Due to the drop down in bellwether Telecom, New Zealand shares ended flat on Tuesday while the Contact Energy Ltd., New Zealand’s biggest publicly traded electricity company, capped gains in a market. Telecom fell 2.5% to NZ$2.30 failed to recover the damage after the fourth major outage since December.

Contact Energy dropped 1.4% to NZ$5.72 after posting a net profit of NZ$80.1 million in the six months to Dec. 31, up 0.3%.

"The Contact result was uninspiring, or probably a bit disappointing. It just goes to show there is still reasonable underlying support for a large part of the market", said Wright.

New Zealand Oil & Gas has a 15% stake in the Kupe project. Contact Energy Ltd., is postponing generation investment and reviewing its use of gas-fired plant.

The company will convert its 400-megawatt gas-fired plant at Otahuhu to run only in peak demand periods to improve profitability.