Mainfreight pays huge bonuses

Employees of Mainfreight have been paid $94.2 million in bonuses after company profits boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic as freight that would have arrived by air shifted to the seas.

The sum is more than double the amount paid out in discretionary bonuses the year before.

Mainfreight has also published the names of every one of its 10,393 staff members worldwide in its annual report, taking up 15 pages, for their efforts working under “unimaginable pressure”.

It comes with the NZX-listed global logistics and transport company notching up a record financial performance for 2021/22. Revenue jumped by 47 per cent to $5.2 billion, profit before tax went up 86.5 per cent to almost $490m and net profit after tax was 89 per cent stronger at $355m.

However, the overarching theme of its annual report was praise for its team during “extraordinary” economic conditions and supply-chain snarls in all five world regions it operates in.

Don Braid, group managing director, has paid tribute to “the wonderful efforts of our people, whose entrepreneurial spirit has found solutions for our customers in what has been a difficult logistics environment”.

Chairman Bruce Plested wrote that in Mainfreight’s 45th year, most of the freight the company moves around the world, much of it 24/7, was required “on time”.

He adds: “We have a company-wide passion to achieve and keep on achieving. That is perhaps the most important way in which we retain our existing customers and grow our business.”

A key objective has been to intensify Mainfreight’s network of facilities within cities, and across and between countries and regions.

Braid says: “Continuing growth has meant we require more and larger facilities. Our capital expenditure will be approximately $540 million over the next two years, of which $450m will be for land and buildings.

“We will also add a further 54 leased facilities to assist the growth of the network. We expect similar levels of investment in land, buildings and technology well into the future.”

Mainfreight paid discretionary bonuses totalling $94.2m in the 2022 financial year to its team – up by 114.7 per cent on 2020/21.