AGL issues profit warning
By Lucy Battersby
AGL shares have dropped 77¢ to a nine-year low of $12.45 this afternoon, a fall of 5.7 per cent, after the company lowered its profit forecast. It was now expecting underlying full year post-tax profit to be between $500 million and $580 million rather than between $560 million and $660 million.
The profit downgrade was due to a fire at the Liddell Power Station in New South Wales last Friday. A fire started in the generator transformer of Unit 3 during an oil cooler filter replacement. The unit was unlikely to start working gain until March 2021 and the company expects the impact of the outage and replacing the transformer to be about $25 million.