thl targets achievement of $100 million in profit
- Wed 19 November 2025
- 7 MIN READ
After riding out COVID, a merger, an economic downturn and geopolitical pressures, the world’s largest commercial RV rental business is back on a positive track.
In 2022, thl became the largest commercial RV rental business in the world following a merger with Apollo Tourism & Leisure. The company now spans New Zealand, Australia, North America, the UK and Europe.
“That’s pretty cool, given we’re based in little old Australia and New Zealand,” laughs CEO Grant Webster.
The dual-listed business is targeting an ambitious future, having finally re-established an even footing after the pandemic years.
“Rentals, manufacturing and retail sales is a wide spread of activities on a global basis. It certainly keeps us busy,” says Webster.
In June, the company announced an ambitious growth target of $100 million in annual net profit after tax, to be achieved sometime over the next three to four years.
“We’d just hit a low point of $28.7 million in profit but we’re confident our goal is realistic. The assumptions we put out there are achievable and, if we follow through, we’ll have a much broader investment base and deliver good dividends,” says Webster.
Tourism, thl’s core industry, was one of the world’s hardest-hit industries during COVID-19.
“We’re moving towards pre-COVID visitor numbers globally but we’re not there yet. Getting back there or higher is a fundamental driver behind our $100 million goal and we’ve got the core infrastructure and the right people to deliver that. A second driver is the cost synergies we’ll gain over the next three or four years as a result of system changes we've completed since the merger. That means we've got a revenue line coming up and a cost line coming down,” says Webster.
He expects to see most of the growth in Australia and New Zealand with some recovery in North America, though continuing geopolitical changes make those harder to predict.
thl CEO, Grant Webster
“The imposition of tariffs created the biggest impacts for us so far. From Liberation Day, we saw a 40 to 50 per cent drop-off in the number of Europeans wanting to go to the US. Then Canada put a retaliatory 25 per cent import tax on vehicles coming in from the USA. Our RVs are manufactured in the US but also used in Canada, so this made it just about impossible to continue moving or sourcing vehicles across the border in the usual way. Now, thankfully, there have been remission orders granted meaning that we can move RVs between the USA and Canada without tariffs – at least for today. We’ll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings,” says Webster.
Fluctuating share prices reflected the uncertainty in global markets.
"We’ve tightened things up so we can be more agile when something new crops up and, while our debt has climbed a bit, we expect it to come back down dramatically now. We’re doing what we can to maintain positive momentum."
“We've had a number of shocks over the last couple of years, but we think we’ve passed the bottom of the cycle. We’ve tightened things up so we can be more agile when something new crops up and, while our debt has climbed a bit, we expect it to come back down dramatically now. We’re doing what we can to maintain positive momentum,” says Webster.
thl listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) in 1986. By 2022, the ASX had been on its radar for about eight years.
“We were keen to dual list but, as we didn’t need to raise capital regularly, we couldn’t justify the additional focus and costs. The merger with Apollo was the opportunity we’d been waiting for as they were already listed on the ASX. The big benefit for us is having access to Australian investment funds that don’t have a New Zealand mandate,” says Webster.
Prior to the merger with Apollo, thl had a strong retail investor base with coverage by NZ stockbrokers with both retail and institutional clients.
“Research coverage expanded significantly when we merged with Apollo and listed on the ASX to include similar stockbrokers in Australia. However, we’re yet to see a strong Australian retail investor presence on our register,” says Webster.
“While thl is our corporate brand, the general public would be familiar with our RV rental and sales brands like Maui and Apollo and would see these vehicles on the road frequently.
Growing our retail shareholder base in Australia is a real area of focus and opportunity for us.”
The ASX listing did, initially, attract strong interest from Australian institutional investors. This declined somewhat in 2024 but, by the middle of this year, they were once again increasing their holdings.
"Growing our retail shareholder base in Australia is a real area of focus and opportunity for us."
“There’s a bit of a herd mentality I think, more in Australia than New Zealand, so, for us, our investor strategy is all about getting on the ground in both countries,” says Webster. “We do investor-specific visits three to four times a year – half year and full year, obviously, and also when we have the opportunity to speak at conferences and other events. There are also ad hoc meetings when I'm in Australia as well as lots of online meetings. We really believe that having a physical presence with institutional investors is key, so we're very keen to engage wherever we can. We’re also using media, our brokers and our analysts to build our profile.”
"We would like a broader international base, even out of Europe where the RV market is also quite big, so we see that as a future opportunity."
Webster says that, as yet, there are no large overseas institutional investors on the register. “We’ve learned from other ASX and NZX listed companies that you really need to be two or three times our size to get listened to in the US. We would like a broader international base, even out of Europe where the RV market is also quite big, so we see that as a future opportunity. In the past five years we’ve been hit with COVID, we had the positives and negatives of a big merger, and then we've had to deal with the tariff and geopolitical situation. We’ve put those three things behind us now and, fingers crossed, we have a good few years ahead.”
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