Same shock, two answers — one of them still guided.

We lock a binary: Port of Tauranga's reported underlying earnings for fiscal 2027 are NZ$145m or higher. Confidence 91%.

Guidance is NZ$160-175m. Our threshold sits NZ$15m, about 9.4%, below the floor of that range — and NZ$10.3m below the FY2026 record of NZ$155.3m. The lock does not ask the port to grow. It asks that a record year not unwind by more than a tenth.

We scouted Air New Zealand for this tranche and dropped it. The airline reported a FY2026 loss before taxation of NZ$336m, against earnings before taxation of NZ$164m a year earlier, and attributed roughly NZ$135m of pre-tax damage to a fuel shock and about NZ$190m to Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 and Pratt & Whitney PW1100 engine availability. Then it declined to provide FY2027 earnings guidance at all, citing jet fuel near US$150 a barrel and continued conflict.

There was no honest lock available there. The single quantified forward figure the airline gave — NZ$70-90m of FY2027 impact from engine-related lease commitments and aircraft that cannot be fully used — is a bespoke disclosure that may simply not be restated in the same form twelve months later. A lock nobody can score is worse than no lock, so the series has no Air New Zealand entry.

Port of Tauranga faced a version of the same shock and answered differently. Its own commentary names Middle East conflict, fuel prices, and geopolitical and tariff risk as pressures on diesel-reliant exporters, forestry in particular — forestry being a material part of what moves across its wharves. It said all of that, and still put NZ$160-175m on the record.

That difference is what makes this a lockable business and the airline not. A port sells throughput capacity under long-lived arrangements to a diversified cargo base; an airline sells discretionary seats with fuel as an uncapped input. When management is willing to be measured against a number while naming the reasons it might miss, a forecaster has something real to anchor to.

A 9.4% haircut below the guidance floor is wide by this series' standards. Locks anchored on contracted revenue routinely run 2-4%. The extra width is not scepticism about Port of Tauranga's operations, which just produced a record on stable volumes and better productivity. It is about what sits on the other end of the supply chain.

Log exports are price- and freight-sensitive, and the company has itself flagged that diesel-dependent export industries are the exposed link. Container volumes were described as stable rather than growing. So the plausible downside is not a management failure; it is a volume shortfall imported from a fuel market nobody at the port controls.

NZ$145m sits below the FY2026 record as well as below the guidance floor, which is deliberate. The lock survives a year in which the fuel shock bites, throughput softens, and the port simply fails to grow. The residual 9% is a genuine forestry-volume contraction of the kind the company itself warned about, or a berth-expansion cost drag landing inside the underlying line.