CitySpring – BT

CitySpring back in black with $7.8m profit

Q4 earnings at $1.78m; It declares DPU of 1.05 cents for the quarter

CITYSPRING Infrastructure Trust upped its cash earnings by 7.4 per cent to $23.5 million for its fiscal fourth quarter, lifted by contributions from its Australian asset, Basslink.

The trust said it uses cash earnings as a measure of its performance, since capital-intensive infrastructure assets tend to show accounting losses due to fairly large amount of non-cash depreciation charges.

It declared a distribution per unit for the quarter of 1.05 cents – after factoring in the rights issue that was announced in August 2009 – compared with 1.75 cents in the fourth quarter of last year.

Basslink – an undersea electricity transmission cable in Australia – generated cash earnings of A$10.8 million (S$12.6 million) for the three months ended March 31, 2010, up 83.1 per cent from the same period a year ago.

City Gas Trust’s cash earning contributions dropped 47.5 per cent to $8.5 million over the year.

CitySpring said that such short-term fluctuations in the cash earnings of City Gas Trust was due to a time-lag in the adjustment of gas tariffs to reflect actual fuel cost.

Its third asset, SingSpring, had its desalination plant recording cash earnings of $4.2 million in the fiscal quarter, inching up 5 per cent from a year ago.

For the full-year, CitySpring’s cash earnings dipped 5.1 per cent to $57.9 million.

The trust posted a quarterly net profit of $1.78 million, swinging from a net loss of $399,000 registered a year ago. Quarterly revenue rose 21.3 per cent to $118 million.

Net profit for the full fiscal year stood at $7.86 million, reversing from a net loss of $50.2 million. Revenue slipped 2.7 per cent to $388 million.

The underlying performance of the three assets is expected to remain stable, the trust said in its financial statement on Saturday.

‘Basslink’s telecoms services, which have turned in creditable results since its launch in July 2009, is expected to continue to perform to expectation,’ CitySpring noted.

The anticipated increase in demand for town gas – following the opening of the two casinos and prime shopping malls on Orchard Road – is expected to boost the volume growth of gas for City Gas, it added.