Receive and adopt the audited Statement of Financial Performance and Statement of Financial Position for the previous financial year

TREASURER’S REPORT

The December 2019 Financial Year was an outstanding result for the Foundation. We recorded a bottom line surplus of $484k, compared with a small loss in 2018. This result is on the back of a tremendous equity growth in the Foundation’s Investment Portfolio, extremely ably managed by JBWere. Booked (but not realised) growth in that portfolio was $531k, compared with an equity loss of $81k in 2018. The Foundation has a relatively conservative Investment Policy, requiring a large proportion of the total investment portfolio to be held in fixed interest bearing investments such as Bonds. So for the overall balance to have grown around 13.2% year on year, not including dividends and interest which are separately recorded at around 4.5% return on overall investment, is a remarkable effort. While Equity Markets throughout 2019 were indeed very buoyant, Tom Phillips and Bruce Robertson from JB Were are to be commended for outstanding professional stewardship of the Foundation’s funds.

Of course as I have been saying for many years Investment Portfolios can go down as well as up (as happened in 2018 to a small extent) so while we will book this surplus, and have indeed crystallised some by realising a small portion of equity growth, we are mindful that each year we have no guarantee of continued growth. Therefore we need to treat most of the gain as inflation proofing our overall equity position.

If we strip out the investment growth our day to day operations were a bit harder to balance. While expenses were carefully managed by Lisa and her team, It is getting harder and harder each year for management to raise funds from traditional sources, and indeed overall we were down around $60k in income from activities, gaming trusts, and donations on a relatively conservative budget. This is despite great effort from Lisa, Ben and the team. As a consequence we have engaged a professional Fundraising Agency Barrer and Co who have been working with Management and the Board to investigate and implement a major gifts and donations programme. This will be in its initial stages through 2020, with full implementation expected in 2021. In the meantime we remain ever grateful to NZ Rugby for its continued financial support through its $400k annual grant. This does give us some certainty of operation and enables us to meet our core purpose of providing support, comfort and financial assistance to the injured rugby players we look after.

Given that our core purpose is in fact the Seriously Injured Players we support, once it became clear in the latter half of 2019 that our equity growth was substantial we did allocate an additional $80k of funding for grants to injured players. This enabled us to meet some pressing Seriously Injured Players financial needs and still end the year with a healthy surplus and maintaining growth in our investment fund towards our holistic target of a $10m fund.

So in summary an excellent year and one which has enabled us to support injured rugby players to the extent of total grants of $410,000, but one in which ongoing needs of generating sufficient income to meet all the needs that exist are becoming more challenging. A challenge that Management and the Board are facing together and one which we don’t intend not to meet. As always my thanks to my fellow Board colleagues for their commitment, to Lisa and staff for their continued dedication, and to Angela whose day to day accounting work makes the treasurer’s job so much easier.

M A Peters FCA TREASURER