ENGAGING WITH OUR STAKEHOLDERS

Building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders across our business is crucial to our success.

We need to know what’s important to our stakeholders, so we focus on, and commit the right resource to the most relevant business activities. Our strategy and business plans are developed with consideration given to the relevant needs and wants identified by these stakeholders as most important to them. We also recognise we need to maintain, and potentially build, stakeholder relationships over time. During FY21 Mercury undertook a stakeholder engagement survey targeting key representatives of our nine identified key stakeholder groups. Details of our stakeholder groups and what’s important to them about Mercury can be found on our website here. We are keen to continue to gather additional insights from our stakeholders and will consider in FY22 the most appropriate and productive ways to shape our engagement processes.

How we engaged with our stakeholders

Our FY21 survey was, for the first time, an online survey. It was designed so that stakeholders could see the fifteen focus areas (material issues) previously identified as important to Mercury, raise any obvious gaps they saw in this list, and rank the relevance of each focus area. The survey had a participation rate of 33%. We acknowledge the input of everyone who responded and made this engagement exercise so worthwhile.

What we learned

The survey showed us that our stakeholders see a close correlation between our focus areas and what matters most to them, with no significant gaps (as reported in the last annual report). This outcome confirmed we are concentrating our efforts in the right areas to meet their expectations. The top five focus areas that matter most to our stakeholders about Mercury in FY21 were: • sustainable growth • natural resources • operational excellence and (tied in fourth place) generation development • safety and wellbeing

We also asked our stakeholders to tell us how they would like to receive information about what’s important, and we learned that they prefer direct engagement via email and one-to-one meetings. This means that future engagement exercises will be more targeted.

OUR STAKEHOLDERS

CUSTOMERS PARTNERSHIPS GOVERNMENT & REGULATORS

COMMUNITY IWI EMPLOYEES

INVESTORS

INDUSTRY PARTICIPANTS SUPPLIERS

For further detail around our stakeholder groups and what’s important to them about Mercury, please see the Engaging with Our Stakeholders content on our website. Helen Tua, Janet Tautaiolefua and Jo-Anne Pawley

BUILDING ON OUR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

A community day was hosted at our Auckland office for around 80 community, government and NGO stakeholders who support customers with continuing credit issues.

The purpose of the day was to acknowledge the work they do in their communities to make lives better for those who struggle day to day, and thank them for their trust in us. We shared what we've been up to since the start of our presence in the community in 2010 and asked for confirmation that we’re on the right track. They gave valuable feedback including a need for more education and resources and greater engagement, communication in more languages, flexible payment options, meaningful rewards, and a greater customer care element. We plan to make this an annual day to connect these key stakeholders and partners together with us and with each other.