “This is a result our people can be proud of, and it would not have been possible without the support of our staff and customers,” he said.
The company declared a dividend of $14.5 million for the year, a 25 percent increase. Separately, $12.5 million was actually paid out during the year, made up of a $7.7 million final dividend for the 2025 year and a $4.8 million interim dividend for 2026. That money flows to Christchurch City Holdings, the council’s investment arm, and from there into the council’s books, where it offsets what would otherwise have to be collected in rates.
The timing gives the numbers some extra weight. Only last week Christchurch City Holdings turned down an unsolicited proposal from a consortium backed by Dubai’s DP World to take over the running of the port under a long term lease. One of the arguments made during that six week assessment was that the port’s own trading position had improved sharply and did not obviously need an outside operator to fix it. A record profit and a bigger dividend, landing a week after the decision, will not settle that argument, but it does put a firmer number under one side of it.
On the capital side, the Te Awaparahi Bay reclamation and the associated wharf design work are reported as on schedule and within budget, with completion expected at the end of the year. The reclamation is the port’s long term answer to running out of flat land, and it is the physical precondition for handling larger vessels in future.
The company also said it met its target for solid waste sent to landfill and its greenhouse gas reduction goal for emissions it produces directly and from the electricity it buys. It says it remains on track for its 2030 targets, a 50 percent cut in those direct and electricity related emissions and a 30 percent cut in selected emissions from its wider supply chain. Emissions from burning the coal it exports sit outside that boundary, as they do for every export terminal.
The result is unaudited. The company says final audit clearance is expected next week, so the figures could move slightly before they are signed off.
What would you like to see the port do with a record profit, reinvest it in the wharves or send more of it back to ratepayers? Tell us 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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