Sometimes profit results aren't quite what they seem - and the latest result just posted by Port Taranaki is a classic case in point, as Rob Maetzig reports.

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WHEN the board of Port Taranaki Ltd gathered in New Plymouth on Friday to approve the company's financial result for the opening six months of this financial year, on the face of things there should have been an air of celebration.

After all, the figures in the six- monthly report showed a massive increase in profitability from the New Plymouth port's operations.

The unaudited after-tax profit for the six months was $4.243 million - way up on the $1.71m net profit that had been posted during the same period in 2007. In fact, this latest six-monthly net profit was not that far short of Port Taranaki's $4.76m net profit for the entire 2007-08 financial year.

That is likely to result in a big boost in the annual dividend paid out to its 100 per cent shareholder, Taranaki Regional Council.

Figures well worth celebrating, perhaps? Well yes, but sometimes things are not quite what they seem.

Although the half-yearly report attributes the increase in after- tax profit to a lift in offshore oil and gas exploration and development activity combined with strong growth in container and dry bulk cargo trade, there is one other attributor that it does not mention.

A year ago, when Port Taranaki tabled its six-monthly report covering the first half of the 2007-08 year, the result was severely affected by the company having to write off as unrecoverable close to $1.5m it had invested in a big plan to be involved in the handling and export of coal from the South Island's Pike River mine project. The plan had been for the coal to be barged from Greymouth to Port Taranaki, from where it would be exported. Port Taranaki invested heavily in legal, engineering and resource consent costs to progress that plan - but in late 2007 Pike River Coal instead entered an agreement with state-owned Solid Energy to rail the coal to Lyttelton.

This meant that last September, when Port Taranaki released its annual report covering the 2007-08 financial year, it posted a flat net profit result of $4.76m.

But on Friday, when the port company's board signed off the six- monthly report covering the first half of the new financial year, the profit result was vastly improved - thanks to the port being freed of the financial effects of the Pike River debacle.

There was some good trade news contained in the result, too.