You're listening to a share these podcast. If you were an investor thinking about channel infrastructure as an investment, what would be the metrics that you would be looking at. We talked about dividend, so divin yield is one, but what are some of those other metrics that you would think about tracking over time to assess whether channel of structure is being well run and doing well.
So the measure that I would look at so this dividend and free cash flow? Right, and the reason that free cash flow is so important and actually you look at it across any business you invest in, not just channel. You know that is a true measure for the cash that the business is producing. And so you know ebit DA can have. You know, when people talk about revenue and ebit DAR, there's pros and cons with those measures, but free cash flow is the earnings less the sustainable capex,
less your interest costs. So you know, it's a true measure of the cash that the business is producing. And
I think cheerholders should look at that. I wouldn't want to give anybody any financial advice, but I certainly look at it at any investment that I look at, not just not just channel and that's a metric that we are focused on as a company because you know, we need to balance the long term nature of our business and making sure that we make good, disciplined investments in our assets to ensure that they're there for a very
long period of time. So that's covered in the capex part of it, and then there's the earnings part of it, or the cash that the business generates as well, which is a reflection of the enterprise or the job that we do.
Your background is that you've headed up M and A for a large recent bank. Outside of maybe those terminal assets, is there any other sorts of assets that could be quite attractive, particularly because of maybe capabilities, expertise, other sort of assets and experience that channel might have that they could leverage.
Yeah. One of the lessons that I've learned from I'm doing twenty years of M and A is you need to look really long and hard at what your own capabilities are as a business and ask yourself, you know, can you actually manage what you're buying better than the person that's selling it to you? And I think in relation to terminals sets, you know, I think we've got we managed New Zealand's largest terminal by a country mile. We've made some really good operational improvements over the last
couple of years. Really proud of the way the team's delivered that, and I think, you know, that's earned us the right to say, well, we are really good owners and managers of those assets. And so I think we're pretty disciplined about the types of sets that we'll look at, actually, and I think focused on those where we can add value as a management team and as as an operator,
and sticking sticking to those now. It might be in the future that we build additional capability and we say, hey, we've got a capability that we can go and export, or you know, there's an asset that comes with the team that has a great cape ability. But I think for the business as it stands today, that's really our focus.
So it's really asking the question, are we the highest value owner of the sasset? It's right, I'm not just trying to get a bargain for a sort of random messet that might not be so strategically aligned.
You shouldn't and you can't do M and A for M and a's sake. You do it because you see it gives you a competitive advantages of business help solve your customers problems in our case, and that most importantly, we can add value to shareholders. And if it doesn't tack those boxes, then you know we shouldn't be doing it. Investing involves the risk you might lose the money you start with. We recommend talking to a licensed financial advisor.
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