MFT - Mainfreight. Global Freight & Logistics

[Rawz]

Best dividend payers are those that leave some profits in the business to grow and pay higher dividends the following year..

[Bjauck]

Best dividend payers are those that leave some profits in the business to grow and pay higher dividends the following year..

MFT’s annual dividend has grown from 43c in 2017 to $1 in 2021. It looks like their policy is OK!

[Sideshow Bob]

MFT’s annual dividend has grown from 43c in 2017 to $1 in 2021. It looks like their policy is OK!

Shareprice was approx $25.40 at the end of 2017 and $93.90 at the end of 2021.....

Although if I'd been holding since 2017 I wouldn't be that worried about divvy's!!

[Jonette]

I've been working on some stats to help to understand economic growth measures and drivers. I came across the ANZ truckometer some years ago and thought it had potential, but they do not do it well, changing data monthly and its not clear that they have a good representative data collection.

So I sourced my own data from Waka Kotahi and selected the sites carefully to capture major routes where the Telemetry is extremely reliable, or as reliable as possible considering the potential for update road sealing stopping data collection. These sites are listed by Waka Kotahi as National sites and get some priority. The output may have some relevance to MFT NZ operations, so I'll post the work here for comments. Anything may be useful so please fell free to jump in.

The chart shows an average count of "Heavy Traffic" or trucks over major NZ highways measured at National Telemetry sites by Waka Kotahi. I can review regionally, but the trends are more influenced by special events, eg Auckland Ports disruption, Lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. The national data picks this up. Take a look.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Dugrc/6/

[Raven74]

Very interesting.

[iceman]

Thanks for sharing Jonette. Good work

[Charlie]

Thanks Jonette .there does seem to be a bit of a drop since the beginning of the year....

[Jonette]

Thanks Jonette .there does seem to be a bit of a drop since the beginning of the year....

Yes, but notice there is a drop every year month on month. The critical point is to note if the level this year, for this month, is higher than the same month last year and the year before, ie is there a trend for each month. I have made the difference grey to help show the differences between each year - unfortunately I can't make a negative difference a different colour

The answer appears that there is a trend for 5 out of 6 months this year with only April showing a dip. ie the trend for the year is positive, while the press is saying that the economy is slowing, trucking seems to be rising. Maybe their data, which is delayed, shows up the April dip more? This data is just a few days old.

[BlackPeter]

Yes, but notice there is a drop every year month on month. The critical point is to note if the level this year, for this month, is higher than the same month last year and the year before, ie is there a trend for each month. I have made the difference grey to help show the differences between each year - unfortunately I can't make a negative difference a different colour

The answer appears that there is a trend for 5 out of 6 months this year with only April showing a dip. ie the trend for the year is positive, while the press is saying that the economy is slowing, trucking seems to be rising. Maybe their data, which is delayed, shows up the April dip more? This data is just a few days old.

Hmm - just wondering how you would take all the Covid jitter out of these data to make them in any way meaningful? Obviously last year as well as this year was significantly impacted by Covid - big and long lockdowns last year (followed by relief spikes) and huge Omicron related staff shortages this year.

If you have only a very small number of datapoints pushed around by a lot of uncorrelated factors it is tough to reliably define a trend ...

[Jonette]

Hmm - just wondering how you would take all the Covid jitter out of these data to make them in any way meaningful? Obviously last year as well as this year was significantly impacted by Covid - big and long lockdowns last year (followed by relief spikes) and huge Omicron related staff shortages this year.

If you have only a very small number of datapoints pushed around by a lot of uncorrelated factors it is tough to reliably define a trend ...

The covid impacts are visible, but should be kept else you nullify the data with potentially bias choices of normalisation. For any event you should look for impacts. eg you can see the impact of Lockdowns 1 & 2 - PLUS you can see the impact of Auckland Port lockout. Staff shortages this year are a slow moving change, yet traffic is up despite this, ie I would expect it to be down, so maybe that shows too.

This is real data, which always includes warts, eg Telemetry machines inoperable, data entry errors, road diversion delays. The value of such data is in finding a trend the informs you about an activity or event. Examples I can think of for this data include; trucking movements, economic activity, building activity, fuel use. The data is updated weekly which makes it a very early warning indicator.

The number of datapoints is hugh, I have almost 60,000 records from every day of every month ie between 600,000 and 800,000 truck measures a month. I'm not sure the number of measurement locations is relevant in NZ, eg a site north of Waikanae plus one in Remutaka captures all traffic north of Wellington in both directions - difficult to increase that and of zero relevance. Auckland is similar, while I get up to three sites per city, only Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington count much. Adding smaller cities has minimal change to trends in this data. A very interesting comparison is to take the site with the greatest count (DRURY) and plot the same chart - it looks very similar for the last 2 years after a step up from 2018-20, maybe port to port traffic changes?

I do accept that the number of weekdays in a month makes a difference, I have not normalised for that, recall each year this changes for every month. I am planning to find an easy way to compare weeks (1-52) rather than months (1-12), which makes a lot more sense, but takes more work.