Feb 11 (Reuters) - Australia's AGL Energy Ltd AGL.AX reported an almost 27% drop in its half-yearly profit on Thursday, hurt by falling power prices and an outage at a coal-fired plant in New South Wales.
The country's top power producer said its underlying profit, which omits one-off items, came in at A$317 million ($244.72 million) for the six months to Dec. 31, compared with A$432 million a year ago. The figure beat an RBC estimate of A$275 million.
The company declared an interim dividend of 41 Australian cents per share, which included a special dividend of 10 Australian cents. ($1 = 1.2953 Australian dollars)