A key issue to emerge this week was South Canterbury's announcement it has shortlisted five potential equity partners to take a stake in the 84-year-old company, with speculative, but unconfirmed, estimates it could be looking for a $300 million-$400 million injection.
The company has a trustee waiver to breach its trust deed and requires a new equity partner to bring it back into line.
It was standing room only at South Canterbury's country-wide roadshow in Christchurch and Invercargill, and at near capacity in Dunedin last night with 60 people at a meeting.
The complex company is in the midst of a massive restructuring, having suffered losses of about $200 million from soured property lending, and needs to rebuild investor confidence to secure its future.
Mr Maier said finding a new equity partner remained a priority. He gave little indication of progress with talks from a shortlist of the five interested parties.
He repeated several positive features of this year, such as the $210 million recovered from bad debts, increase in cash to $177 million, plus $13 million in trust and capital above $205 million.
"A break-even result [first quarter] is not good, but it's better than losing $200 million like last year ... we are not circling around the gurgler," he said.
However, on the question of more bad debt provisioning coming to light at year-end in June, Mr Maier said "possibly", while more write-offs from within the $500 million of "bad bank" distressed and overdue loans was a "maybe, possibly" scenario.
Key for many analysts is the "wall of maturities" totalling $1.13 billion in bonds and debentures which come up for renewal between now and October.
Mr Maier said the maturities remained one of the bigger issues. South Canterbury was tackling that by offering varying new maturity dates, at different interest rates, so as not to repeat the scenario of creating another new wall, "or the same problem in a year's time".
In summarising the update, Mr Maier said: "We want your support, not for fun or old times' sake, but because South Canterbury deserves to be here," he said, having outlined the company's past and saying that founder Allan Hubbard had put more than $150 million into the business recently.
