There’s more good news for PGG Wrightson this week, with the company’s finance arm posting a net profit of $8.9m.

PGW Finance’s result comes despite loan impairment increases, and follows PGG’s announcement of a much improved balance sheet of its own last week.

PGW Finance chief executive Mark Darrow says the impairments are mostly due to dairy sector losses, but the company has limited its exposure there.

 “I think part of managing your risk and your asset portfolio is making sure you’ve got a good spread of loans across different sectors.

"We’ve always maintained around about 25% in dairy and we’ve kept it at about those levels because it tends to be a slightly more volatile sector than some others.”

Mr Darrow says the company made an effort to keep budgets tight, a move which has paid off.

 “We’ve managed to run the business fairly prudently through the year. We’ve been very, very careful on operating costs and kept those …at industry benchmarks or below, and we’ve done very well at getting our funding costs right on our funding base.”

Total loans and receivables for the company were down 5% to just over $530m.