Prime Minister John Key will lead a high-level business and education delegation to India next week, visiting Mumbai, New Delhi and Kochi.
“India is a key partner for New Zealand. It is a leading source of skilled migrants, international students and tourists, and in the five years since I last visited our two way trade has grown by 41 per cent to $2.4 billion,” Mr Key says.
“The India-New Zealand relationship will only continue to grow, and this visit will help drive New Zealand’s political and commercial partnership with the world’s third-largest economy.”
In New Delhi, Mr Key will meet with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Pranab Mukherjee, who visited New Zealand earlier this year.
“Along with further strengthening New Zealand’s political, security, and economic connections with India, my meeting with Prime Minister Modi will be an opportunity to discuss his efforts to reform India’s economy and how New Zealand can be part of India’s growth.”
Mr Key will also attend a range of events focused on showcasing the innovation of leading New Zealand companies doing business in India, as well as our reputation as a high-quality education and tourism provider.
Mr Key will also be accompanied by MPs Mark Mitchell and Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi. The delegation will be away from 24 – 28 October.
LaserBond has been using thermal coating techniques to produce hard-wearing components and products for the mining, power generation, manufacturing and agriculture industries since 1992.
But a downturn in the mining industry is helping to fuel demand for its products as companies look to maximise productivity.
LaserBond Chairman Allan Morton said the company’s laser-applied coatings typically tripled the life of a product.
“This is effectively 3D printing using industrial robots and industrial lasers to add material to existing substrates to create better performing products,” he said.
“The economic benefit is not so much that the components are lasting longer, it’s that you don’t have to shut the system down to change components so they’re getting longer cycles out and that has ramifications in the workplace health and safety area as well.
“When everything was going fine in our boom times people said ‘we will not pay that’ because even though we might have four times the life we might be double the price but now companies are looking at costs and the cost of downtime overwhelms any incremental cost of a higher-performing component that we supply.
“We’ve said our day will come at the bottom of the cycle.”
Founded in New South Wales, the company has about 65 staff and has had a plant in South Australia since 2013.
It has recently formed a research collaboration with the University of South Australia’s Future Industries Institute and is establishing a new “laser cell” in Adelaide featuring a 16kW laser, which it hopes to have up and running in September.
“We know that we make a 60 per cent energy saving, we get higher efficiency and we get less waste with these new lasers. We currently have the three most powerful lasers in Australia in this industry and the one we’re buying will be twice as big again – it will be the highest power laser beam used for laser cladding in the southern hemisphere.
LaserBond predominantly manufactures for the mining industry and exports about 80 per cent of its products to countries including Chile, Mongolia and South Africa.
Products are typically made from steel and then applied with materials such as nickel alloys, tungsten, titanium carbides and ceramics. Manufactured items include mining picks, furnace doors and ‘down the hole’ hammers.
“Basically any metal component that wears we can apply a surface to make it last longer for new parts as well as we can make an old part with new surfaces that are better than new,” Morton said.
The company expects the new laser to allow it to double production.
“We’re able to deposit material quicker than we currently do and also it’s all about energy.
“We can put a certain amount of composite material on a part, we want to be able to increase that speed to enable us to be more cost effective for our customers.”
LaserBond Founder and Executive Director Greg Hooper is recognised as a world-leader in the field. He has moved from Sydney to Adelaide to play a key role in the Research & Development side of the business and the collaboration with UniSA at Mawson Lakes, which is just a five-minute drive from the company’s SA base at Cavan.
“There is a lot of opportunity in a lot of different industries. I’ve been working on materials and depositing those materials better and quicker so we can be more competitive,” he said.
“We envisage that South Australia has the focus for the R&D and it will become our product manufacturing division, which will be our biggest division over time.
“It appears to me that the time is changing with regard to the collaboration of universities with private industry and it’s very enlightening.”
Anti-static packaging is one newer area where graphene’s conductivity properties could soon be commercially applied. Brent Balinski reports on Manufacturers' Monthly.
After nearly two years of exploration, two Australian companies have signed an agreement to take the “wonder material” graphene into its next commercial domain: in anti-static and static-dispersive polymers.
Yesterday graphene technology business Imagine Intelligent Materials and engineering plastics specialist Duromer Group announced an MoU to develop commercial applications that use graphene’s unique properties operating with a state- of-the-art operation in Vietnam (Durocolour Vietnam Ltd).
When it comes to able-bodied engineers designing products for differently abled individuals, misunderstanding can lead to products that are perceived to be optimized yet actually miss the mark.Running blades are a great example of this important concept of human-centered engineering. This is because some argue the blades offer an advantage over able-bodied runners. But when you dig deeper with a human-centered approach, you might see that this is not truly the case.
“Current running blades are incredible devices. But for every perceived advantage, there are 10 to 20 disadvantages we see with things like health, mobility, psychology and the mental game of sport,” expressed Kevin Shinn, vice president of industrial design at Altair Thinklabs. “There is not an advantage there. At the end of the day, these people are differently abled, so they will need to adapt in some way compared to able-bodied people. You have to look beyond just the device themselves, and that’s what we’ve done.”
Engineers Learn Blade Runner Challenges to Optimize the DesignThe goal of human-centered engineering is less about finding solutions and more about understanding problems.
“These devices are so cool that people assume there is an advantage,” said Shinn. “Somebody with no legs with a pair of devices has an advantage. It’s kind of absurd when you think about it, but we needed to find that out to be sure and learn about the right questions to ask. To do that, we took a human-centered approach.”
Picture this: The products you work so hard to sell online have "sell by" dates that are enforced by law. After this date, you have to throw them out. What would that scenario do to your supply chain and your efforts to manage inventory, not to mention your sales?
While common items like clothing, electronics and jewelry can sit around for weeks or months before someone purchases them, you, too, might have your own internal "sell by" benchmarks - dates by which you want to get them off the shelf and out the door so you can sell newer or different items.
For those who grow, manufacture, or distribute food products, time is of the essence and "sell by" dates are very real. They face other challenges as well:
Regulation. Food has to be traced and tracked by regulatory agencies. The producer has to know where an item or "batch" of items is at any given moment so they can be recalled if required.Unleashed, an inventory management software product developed in New Zealand, helps food producers keep track of what they sell and how much it costs to produce. It's specially tailored for the unique challenges facing merchants who supply restaurants, other food producers, and the general public, and who sell both online and off.
Almost half of all broadband connections in New Zealand had unlimited data plans at 30 June 2016, Statistics New Zealand said today. In 2016, there are 43 percent more unlimited data plans than in 2015, when only around one-third of connections were unlimited.
This is coupled with a large increase in the amount of data used by broadband connections compared with 2015. In total, residential and business connections used over 143,000 terabytes in the month of June 2016, a 70 percent increase from 2015.
“Residential broadband connections in New Zealand used an average of 88 gigabytes each during the month of June 2016,” business performance senior manager Jason Attewell said. “That’s equivalent to 85 hours of video or TV streaming. Kiwis are really making the most of their unlimited data plans, considering that half of the broadband connections in June 2016 had no data cap.”
This increase in data usage is likely to coincide with the increasing number of streaming services available, and the continuing popularity of these. Additionally, telecommunications services are 20 percent cheaper in June 2016 than in June 2011 (see Consumers Price Index: June 2016 quarter).
“It’s never been cheaper to have unlimited data plans, and there are so many options for how to use the data – watching movies, streaming music, creating and sharing content, and communicating with friends and family,” Mr Attewell said. “A few years ago only 5 percent of us had uncapped broadband connections, so it’s exciting to think where we could be in another few years.”
These figures come from the annual Internet Service Provider Survey, which is sent to all internet service providers in New Zealand.
The number of fibre-optic broadband connections in New Zealand has more than doubled since June 2015, Statistics New Zealand said today. Over 220,000 broadband connections in New Zealand are made through fibre, compared with 105,000 one year ago. As at 30 June 2016, over 12 percent of all broadband connections were through fibre-optic connections, a high-speed way to use the internet.
“In 2016 around 1 in 8 broadband connections is made through a fibre-optic connection,” business performance senior manager Jason Attewell said. “The market share that fibre occupies has really taken off, since it was only 1 in 20 connections one year ago. The total number of fibre connections has doubled in each of the last four years.”
While copper (digital subscriber line) remains the most common type of connection technology, with 65 percent of connections accessed this way, fibre connections are likely to continue their growth into the future. The government aims to have 80 percent of New Zealanders able to access the internet using fibre by 2022.
“As the ultrafast broadband rollout continues, more and more people are taking the opportunity to get faster internet at their home or business,” Mr Attewell said. “This can make it easier for businesses to grow and for households to use the internet for streaming movies, online gaming, and communication.”
These figures come from the annual Internet Service Provider Survey, which is sent to all internet service providers in New Zealand.
Following a joint directive from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and the United States Department of Transportation (DOT), Air New Zealand is placing a total ban on the carriage of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices from 5am (NZ time) Sunday 16 October 2016.
These devices cannot be accepted for carriage either in person, in carry-on luggage, or in checked luggage.
Air New Zealand is strongly advising travellers not to bring these devices to the airport with them. They cannot be accepted for travel and there is no storage facility available for them at our check in areas. Owners of these devices should contact Samsung for advice on how to return their devices.
Air New Zealand apologises to customers for any inconvenience, however, this is an FAA and US DOT safety requirement.
Air New Zealand has also been in consultation with the NZ Civil Aviation Authority on this matter.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242