Trade Minister Todd McClay leads a senior-level business delegation on New Zealand’s first trade mission to Tehran in twelve years, today.
Iran and New Zealand have a long-standing trade relationship, dating back to 1975 when New Zealand established an Embassy in Tehran, its first in the Middle East.
“There is enormous opportunity for Iran and New Zealand to work together to boost two-way trade,” says Mr McClay.
“Iran has traditionally been a very important market for our sheep meat and butter however exports have diminished over a number of years. Since the lifting of UN sanctions there are now renewed opportunities to re-establish this trade as well as new opportunities in the education, construction, food and beverage, energy, forestry, specialised manufacturing and services sectors.
“Earlier this year the visiting Iranian Foreign Minister said Iran presented a $1 billion prospect for New Zealand. This mission will be an important first step towards delivering on this exciting opportunity,” says Mr McClay.
The eighteen New Zealand companies joining Mr McClay on this visit to Iran are: NIG Nutritionals, Tait Communications, Enatel Limited, Sealord, Silver Fern Farms, Westland Milk Products, Fonterra, FrameCAD, Flight Coffee, Switchfloat, University of Canterbury, University of Auckland, ANZCO, Auckland University of Technology, Pacific Helmets, Pelco NZ, NZ Bankers Association, and Pultron Composites.
Mr McClay has invited Labour trade spokesman, David Clark, to join him on this visit in the interests of promoting a bipartisan approach to trade, which is critical to New Zealand’s prosperity.
By Foreign Affairs Publisher / December 2, 2016 /
Manufacturers continue to face additional freight costs, as well as delays and disruptions to supply chains, with the road and rail closures following the Kaikoura Earthquake, say the New Zealand Manufacturers and Exporters Association (NZMEA).
NZMEA Chief Executive Dieter Adam says, “We have had feedback from manufacturing members describing significant delays for some products to reach their destination, some with uncertainty as to when this will be resolved.
“Manufacturers are facing freight surcharges of around 15% currently, with other significant costs in adjusting and adapting their supply chains.
“We support Mainfreight’s call for KiwiRail to open up a dedicated coastal shipping option to take the pressure off roads that are not suitable for the level of freight. Given the predicted long time frames to fix the damaged roads and rail services, this kind of solution would be a huge help to restore more normal operating conditions for manufacturers and other businesses.
“Finding and implementing such a solution is a matter of urgency. This is not only a commercial problem, but one that hits manufacturers' viability and ability to compete, disrupting vital supply chains. The Government should be willing to step in to help facilitate a solution if one cannot be found soon.” Said Dieter.
An NZMEA press release - Friday 2 December 2016
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, which is battling rival ResMed over intellectual property for face and nasal masks, has succeeded in overturning the second of two preliminary injunctions against it in Germany, allowing the company to resume sales of the affected products in that country.
The District Court in Munich in August granted two preliminary injunctions preventing the sale of F&P Simplus, Eson and Eson 2 masks in Germany by F&P Healthcare's German subsidiary. The first injunction was overturned on Nov. 17, and the second on Dec. 1, allowing the company to resume sale of the products, Auckland-based F&P Healthcare said in a statement.
ResMed and F&P Healthcare are involved in a tit-for-tat dispute over intellectual property, with ResMed filing a patent infringement complaint in the Southern District of California as well as lawsuits in Germany and New Zealand, and to the US International Trade Commission against F&P Healthcare in relation to face and nasal masks, just days after the Kiwi company filed its own patent infringement lawsuit against the US company in the US District Court for the Central District of California relating to its flow generator products and masks.
“We are pleased with the outcome of the first two hearings in these patent dispute proceedings and we remain confident in regards to future proceedings," said F&P Healthcare managing director Lewis Gradon.
Fisher & Paykel told shareholders at its annual meeting in August that the company had been unable to resolve the IP dispute with ResMed after 18 months of talks, but said they were well prepared for the legal action which they wouldn't have taken unless they were "pretty confident" about winning. However, the company warned it could take a decade to be fully resolved.
Shares in F&P Healthcare jumped 6 percent to $8.70.
A Business desk release
Downer EDI has been awarded a $1.7 billion Sydney train contract by the New South Wales Government.
The contract includes an order of 24 double deck trains, with options for up to 45 additional sets, and maintenance of the trains for an initial period of 25 years, plus two optional five years extensions.
Under the agreement, Downer’s joint venture partner CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles (CRRC) will manufacture the trains, while Downer will provide maintenance services.
The company’s Chief Executive Officer Grant Fenn said he was delighted to secure the Sydney Growth Trains contract which would build on the proven success of the Waratah trains.
“The Waratah trains have achieved exceptional availability and reliability – in fact they are the best performing train in the world. Importantly they are also very popular with commuters and train drivers,” Mr Fenn added.
“There is more than 90% commonality between the design of the Sydney Growth Trains and the design of the Waratahs. All major sub-systems are the same including traction, brakes, door, train information systems, heating, ventilation and air conditioning.”
Downer is a leading provider of services to customers in markets including: Transport Services; Technology and Communications Services; Utilities Services; Engineering, Construction and Maintenance (EC&M); Mining; and Rail.
The company, which employs 19,000 people, operates primarily in Australia and New Zealand but also in the Asia-Pacific region, South America and Southern Africa.
A Downer EDI release
Third Domino tumbles in wipe-out of political class
The decision by France’s president Francois Hollande not to offer himself for re-election for another five year term brings to an end the heyday of client-politics in the western alliance.
Known in France simply as “clientelism” the process is borrowed from industrial consumer merchandising.
It amounts to identifying numerous sector or niche markets. Then tailoring a special approach to each in order to create the desired mass market, in this case of votes
Mr Hollande, known in France as the King of Concensus, brought this whole technique to a fine art.
Anything at all would be tossed back and forth, tested, then tossed back and forth again for further consultation.
It was Mr Hollande’s bad luck that he was in the driving seat when France went through its most tumultuous period in the past half century in the form of islamic insurgency.
It was now that Mr Hollande fell back on his consensus technique which took the form of testing the reaction of his sprawling left constituency to sweeping aside France’s exaggerated code of rights in order to implement the state of the emergency that the situation required.
As was his custom, Mr Hollande sought out acceptable displacement activities such as leading parades to commemorate the slain in these atrocities.
He immersed himself in the Paris climate conference. At any other time France’s ultra-politicised politico-professional liberals would have trumpeted his presence at the high altar of the political class as an example of his mastery of statesmanship.
Instead his absorption by the liberal ritual was construed as still another example of Mr Hollande’s reluctance to bite any bullet for fear of losing votes.
Mr Hollande is a photo-fit of the political class. He started at one of France’s political versions of West Point. In his case ENA, and then zig-zagged his way forward, his pace accelerating during his patronage under the aegis of the regal Francois Mitterand.
Cruelly, and in the Latin tradition, everyone, and from all his niche markets, now has their boot into the hapless outgoing president.
The most vicious kicks in the guts are from his own former proteges whose careers he had so assiduously nurtured in the tradition of the French political class.
Celui qui essaie d'avoir des amis avec tout le monde n'a pas d'amis.
He who tries to be friends with everyone has no friends
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Friday 2 December 206
Earlier MSC article: The end of the Politically Correct
Our foreign correspondent forecast the Trump victory, and now previews the fall of France’s Francois Hollande ....
| Napier, MSCNewsWire, Nov 24, 2016 | - The predicted fall of France’s president Francois Hollande in next year’s election will bring to a close the initial era of political correctness. He is scheduled to become the third big-economy leader victim within less than a year of the accelerating electoral power of the non-political class.
Mr Hollande is known as the King of Consensus. His determination prior to any decision to canvass every opinion and nuance in his own Socialist Party and also in the string of other French leftward parties conveyed an impression of dithering in the face of islamic insurgency.
Instead of being seen to be heading a tough reaction Mr Hollande’s nature lead him to be more at home leading candle lit marches, vigils and uttering trite panaceas in the face of the emergency. It was left to his prime minister Manuel Valls to express the public mood about the threat throughout France of rampant religious extremism.
Worse still, Mr Hollande was viewed as being over-preoccupied by the star studded Paris climate conference with its breathtaking ritual insights into the blindingly obvious instead of with the much more visible and immediate terrorist threat
The most visible manifestation of Mr Hollande’s pending loss of the presidency is the number of his own hand-picked cabinet members who are deserting the sinking ship. The “frondeurs” as the rebels are known are setting themselves up, they are still in their 30s and 40s, for the 2022 election.
There is though in the anticipated disappearance of Mr Hollande a signal point of difference with those other landmark scupperings of the political classes, Brexit and Trump. The difference is that this time everyone is expecting it.
The winner of the French Republican Party primaries is now looked to as the winner of the presidency. This is looking, in fact, increasingly like former premier Francois Fillon.Mr Hollande’s political career has been an inch-by-inch bureaucratic progression characterised by a reverse Clinton-effect process.
His life-mate Segolene Royale (pictured above with Hollande) with whom he has four children was the glamorous one. Her attempt to crack the French version of the glass ceiling was more spectacular than anything attempted by Hillary.
In the event she lost to Sarkozy.
It was now that that the blander Francois entered the lists and in doing so streamlined his approach by parting from Segolene. The go-it-alone Francois now beat the unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy and the ElyseesPalace was his and his Socialist Party’s.
Four and a half years later he looks like a president who knows he can’t win. He is unlikely to hand over to the rather more decisive figure of his prime minister Manuel Valls.
No major economy leader, not even President Obama, personifies so closely as does Francois Hollande the twin pillars of diversity and multiculturalism which in France’s case are supercharged by the Revolutionary code of the Rights of Man.
Few doubt his sincerity of purpose. It is just that as with the other casualties of this new wave politics, the Clintons, he found himself reading from an out-of-date script
Roger Hanson: Earthquakes and the benefits of lead rubber bearing base isolation
Fonterra opens state-of-the-art milk powder dryer at Lichfield
Port Nelson facing increased post-quake workload
Business delegation to look at opportunities in Iran.
Downer EDI wins $1.7bn Sydney train contract
Automobile Association: Keep transport levy, Aucklanders can cope
Nestle claims it can slash sugar in its chocolate bars by 40 per cent
Cargo delayed as ports under strain
Scott Technology to boost staff in local markets
While you were sleeping: Bond yields climb
Travelling to China? Your Customs Agent Could be a Robot
Tony Alexander's BNZ Weekly Overview
Glowing report on Government handling of Paris terror threats and 1080 milk scandal
The Coda intermodal freight hub expansion was officially opened by the Minister of Transport Hon Simon Bridges today, unlocking a new transport network for the North Island.
Scott Brownlee, Chief Executive of Coda Group, the country’s leading freight management business, said based on cargo volumes, the Coda intermodal freight hub, Savill Drive in Auckland, will be one of the largest fully intermodal freight hubs in New Zealand, providing a consolidation point to bring together export, import and domestic cargo flows into one single location.
“Infrastructure investment and rail connectivity were key milestones required to increase capacity and services of the freight hub and the existing Coda rail offering between Auckland and Palmerston North. We now provide further opportunities for lower North Island exporters to access the two main ports in the North Island.
“The hub is an efficient supply chain ecosystem that will continue to remove waste from the North Island’s freight network. Each day we’ll see more than 300, 20-foot equivalent container loads of goods flow through the site, with products dispatched to supermarket shelves and retail stores or railed to port for export to markets around the world. The intermodal freight hub is a significant step in increasing the landside logistics capability required to consolidate cargo and service the larger ships now visiting New Zealand.
“By working together with our customers and partners, we’re delivering fresh, innovative supply chain solutions which will provide better matching of freight flows up and down the North Island and keep New Zealand businesses competitive,” he said.
KiwiRail Chief Executive Peter Reidy said the recent Kaikoura earthquake has demonstrated how connected New Zealand’s logistics partners need to be.
“We’re proud of the work we’re doing to achieve this and welcome strong strategic partnerships like the one we have with Coda. The facility not only means an increase in rail volumes, it is also helping change the way export and domestic volumes are flowing. This collaborative approach supports the growth of New Zealand businesses and in turn this brings significant benefits to the country.
“Helping to drive New Zealand’s growth is important to KiwiRail and this facility is a good example of how KiwiRail is offering transport operators the best landside logistics solution.”
The significance of the southbound rail link will enable the Coda intermodal freight hub to move south, by rail, the equivalent of 8,000 heavy vehicle trips of cargo annually. Each year this will save over 1.5 million litres of fuel and 4,000 tonnes of carbon emissions – equivalent to planting just over 100,000 tree seedlings, grown for 10 years*.
The Coda intermodal freight hub provides a full logistics solution which includes transport, product warehousing, cross-dock facilities, container loading and devanning, container storage, hire and a coastal shipping service moving up to 500 TEU per week to the South Island.
The new expansion includes a new 10,000 sqm intermodal yard, 4,950 sqm warehouse extension, 6,500 sqm freight canopy, two rail sidings and in 2017 an additional 7,500 sqm warehouse with additional freight canopy will be completed.
Cites Dictator’s emphasis on health, education throughout Latin America
Fidel Castro was a “giant” who saved Cuba from revolving door coups and counter coups declares New Zealander Bernard Diederich who was a close friend of Castro’s since his ascent to power.
Mr Diederich and his wife were on the invitation list for the 10th anniversary of the Cuba revolution.
Had it not been for Castro, emphasises Mr Diederich, Cuba would simply be another “poor and uneducated” Latin nation.
Mr Diederich cites Castro’s intense interest in science and religion as additional, and unrecognised, aspects to the personality of the dictator.
Mr Diederich also emphasises the way in which the Cuban leader deployed his technical people notably doctors throughout Latin America and to the benefit of the poor there.
For many year Mr Diederich ran Haiti's daily paper and was thus eyewitness to the various catastrophes in the region caused by human intervention.
Mr Diederich was for many years in charge of Time Life’s Central America coverage. He was awarded the National Press Club's Lifetime Achievement Award two years ago. He is pictured at the event in Martinborough where his New Zealand family is now based.
He hails from Wellington and is considered now to be New Zealand’s greatest living adventurer. His odyssey started early in World War 2 when he became a boy sailor on the Pamir, the square rigger seized from the Germans.
Considering this too safe, he went on to sail in tankers across the Atlantic.
After the war he hove-to in Port Au Prince, Haiti, where he started his newspaper and began a tortured relationship with the Duvalier dynasty.
Now a resident in Miami, Mr Diederich was to deal on personal terms with all the Central American dictators over the next half century and his books on them are considered standard reference works.
Early revolutionary days (top of page): Bernard Diederich, wearing tie, with Fidel Castro.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk
Last month, customs officials at the Gongbei Port of Entry began using Sanbot, a humanoid robot designed and built by QIHAN Technology Company, to help increase efficiency, security and customer experience at the busy border crossing.
According to QIHAN, Sanbot is a service robot powered by a cloud-enabled app ecosystem designed to be deployed in a wide variety of settings including retail locations, schools, hospitals and more.
“The use of Sanbot by Gongbei Customs demonstrates just how versatile Sanbot’s AI platform truly is,” said Zhuang Yongjun, chief technology officer at QIHAN. “We truly believe that robots like Sanbot have the potential to change how service industries operate–and that includes helping customs workers operate and secure ports around the globe. By equipping Sanbot with an incredibly powerful, cloud-based development platform, QIHAN has been able to allow our partners at Gongbei Customs to tailor Sanbot’s capabilities and behaviors to the needs of their specific use case.”