Thanks, Chiara, and welcome, everybody, to the Freightways FY 2026 full year presentation. Around the table, you've got some familiar faces that you've seen at most of the other full year and half year presentations: Stephan Deschamps, our CFO; Neil Wilson, who looks after the Australian portfolio and Big Chill; and Aaron Stubbing, who looks after the New Zealand Express businesses.

Just to make the point, largely the same executive team that Freightways has had for many years, and has overseen almost a doubling of Freightways over the last seven years. It's really nice to see that continuity, but great success in the business over that period of time.

I'll cover off an overview and just few of the key points we see upfront and then hand over to Stephan to talk you through the numbers in terms of P&L performance and balance sheet. The businesses over the past year have done rather well in a pretty complex economic environment, and when we talk about a complex economic environment, I guess what we had at the start of '26 was still the tail end of a three-year recession.

We had the start of a recovery as we came in close to Christmas around November-December, and Q3 actually looked relatively promising, and it was probably that little sweet spot of economic activity in New Zealand in particular. Then we had that abruptly halted by the war in the Middle East, rapid escalation of fuel prices, diesel prices which nudged around $4 a liter here in New Zealand, and that really put a dampener on consumer behavior and the number of items ultimately flowing through the networks.

The focus for our businesses, regardless of the economic environment, had been on improving margins. It's pleasing to see that we've made progress across most businesses.

There's a number where we still have a bit of work to do. A little bit of organic growth, along with our pricing strategies, has enabled us to keep our margins intact and improve them to some degree in many of the businesses.

Similar story to half year: economy services had higher demand, these are road-based services as opposed to overnight airfreight, they're local hub-and-spoke services as opposed to point-to-point across town. Generally, if customers move from a premium overnight service, generally, we've been able to capture that in another brand with a road freight express service.

The Aussie businesses and Allied Express in particular continued to shoot the lights out, really impressive contribution from Allied, a lot of same-customer growth, a lot of growth out of that existing base that they have. Then welcoming the VTFE business into Freightways from the start of February.

Pleasingly, I guess through the course of that year, balance sheet still in midrange of policy after the acquisition of VT Express. I'll hand over to Stephan to talk through the highlights and talk through the financials.

Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. If you look at this summary of FY 2026, most of the indicators seem really good.

Pretty much every line of the P&L has increased double-digit: revenues 13.5% and NPAT 17% driven by lower interest spend on top of the economic recovery we had in the first half of the year. The story looks really good.

As we are going to see, what's happening behind that is a little bit more complex and contrasted. One thing which is clear, though, that is that Australia is becoming a more significant part of our activity.

It was about a third of our revenue and profit a couple of years ago. We are now increasing to 40% and we are expecting that trend to continue, the center of gravity keeps moving slowly from New Zealand to Australia.

If we look at the key numbers, our revenue now is almost 1.5 billion. As Mark mentioned, we acquired VTFE in Australia from February, so that was a small contributor to that revenue increase, but even without that, we would have had double-digit increase.

The main drivers behind that are price increases, market share gain, and a level of organic growth. The EBIT margin, which is our focus, has seen some limited improvement, but again, the story behind that is quite contrasted, and I'll come back to that, but we have two groups of businesses with very different results.

I think overall, we were hoping that FY 2026 was going to be a normal year without pandemic, without recession, and it didn't quite turn out like that. If I were going to use a sport analogy that Mark really enjoys, I would probably walk away from rugby and talk about American football, it's not quite a game of two halves, but it's a game of three good quarters and one bad one.

If we look at some of the drivers on the following slide, you can see what Mark alluded to. In New Zealand, the first three quarters of the year saw a reasonably solid economic recovery and good activity that was building up.

When the war in Iran started and fuel prices drove to a significant high, we've seen a significant impact on economic activity in New Zealand, and all that recovery pretty much went to a halt. Even though fuel prices have come back down since the peak of the war, we haven't seen a resumption of that economic growth in New Zealand.

In Australia, the slowdown took a little bit more time to appear, but as we looked at all our businesses by the end of the year, that was becoming more significant. On the next slide, we'll talk about margins, which we've mentioned over the last three years as a key focus of ours.

Behind a reasonably flat headline, as I've mentioned, you really have two groups of businesses. Our most premium businesses in New Zealand continue to be impacted by the economic environment, and NZC and Big Chill in particular have seen a decline in margin last year.

In Australia, we saw the same thing with TIMG, which is driven largely by a slowdown of digitization activity. On the more pleasing side, all the other businesses have seen a level of improvement of margins as price increases and stronger activity combined with a controlled cost base allowed them to deliver significant gains.

Some of the names you can see on this slide: Post Haste, DX, and Allied had very solid margin improvement. These margins remain a focus of ours this year and in the coming years.

In terms of balance sheets, our debt was slightly higher, reflecting the acquisition of VTFE in February for slightly more than $70 million Australian dollars, but the measure we use for our gearing, which is net debt over EBITDA, was stable at 2.4 times. I should stress that we're using post-IFRS 16 numbers.

If you use pre-IFRS 16, we're standing at about 1.5. Mark mentioned our capital management policy, maybe to remind everyone of that very quickly, we want to keep our net debt to EBITDA between 2 and 3 times post-IFRS 16.

We're at 2.4 times now, we have a significant headroom from a debt point of view. If we were to consider an acquisition that is significantly larger than the debt headroom we have, we would use a combination of debt and equity to fulfill that acquisition.

On the basis of a strong balance sheet, we decided to increase our dividend by 5 cents for the full year, which is a 12.5% increase, we'll be paying 45 cents for the entire year, which is a final dividend of 24 cents. We are fully imputed in New Zealand and we are about 49% franked in Australia.

I'll hand back to Mark to look at some of the details of the activity by segment.

Thanks, Stephan. I'll talk through the numbers and Aaron and Neil will come in with a bit of color in and around the NZ and the Aussie landscape.

In terms of Express, as Stephan mentioned, reflective of the overall result, really strong revenue growth here, same-customer growth, particularly in that Q2, Q3, and through most of the year for Allied Express as well. All businesses managed to pick up market share gains.

Each brand is very focused on a niche. We know the types of customers that are attracted to that niche and that suit that particular service, and as a result of that focus, we've had really good results really for quite a number of years in terms of winning either new business from market or business off competitors.

The price increases well executed at the start of the year and have been again in FY 2027, and the five months contribution of VTFE was round about $40 million NZ dollars to the revenue line. As Stephan mentioned, the growth of Allied Express and Post Haste, DX in particular has been really strong top line and bottom line.

They've all, I guess, lived in niches where there is good demand for their services. Allied Express is benefiting from tailwinds that come with big and bulky purchases, a lot of e-com emerging businesses that are selling flat pack furniture, sporting goods, some of the larger items that we transport through the Allied network.

Post Haste really benefiting from being experts in that express two-day inter-island road service and next-day North Island, and have attracted a reasonable amount of e-commerce volumes that have come through cross-border as well. DX Mail, who have not only picked up market share, but have also made their operation a lot more efficient through the use of AI and technology to improve the way they sort mail, to make postie runs more efficient, and are getting really good leverage out of those initiatives.

Big Chill had a positive Q2 and 3, just started to see a little bit of lift there. Big Chill quite exposed to what's happening in the hospitality markets, generally handling more premium food through those channels into hospo, into QSRs, and supermarkets.

You really did see the impact as soon as the price of fuel went up and took money out of the pockets of consumers, you saw that fall down again. The fuel costs through that quarter that had a one-off impact on earnings, so as the fuel price went up, and I'll talk later, we have adjusted the way we run our fuel surcharge mechanisms, but you do get a one-off impact, and we did have this year as the fuel price went up and our surcharge lagged and came in a little bit later.

That affected margins in March and April slightly. Hand over to Aaron to talk a bit about just what's happened in that New Zealand Express landscape.

Good morning, everyone. For New Zealand EP, the volume grew by 5.1% for the year.

The same-customer volume had three positive quarters, and as Mark alluded to earlier, the fourth quarter was quite tough and we saw some softening. The economy services continue to outperform the premium offerings, and that's just reflective of that cost-conscious marketplace that we're operating in.

We had strong contributions from e-commerce and healthcare, and it should be noted, though, that e-commerce growth has flattened over the last couple of months, and we think primarily this is down to the fuel increase and some movement between the channels.

Morning, all. Just from a Big Chill perspective, up until February, as Mark talked about, we we did see a gradual improvement in customer volumes across the transport division.

Unfortunately, when the war started in February, that kind of came to an abrupt halt. You can actually see a direct correlation between the fuel prices that we were charging and also the lower customer volumes coming through.

To offset that, new business wins have been particularly important. The team's done a really good job both protecting existing customers as well as securing a number of good business wins, particularly on selected routes.

As you see on the slide, overall item growth grew by 3%, and most of that was through was through net market share gains, which was quite pleasing to see. 3PL continues to deliver well and and slightly ahead of where we expected, sitting at 87% nationwide.

We've got a small amount of capacity at Ruakura. However, Auckland and Christchurch are are pretty well full.

The Big Chill team are still actively engaged with customers having a think about where the next best option might be to position a 3PL new 3PL location, with a number of strategic locations being considered. The next point I want to talk about was the fact that the transport industry generally has a a north-south volume bias, and Big Chill traditionally have also suffered from that, so that they have less volume coming from the South Island back to Auckland.

The team have really focused on managing utilization levels and margins and using better data analytics to target new business efforts on improving yield on those lower lower-utilization routes, and that's been quite successful. The last point I had on Big Chill was that during the year, Big Chill opened a new branch in New Plymouth, which has been really successful both in in terms of on-time performance improvement stats, but also they've secured a couple of decent new business wins out of that.

As a result, we're now having a thinking about where we can expand to next, with the logical options being most likely Nelson, Tauranga, or Invercargill. As Mark talked about, Allied Express performed really well with a 20% lift in volume year-on-year.

In the last couple of years, we've invested in much larger sales teams than what Allied have traditionally offered, and that has paid some really good dividends both in terms of new business wins, but also in crease- increasing the share of wallet that we received from existing customers. Allied are another business that have developed much stronger margin reporting, and this has allowed them to reposition themselves in certain market segment, and as a result, extra volumes have been realized.

An example of that would be that in FY 2026, Allied realigned prices and services in the 22 to 50 kg parcel market, and that generated really solid growth from our existing customers, which was pleasing to see. That volume has necessitated the need for some extra facilities.

In Campbellfield in Victoria, for example, we've added a 12,000 square meter facility. However, apart from that, the extra volume that we've carried was largely handled within the existing infrastructure.

As a result, as has been talked about, Allied produced a really really good result in FY 2026. Then my last point was that in the last couple of months, we have seen some softening of volumes in express package, both across Allied and BT.

When I look when I look at that sector-by-sector, probably the most notable sectors are building and construction, car parts, and some key on the e-commerce customers. Their volume seems to have dropped a little bit in the last in the last six weeks.

Just update around the airfreight. I think, as we talked about at our last update, Airwork, our JV partner in Parcelair, was placed into receivership in July 2025.

Since then, the business has operated as a going concern with with under the control of the receivers while they try and work through a potential sale process. During that time, both of our airfreight suppliers, being Airwork and Texel Air, have performed really well in the year with some quite high on-time performance reliability, which has been pleasing.

We expect that by the end of the year, we will have transitioned away from the 737-400 fleet that we operate to one where we're using 737-800 instead. The advantages that offers us is that 300s are newer, they're more fuel-efficient, and they have a higher payload capacity.

For example, a 737-800 can take 21 ton of product, whereas an whereas a 400 takes 18, you're getting a better payload in each in each aircraft. There's a few one-off costs transition to that newer fleet.

However, that's already been allowed for in the FY 2026 result. Other than that, the ongoing costs of operating 800s are pretty much in line with what we're currently incurring.

Thanks, Neil. In terms of information management and waste renewal, a pretty flat result here really.

Revenue flat. There were improvements in some of the revenue streams within the division.

Pricing in particular. Through waste renewal, the document destruction revenues grew 4%, medical waste was up another 7%, and e-waste up by 10%.

E-waste generally is taking devices which have data on them: laptops, servers, hard drives, etc., and either recommissioning those that can be sold or completely destroying them and selling the commodity parts. It's certainly a growth part of the waste renewal sector.

Document storage volumes grew slightly, mainly pricing, offsetting pretty flat volume, and the decrease was really around the digitization piece. We'll talk a little bit more about that later, but really that was the one piece that declined from where we had been in FY 2025.

Paper prices a little bit lower, 8% lower. Paper pricing impacts our business far less than it used to many years ago, where we were heavily reliant on paper sales to prop up revenue.

That's a much smaller part of our revenue base these days. Pleasingly, the Shred-X reset that we've talked about is largely complete, and again, Neil will talk about some of the margin improvement that we're getting through Shred-X as a result of those initiatives.

As Mark said, it's been a year of reset, if you like, for Shred-X. There's been a number of key initiatives which the team have implemented aimed at improving overall returns, and as you can see from that graph, which shows sort of the six-month rolling EBITDA margin, that has been delivered successful growth both in terms of EBITDA percentage, as well as overall EBIT performance.

The business has mainly focused on productivity improvements, with the key wins being around improving run density. There's been a network project looking at the way that we service customers, and that's resulted in a much-improved run density, which in turn has lowered the number of drivers that we need to service our customers.

They've also automated a number of manual labor processes, which have reduced staff numbers. There's been an increased focus on margin improvement, both through pricing and also exiting some low-margin work.

An example of that would be that during the year, we removed paper rebates which have been paid to printers. Traditionally in the Australian market where there was rebates offered to Australian printing industries, which were very low and near margin for us, we removed those in July 2026.

The team have also grown e-waste and ITAD volumes. The introduction of the fuel surcharge in January this year has been really important, was new for Shred-X, and the timing was good, it's been quite important in terms of protecting their margins.

Lastly, and pleasingly, Shred-X have had a absolute focus on improving reporting and around the health and safety, and their performance has improved in that area, and as a result, they've managed to reduce the cost of work care cover, the premiums that they have been paying. Horizon 3 approach that we operate across Freightways is particularly relevant for TIMG, both in Australia and New Zealand, and that's largely because that industry, or the information management industry, is going through quite a period of changing dynamics.

I think it's important to note that overall, we are still seeing growth in our core archive and media business, which is our Horizon 1 opportunity, obviously. It has slowed, hence why developing faster-growing Horizon 2 and 3 opportunities is really important.

The focus therefore around our traditional core archive and media business is running as lean and efficient as businesses as possible, and taking a yield management approach to each warehouse individually. Where warehouses are full, as organic growth requires, we're pulling pricing and document destruction levers to make sure that the utilization overall remains high, and where warehouse utilization is lower than what we like, that's where we're focusing our new business efforts to try and fill spare capacity.

With that lean approach in mind, TIMG Australia just undertaken a restructure in July 2026, which is rationalized a further 17 positions, which will see the benefit of in FY 2027. That running lean approach is an ongoing thing that we have.

Yes, running lean on our core business, but then investing cash into our Horizon 2 and 3 business opportunities. As that little graph there shows, digital earnings, particularly in Australia, have continued to scale.

The slight dip you see there in FY 2026 is the finishing of a multi-year digitization project for a very large government department in Australia. They still have a fairly full list of digitization opportunities, which we are looking to realize.

An example of how much the business has changed, if you look at digital and lit support together, for TIMG Australia, that's just under 40% of their revenue now. As you can see, that the Horizon 2 business is scaling and it is changing the overall mix of revenue for our information management division.

The current focus for digital is around consultative selling, we have a team now engaging with customers to understand what they are holding in physical archive boxes. The privacy laws in particular opening up new opportunities around that, because it's a requirement that businesses understand the personal information that they're holding around individuals, and often when they have had archive boxes in storage for a long period of time, there's a bit of a knowledge gap there, there's an opportunity for us to digitize information to give customers better visibility around what they are storing.

From a Horizon 3 perspective, Stocka in New Zealand has continued to scale nicely, and as a result, we're going to launch that in Australia in FY 2027. Lastly, we're market testing a number of new H3 products which utilize AI tools to assist with data storage and extraction.

That's at the market test stage. We're engaging with customers.

We have a few interesting concepts around AI with what we can do with data, and it's just a matter of validating that with the market to make sure that they're products that we can scale.

Thanks, Neil. Just in terms of future investments, there's a couple of key facilities that we wanted to talk to, Aaron will cover off those, and then we'll talk a little bit about Australia and the M&A opportunities we see there.

Right. Our Christchurch Airport extension is well advanced.

It's an extension of the building and our automation. It'll reunite our EP brands back under one roof and provide about 50% operational capacity, which is approximately 10 years of growth for us.

The automation equipment arrives next week, so that's quite exciting, and we've targeted to be fully operational by quarter two of 2027. It allows us a little bit of time in that process to pause the automation construction and ensure we focus on our service delivery during that peak season.

Then we have Palmerston North, which is a new build, the EP brands are currently based near the CBD, but we'll move them out to the airport to cohabitate with Parceline, our linehaul operator. The new site will provide operational facilities and faster transit times, while providing about another 10 years of capacity in terms of Palmerston North growth.

The completion is due prior to Christmas, but we'll move in in quarter one in 2027, once again just to avoid any compromise of service during the peak season.

Thanks, Aaron. In terms of Australia, really, as Stephan talked about, the size of Aussie in comparison to Freightways has really accelerated through the period that we've had Allied Express and then VTFE, and the organic growth that we've managed to get out of Allied over that period as well.

Reality is, within Australia, the express market is probably six to seven times as big as the New Zealand express market, and below the top sort of three tier 1 players that cover the entire country with massive fleets and tend to provide air and road services, it really is a pretty fragmented landscape. We've spent a long time over the last three to four years looking at round about 70-odd opportunities and businesses, some good, some bad, some ugly.

There's a real mix there. I think it's given us a really good institutional knowledge of the way that the Australian express industry operates.

We've got a really good feel for the niches that the various players operate within. Those niches can be a geography, they can be a freight size, they could be a speed in terms of overnight, two-day, or longer, intrastate and interstate.

It could be certain industry verticals: medical, construction, etc. Getting a good grip on the range of opportunity there and understanding which of those are complementary or fit really well to an Allied Express or a VTFE has been really valuable learning for us.

I think the reality is, given the market share as we have in some of the niches we operate in New Zealand, we know that acquiring further in New Zealand in Express, for example, is highly unlikely. We do expect to deploy more capital over time into Australia, but manage that within the capital management policy that Stephan outlined earlier.

In terms of M&A, I think from that screening of around 70 businesses, we've got ourselves down to a relatively tight short list. There's about a dozen companies that we think could be a good fit, either as bolt-ons or as close adjacencies for Allied Express or VTFE, and so that's really where we will focus our attention over the next year or so.

In terms of outlook, it's been an interesting seven years, I think, when we've reflected back over the growth that Freightways has had over that period of time. You think about the number of world events and macro events that have impacted businesses from COVID, labor shortages, three years of recession, and fuel crisis.

I think, last year and in fact, through much of that period, our business has proven to be really resilient. We are diversified across two different countries, we're diversified through information management, waste renewal, and express.

In particular, over the last three years of soft economic activity, we've still been able to play our own game. Market share wins have been really important for us.

In this year, we just started to see a little bit of that same-customer activity become positive, which was a nice tailwind, albeit for a fairly short period of time. We think those same-customer volumes will remain soft as long as fuel prices remain elevated.

I think the evidence we have seen over the last four months or so is that the money coming out of the pockets of consumers and going into the fuel pump has meant that they are spending less and they're buying less of the products that we might move around our networks. We think that will probably remain until fuel prices come down and then really remain at a sustained lower level than they are today.

The pace of recovery will also be dependent just on how the relative economies are going. In Australia and New Zealand, Stephan pointed earlier to the higher interest rates in Aussie in particular, and slowly moving up in New Zealand.

That will have an impact, particularly on the New Zealand businesses where we are pretty broad-based and sit across most of the industries that you find operating in the New Zealand economy. We think it'll be softer for longer again until fuel prices drop and maybe slightly more positive economic conditions over in Australia.

The capacity we get in Christchurch and Palmy, those are key hubs for us. Everything that goes in and out of the South Island fundamentally travels through Christchurch, everything in and out of the lower North Island travels through Palmerston North.

They're quite strategic investments in capacity and the optimism, I guess, we see around the growth through the NZ EP businesses. Evolve is still trekking along, we expect that we'll spend round about another $5 million this year, which should largely complete that project.

Margin improvement still a focus, as Neil talked about. TIMG Aussie is a key area in terms of having the Horizon 1 operations as lean as we can make them and putting our investment into scaling Horizon 2 and discovering Horizon 3.

We'll keep growing the EP presence in Australia. We're represented in B2B and B2C now.

Presents really good opportunities for us to keep expanding both organically, through having new business sales teams that are going out and winning market share, as well as having a proactive approach to M&A where we can look for the right kind of business that has the right fit that can complement two very good businesses we have in Allied Express and VTFE. That brings the presentation part to a close.

We'll hand back to Chiara, who can manage any questions that you may have.

Thank you and morning, guys. A few questions from me, really focusing on the volume backdrop across the NZ and Australian parcels businesses.

The first of which, and it's really I guess a clarification question: Allied Express, you talked about 20% volume growth network items through the course of FY 2026. The chart on figure 17 looks like it was 20% in the first half, but at the first half presentation we were only talking about 14% growth.

Just curious as to which one is right and whether there's any explanation for the differential?

The 20% is correct for the full year, Andy. There's a number of initiatives we've had through the business just in the terms of analytics and the way we're measuring that.

Allied get a lot of multi-part consignment items that go through the business as well. As we've refined that, but yeah, the 20% for the full year piece is accurate.

That is great. Then in the context of the comments that you make about both Allied and VTFE over the last six weeks in terms of a softening of demand, can you tell us what that means?

Are we talking a material softening versus what you saw in Q4, which was clearly slower from an Allied point of view? Are we seeing negative same-customer volumes, or please clarify?

The biggest piece probably for Allied, one of their very large customers is taking a slightly different approach to the market. What they're seeing in that market, there's quite heavy discounting from a number of their competitors, and they've just decided not to play that game.

They're doing less in the way of promotions, pushing out a bit less volume. They're a pretty big part of the Allied base.

We've seen their volumes slightly lower than they would have been in the prior corresponding period. For other customers as a whole, it was still positive trading, but at a far lower level of growth than we had seen previously.

One very large customer does make quite an impact there, and effectively, they will ride out, I guess, some of the discounting that's going on by competitors. With VTFE in the B2B— sorry, yes?

Sorry, you carry on, Mark.

Yeah. I was just going to talk about VTFE in the B2B space.

They have seen impacts particularly in that construction sector with volumes coming off quite a bit. That part of it has dropped a lot from the prior comparative quarter where we didn't own the business, but if you look at their trading through that period.

Same-customer volumes for VTFE are negative just like they are in New Zealand for the NZ EP businesses through that last quarter and over the last six weeks.

The drop,

Andy,

is quite comparable to what we saw in New Zealand a few years back in construction.

Okay. VTFE, just focusing in on that, in terms of the five months that you've owned it, we've seen volumes fall overall versus the prior year?

Particularly in Q4, yes. Yeah.

Okay. Then if we package all of that up, both VTFE and Allied in terms of current run rate, are we up or are we down?

Allied slightly. VTFE down.

We haven't combined them. They're quite different revenue per item and quite different profiles of freight, we haven't done a combination of those two.

Great. Just on VTFE, can you talk about New South Wales and the solution there, please?

We'll talk about Queensland and New South Wales. Queensland very quickly: what we've done in Queensland is established a startup delivery network using the Allied Express facility.

Allied Express are in a big facility in Brisbane. VTFE are establishing their own fleet in a portion of that building, and that's enabling them to deliver the volumes that they pick up in Melbourne and transport interstate into Queensland through the Brisbane metro area, and then use an agent for the balance of Queensland.

That, in terms of a sort of startup Queensland operation, lost a bit of money in the first couple of months as we got established and then operated at break-even in June, and we expect to grow from there. We've put some sales resource into Queensland.

In terms of New South Wales, as we've talked about with VTFE, it's the one state that they don't have a partner for, they don't pick up any volume out of Melbourne and deliver that into New South Wales, because they have not had a partner there. The job that we have been focused on is either, a, finding the right partner or finding an acquisition opportunity in New South Wales that allows us to get up and running.

There's a couple of opportunities there. We're actively talking to them, and I'd like to think that during the course of FY 2027, VTFE have added New South Wales into the lanes that they can deliver to.

That's great. Thank you, Mark.

Appreciate it. I'll leave it there.

Thanks, Andy.

Yeah. Hi, guys.

Sorry, can you just clarify what you said at the end there about New South Wales and the timing of when you'd expect to find a partner or some sort of channel?

We'd like to think that we'll have a channel either that we own or that we can partner with during FY 2027, during this year.

Right. Nothing imminent.

You wouldn't expect it in the first half, necessarily?

Not necessarily in the first half.

Okay. The other question I had was just around the fuel surcharge impact.

Can you just confirm what the impact was in the New Zealand business? I know in the Australian business it's a different system.

Has that been sort of an ongoing impact in Australia or is it, has it sort of reset and you're happy that there's no ongoing impact there?

No ongoing impact in Australia. Again, depending on the customer and the contracts, a little bit of impact early on, March-April, but that's largely been caught up now.

In New Zealand, look, we estimated around a couple of million impact in terms of margin, and that was at the point where fuel went up and then our surcharge came in on a lag. Then what we have done is shortened that lag now to a week.

In the future, any sudden movements in fuel price, our pricing will follow within a week rather than the two-month lag that we've had for about 20-odd years.

Okay. Cool, that's all for me.

Thank you.

Thanks, Wade. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, team. I just wondered if we could start with the transport margin outcome for the year, which was relatively flat.

Could you give us any color in terms of what was happening in New Zealand versus Australia from a margin perspective?

Sure. I tried to mention that, but roughly in New Zealand, the biggest impact would be NZC, on the negative side would be NZC and Big Chill.

The premium end of the market remains under a lot of pressure and we've seen drops of margins. That's because of the size of NZC and Big Chill, that's probably why the overall number doesn't look better.

If you look at some of the other businesses in New Zealand: Post Haste, DX, we've seen margin increase of 50 to 150 basis points roughly. In Australia, Allied grew significantly, contrasting that, and so did Shred-X and Med-X, contrasting that, TIMG because of the lack of digitization work was lower than it was the previous year.

Quite a contrasted picture depending on where you look.

The one other point, Marcus, small, but the VTFE margin sits at a fundamentally lower margin than Allied Express.

As we expand into New South Wales, there's investment going into that, so that margin will probably continue to reduce a bit until we are in a more BAU state of the market.

Sorry, could you give me any specifics in terms of what the Allied margin movement was in the year? Was it up?

It was up, yeah, by about 100 basis point from memory.

Great. Thank you.

Then in the guidance, just staying on the margin topic, putting—

We don't give guidance.

Lack of guidance maybe, is a better description. I know that there's a bullet on margins, but can you be a little bit more specific in terms of whether you're anticipating, excluding fuel, for the core businesses any noticeable improvement in margin this year?

I'll go first, and then let Stephan fill in. I think had we not seen this dampening of consumer demand and the high fuel prices, yes, we would have expected further margin accretion.

I think that was part of the plan we've had. We've had a good price increase.

I think the impact of those underlying volumes, that'll be the piece for us to watch in and how long that goes for.

I would have said the same thing. Before the war in the Middle East, I would have been positive about the year.

What we've seen in the last quarter makes me a bit nervous about what this year is going to look like.

Understood. On VT, it looked like on an EBITDA basis, it contributed just over a couple million dollars for the period you owned it.

Could you give us an updated view— sorry?

About 4 million, I think, EBITDA level.

EBITDA was 4? Okay.

For Q4, yeah.

Sorry. There was a bit of interest in that division.

Yeah.

Okay. Then so how would still feel comfortable with what you guided at the time of the result?

I think it sort of was implying about sort of 10-ish, 10, 11 on a run-rate basis?

It was round about 10 mil on a run-rate basis. I think it'll end up being a little bit softer than that possibly, Marcus.

Again, it's a bit how long is a piece of string in terms of that pressure with fuel prices. We are investing a little bit just in that Queensland.

In Queensland, as I said, kind of break-even where we'd been making a little bit of money with agents only. Break-even with our costs of operating, but that should grow as we start to pick up some new business up in that Queensland market.

Construction and building is quite a significant share of the portfolio of customer of VTFE, and as Mark mentioned earlier, it's been impacted by the economic conditions in Australia. I think the best way to think about it is to look at what happened in New Zealand probably two, three years back, and you've got probably about the same magnitude.

Okay. Then just finally, you mentioned Evolve at 5 million for the year.

Could you just sort of update us: is that the end of Evolve this year and then just an updated view on the ongoing cost for '28?

No, there's probably another year of investment in FY 2028 for Evolve, which is also when we should start seeing the benefits flowing through. In terms of ongoing costs, it's probably around a couple of million, but that would be FY 2029, I think.

This year and next year, we'll still see implementation spend, which then would be gone, and it's just the ongoing roughly a couple of million, I think.

Yeah. That project is taking a little bit longer, or the scope's a little bit bigger?

How are you thinking about that?

It's a combination. It's quite a complex project to implement because we are doing that across a number of businesses that have different practices, there's a lot of work to make that effective.

We've been a bit more cautious in rolling out the new system to the businesses than what we were originally planning, and that's what you're seeing in the probably extended timeline and slightly higher cost.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, thanks for taking my question. Just with respect to New Zealand Express, I guess post balance date performance, are we right in thinking that kind of resembling the fourth quarter performance into July and August, or is there reason to believe that maybe the comps have trended a little bit more negative based on your commentary?

Then secondly, how did the conditions in the fourth quarter sort of impact your attitude towards pricing in Express in New Zealand on a sort of weighted basis? Can you perhaps give us a little bit of color as to whether I guess the pricing mechanisms have been set?

Thank you.

Absolutely. I think a little bit weaker than the fourth quarter on the chart.

Over these last sort of six weeks, July not too bad. Winter is always a quieter period, but yeah, slightly lower than you would have seen in Q4 in terms of the volumes.

In terms of pricing, no, we've really stuck to our guns on that, Ian. We communicated the price increase round about May, didn't we?

Implemented as of 1st of July, and in terms of where we're sitting today, we think probably bang on track in terms of achieving the 75% of the headline rate, which is what we normally seek to achieve. In terms of pricing, we pushed it.

Certainly, the guys are conscious of keeping hold of volume where there is good margin, those kind of things we have done for many, many years. I think the team have done a particularly good job at pushing through and executing that price increase.

Thank you. Just maybe focusing on the Allied business, noting your capacity investment up in Campbellfield, just how you kind of feeling about other capacity in the business at the moment, ability to chase market share growth?

Kind of assuming that the comp sales are around that sort of 10 to 20%, hard to maintain that elevated position. How you're seeing about market share opportunities

and

just generally competitive intensity

I

think as well in that segment?

Yeah. I think in FY 2026, and probably the tail end of FY 2025, we picked up quite a bit of share of wallet because of the expanded facilities and because of the sort systems we had, also because we simplified our pricing.

In some places, we had so many surcharges prior. The team simplified that, and that helped them win business, ironically, without actually lowering a price, just making it easier for platforms to accommodate.

We won't get the same level of that share of wallet type gain that we got out of the existing base, because that's largely been achieved. In terms of capacity, look, we're pretty happy with where we are, Ian.

In Queensland, we have plenty of space in that facility. It's a large one that we rented with the idea that it would last us a good 10 years.

Campbellfield in Vic has given us the opportunity, you could probably double the amount of volume through the combined depots. In New South Wales, we had about 20% of the depot which was just racked and holding product for some customers, really just to pay a bit of rent.

We've taken that racking out to free up that part of the depot, so that frees up about 20% of the floor space in Sydney. The reality is, if we keep getting the volume either through new business or same-customer growth, in Sydney, the natural thing for us to do would just be to take on a satellite depot of X thousand square meters at an incremental cost just to situate couriers and help us get through.

Similar thing to what we do over here in New Zealand as we're growing, open up another satellite. It's a marginal cost on the existing cost base, and use that to grow.

We're pretty happy with the capacity we have in the Allied footprint, and we're pretty focused on the niches that we know we can go out and win.

Very good. Thanks, Mark.

Thanks, Ian.

Okay. Thanks very much, everyone, for dialing in.

Just like to finish by thanking all of our teams across Australia and New Zealand. It's a big team now, just over 6,000 employees and contractors that work as part of the Freightways family.

Really, it's down to the service that those people have provided across all of our businesses that has helped us have the year that we've had to win business, taking market share in periods of fluctuating economic performance from a macro sense. To all of those people out there, thank you.

To all of those that support us, thank you, too. Cheers.