Will purchase appease shareholders and their class action?
The acquisition by Toronto’s Resolver Inc of assets of Wynyard Group points up the need for an international partner by New Zealand technology companies.
Resolver has taken over a slew of products from the Wynyard Group which went into liquidation. In doing so the Canadian company also acquires a user base, notably in the public sector.
Resolver’s activities in the crime-fighting, counter insurgency, and security IT application sector mirrored those of Wynyard.
The failure of Wynyard much earlier to acquire a big league international collaboration is all the more strange bearing in mind that Wynyard sprang out of Jade which achieved its global market share through an initial tie up with Unisys, and then with the UK’s Skipton Building Society.
Even so, collaboration poses a special threat for risk systems producers.
The less people in on the codes, the better. The less diluted their allegiance, the less the risk of leaks.
These systems require input from law enforcement authorities. Tolkien buff and New Zealand resident Peter Thiel’s Palantir is an example.
It is not known if the acquisition by Resolver of the Wynyard Group product line is sufficient to appease the formerly NZX main board company’s shareholders with their class action.
Meanwhile, the transaction reinforces a long tradition of Canadian IT involvement in this country which started with the introduction of the first PC portable, as they were then known, the Hyperion, then the Commodore, and much more recently the BlackBerry, long the Parliamentary standard.
Canadian manufacturers that played a big part in the telecommunications ramp-up included Mitel, Norpak, and Brian Tolley’s Bell Block cable extrusion process factory Canzac.
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Wednesday 15 March 2017 ||
The amount of water exported in bottles is so small that it is irrelevant to the important discussion on better managing New Zealand’s freshwater resources, Environment Minister Dr Nick Smith says.
“We use a million times more water for irrigation, town water supply and industry than that for bottled export. Bottled water exports are such a small fraction that it is a distraction to the important debate about how New Zealand better manages its freshwater resources.”
New Zealand’s annual freshwater resource is 500 trillion litres of which 2 per cent, or 10 trillion litres, is extracted. Statistics New Zealand reports that last year 8.7 million litres of bottled water was exported, down from 9.8 million litres in 2015. This means bottled export is 0.000002 per cent of the total water resource or 0.0001 per cent of the total water extracted.
“There is a real fairness problem with charging bottled water for export and not other water users. It would be odd from a health perspective to be charging a company bottling water, but not charging for the company that makes fizzy drink or beer. Nor would it make economic sense to charge the company bottling water for export, but not the company using the water to produce wine or milk. There may be a better return for New Zealand with less environmental problems in exporting the water rather than spraying it on land, adding fertiliser and producing milk noting that each litre of milk takes an average 400 litres of water to produce. The argument that the water bottling company may be foreign does not hold water when many larger water users in other industries like dairying and wine also have overseas investment.
“Freshwater management in New Zealand does need to improve. We have introduced a requirement for Councils to set minimum flow requirements in our waterways and compulsory metering. This has resulted in a significant number of red zones where further water extraction is prohibited.
“A technical advisory group is working on how New Zealand can better allocate freshwater and will be reporting back to Government by year’s end. The key to reform will be ensuring it is based on sound science and good data.”
| A Beehive release | March 14, 2017 ||
Entries open today for the 2017 Prime Minister’s Business Scholarships, which offer New Zealand’s managers and executives the opportunity to improve their skills at the world’s best business schools.
Economic Development Minister Simon Bridges says the scholarships are designed for managers and executives of companies involved in exporting, who are looking to expand their expertise through international study.
“We want New Zealand’s business leaders to have an opportunity to learn from some of the best overseas business schools and institutions,” Mr Bridges says.
“The aim of the scholarships is to make it easier to access these institutions, in turn increasing business leaders’ knowledge and improving the international competitiveness of New Zealand businesses.
“The scholarships also support New Zealand business people to develop networks and teach them to overcome the challenges our distance from overseas markets can pose.”
The Prime Minister’s Business Scholarships cover up to half of the course-related costs of attending an international learning institution.
“Previous recipients have enrolled at prestigious international institutions such as Harvard, Wharton and Columbia Business Schools, Stanford University, and the London School of Economics,” Mr Bridges says.
“This is a great opportunity for business leaders and senior managers involved in exporting to study overseas, improve their knowledge and then bring those valuable skills back to New Zealand.”
Applications for the scholarships close at noon on 28 April 2017.
More information can be found at www.mbie.govt.nz/about/our-work/scholarships/prime-ministers-business-scholarships
| A Beehive release | March 14, 2017 ||
Vector today announced another step in its strategy to deliver efficient, sustainable energy solutions to consumers, with the acquisition of two companies, E-Co Products Group and PowerSmart.
E-Co Products, better known as HRV, is a total home solutions business that has built a deep and strong connection with New Zealanders, helping to create healthier homes.
PowerSmart is a leading provider of innovative large scale sustainable power solutions in New Zealand and the South Pacific.
Vector Chief Executive, Simon Mackenzie, says the businesses will continue to operate independently and provide Vector with complementary channels to deliver innovative technological energy solutions directly to consumers.
“As new and disruptive energy solutions become available, the way energy is produced, consumed, and monitored is changing. We are focused on leading energy innovation and empowering customers by offering them choice and control.
“The acquisition of both E-Co Products Group and PowerSmart will boost our ability to deliver these new solutions, at both a household and commercial scale. These companies share our vision of a new energy future and we believe it’s an excellent fit for all parties,” Mr Mackenzie said.
E-Co Products Group Chief Executive, Bruce Gordon says E-Co Products is very excited to be joining the Vector group.
“As New Zealand’s leading energy solutions provider, Vector can provide key expertise and innovation in areas that will benefit our business and take it into a new era,” he said.
PowerSmart Chief Executive, Mike Bassett-Smith, says Vector’s scale and network expertise will assist with the company’s growth plans.
“As the economics of solar and batteries continue to improve, we can leverage Vector’s knowledge and experience to undertake ever larger, more complex projects,” he said.
Both acquisitions are subject to customary conditions and settlement is expected to occur on or around 31 March. The acquisitions will be funded from Vector’s existing facilities and are expected to be earnings accretive in FY2018.
| A Vector release | March 15, 2017 ||
Kids in river4Local Government New Zealand has launched a new piece of work to create a comprehensive framework that brings freshwater issues and water infrastructure into a coherent policy.
Local government is at the heart of water issues in New Zealand, from the provision of drinking water and storm and waste water services to implementing standards for freshwater quality.
LGNZ President Lawrence Yule says “Water 2050” will develop a framework for water that coherently integrates freshwater quality and quantity, standards, rights and allocation, land use, three waters infrastructure, cost and affordability, and funding while recognising that the allocation of iwi rights and interests in freshwater is a live issue for the Crown.
“From the perspective of local government there has been little connected discussion of how quality standards like those announced by the Government recently connect to infrastructure investment and, perhaps most importantly for communities, affordability,” Mr Yule says.
“Water infrastructure is owned by communities and is fiendishly expensive to construct or upgrade – the cost of upgrading New Zealand’s current water infrastructure will be in the billions. The quality of this infrastructure has a direct impact on the quality of our streams, lakes and rivers.
“So we need to ensure that when we set goals for how clean we want our freshwater resources to be, that we are also talking about the cost to our communities of doing this, the economic trade-offs that might need to be made, and how we pay for it. This is something that has been missing from the discussion so far.
“To achieve affordable and sustainable results we need to think about water in a holistic way and this will be the aim of Water 2050,” Mr Yule says.
The first major step in Water 2050 will be a Freshwater Symposium to be held in Wellington at the end of May.
The two day symposium will look at the strategic issues for freshwater management in New Zealand with a particular focus on water quality, quantity and funding and how we get the right outcomes for communities.
The symposium will include a key note speech from Austin-based David Maidment, a specialist in environment and water resources engineering from the Center for Research in Water Resources, at the University of Texas.
“This symposium will seek to address many of the major issues around freshwater for New Zealand, local government and its communities,” Mr Yule says.
“We need to start having a better quality conversation about water and we hope this event will lead to a broader dialogue about what we want for our water and how we get there.”
| ALGNZ release | March 14, 2017 ||
All too often, engineers and architects assume customers and prospects can read technical drawings. The reality is that technical drawings are a foreign language to many and they often cause prospective clients to become disengaged with the design process. Many alternatives have been found, like computer generated renderings, but nothing compares with the totally immersive experience of virtual reality.
Peter is the Autodesk Senior Manufacturing Technical Specialist & South Island Area Manager for CADPRO Systems. At the CoLab Conferencehe will be explaining how to use VR to engage prospective clients on a whole new level.
After learning AutoCAD 2.6 whilst studying Manufacturing Systems at Coventry University in the UK, Peter realised that digital design and manufacturing was the future. Having gained over ten years industry experience in the UK, he moved to New Zealand in 2003 to work for CADPRO Systems. In 2005 he became involved in a design project which later broke the World Land Speed record for a motorbike and sidecar. In 2012, the SAHMRI project (façade design for Adelaide hospital) consumed 18 months during which he and a team of others designed a factory-built panelised steel & glass cladding system for one of the most complex and beautiful facades in Australasia.
See the full programme and book at the PrefabNZ CoLab event page.
I’ve been investigating the potential impact of technological change on building and construction in New Zealand over the next 15 years. It’s made me think, in particular, about how technology in buildings can help us reach our lower carbon targets – just what my colleague Nick Collins was talking about in February’s blog.
Technology is at the forefront of improving building performance, particularly in leveraging the potential of increasingly ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ sensors, systems and analysis to provide data which can improve building operation.
This often refers to commercial buildings with building managers, but technology has the capacity to help us meet carbon reduction commitments through energy efficiency in our homes.
Smart meters, for example, help consumers to manage and adjust their energy/water usage at the house level and enable smart grid infrastructure at the city level. Smart meters generate usage data which can, with the appropriate security and privacy measures in place, interact with city-wide systems to manage demand, identify households in fuel poverty and interact with micro-generation of renewable energy.
In New Zealand the rollout of smart meters was left to the market, rather than regulated (compare this to the UK government which wants smart meters in all UK homes by 2020). According to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, the meters rolled out are not particularly ‘smart’ – “They could have included a low cost component that would link the meter to a home area network – a network that connects the devices in the home that use electricity. This would have made it easy for householders to access real-time information on their electricity use using conveniently located displays, and enabled the introduction of smart appliances.”
Not only would smart meters benefit homeowners, they would enable smart grid implementation in New Zealand. Smart grids use modern digital communication technology to link with end user area networks (through really smart meters), establish better interconnection between distributed energy sources such as photovoltaic cells, and (ultimately) enable the integration of electric vehicles into the system. Distributed and autonomous power generation and usage is critical, with microgrids relying on typically renewable energy sources such as hydro, bio-mass, solar, wind, and geothermal.
Meanwhile, rapid developments in solar, storage, sensor and ‘smart’ technologies are allowing energy consumers to gain direct control over energy resources - self generation, self storage and self energy management. Solar PV panels have been improving exponentially - as solar capacity doubles, the cost of solar goes down by 22% every two years since 1970. Developments in energy storage and improvements in battery technology (for example, Tesla’s Powerwall) are fundamentally transforming the energy sector by integrating renewable energy into electricity grids and turning intermittent renewable power into a direct competitor to base-load power. Solar storage costs are going down at the rate of 16% pa. The spread of these technologies is being helped by innovative concept business models involving zero money down and third party finance (for example, SolarCity which treats its product as a service) and the growth of smart appliances that help consumers maximise energy efficiency.
How efficiently our homes operate needs to be recognised as a key element in lowering our carbon emissions. Technology can help us get there!
| A BeaconPathway release || March 13, 2017 ||
Story So Far---Newspaper Managers Ironical and Touching Failure to Cooperate
The extra month of unexpected additional breathing space allowed before the promulgating of the final verdict of the Commerce Commission in the matter of the proposed merger of the two newspaper chains, NZME and Fairfax, will allow all interested parties more time to study the implications of the word deceive.
Deceive features in the Commerce Commission’s own glossary of words, the ones that fall into heavy use in its own jurisdictional bailiwick.
Indeed, as a helpful compendium this technique might well be used by other such official authorities.
The Commerce Commission defines it thus:-Deceive:-
To cause to believe what is false, to mislead as to a matter of fact, to lead into error; to delude, take in:
We may use this crisp definition to parse it in the case of the two supplicant chains requiring the approval of the Commerce Commission to bring about their desired amalgamation.
Therefore does the desired merger cause New Zealanders:-
To believe what is false? Not at face value – the chains are overwhelmingly in the print business which is shrinking rapidly. A diminishing marketplace requires diminished fixed costs which requires economy of scale such as might be achieved by merging.
To mislead as a matter of fact? The chains have been candid. They want to merge. They are not, for example, seeking to establish a cartel, fix prices. Both of which are difficult anyway in a severely over-supplied market and one with no bar to entry.
To lead into error? The Commerce Commission in its earlier draft verdict seemed to indicate that it had in fact defined an error. Namely that the erring is in the elimination of editorial diversity represented by having one proprietorship instead of two, leading to a contraction in the diversity of opinion.
To delude? Here we must answer this one with another question. Would the “reasonable” person, so beloved of, for example, by libel lawyers, be “deluded” more or less by one single amalgamated chain, instead of two? The increasingly widespread distrust of journalists, not to say, contempt, might indicate that the reasonable person today already sceptically applies two pinches of salt, instead of just the one.
To take in? See “To delude.” See also bundling (below)
We may now refer in this context to the Commission’s own underpinning objective also clearly and prominently displayed on its web site. The Commission’s purpose, it proclaims is:-
Achieving the best possible outcomes in competitive and regulated markets for the long-term benefit of New Zealanders.
It is the three words “long term benefit,” that carry the freight in the merger context.
Without the merger, can the two chains sustain their score or so of subscription daily newspapers?
A curious element of the journalistic makeup, and one which cross-infects their management is an inability to explain their own case whatever it is with any degree of concision at all.
Another and a trait which has been notably on display in this matter is an inability to see something from the point of view of the other person.
Therefore one cannot take for granted that the two chains have explained to the Commission that should they have to close their provincial dailies then they will also have to close scores of rural free sheets that distribute agribusiness information gleaned by their subscription stable mates
Now to the matter of bundling.
This is an information technology term which refers to a provider rolling out a product which can only be connected with and used with parts and other add-ons from that same supplier which are said to be “bundled” with the original product.
The Commission’s veto of the Vodafone – Sky marriage turned on the notion that Vodafone’s subscriptions would become part of a bundled subscription package that contained Sky also.
For Sky, think sports broadcast rights.
If anyone is still in doubt about the significance of sport in relation to what the Commerce Commission might postulate as being “for the long-term benefit of New Zealanders” then they might contemplate its priority treatment by, for example, the free-to-air television broadcasters.
Any moral backsliding by anyone with any profile at all in a moving ball sport moves into the narrow early bulletin time band still allowed for authentic news, as opposed to the pre-orchestrated, or contrived version of which leisure/sport is the mainstay.
Any such similar behaviour by a member of a once revered calling, let us say by a lawyer or a cleric, is interpreted as being of little surprise value and is thus shunted, if it appears at all, into the tail end of the news hour.
The Commission in its veto of the Vodafone – Sky marriage took this singular benefit into account, the one of access to real time sporting rites of passage, and decided that it should not be bundled into mobile telecommunication subscriptions.
Bundling, customer capture, is another word for leverage. Is there any leverage bundled seen or unseen into the NZME- Fairfax nuptials?
One area of such coercion could be levering Fairfax subscribers into NZMEs radio stations.
But the NZME stations are free to listen to anyway.
In the heyday of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, the 42 daily newspapers of that era happily worked together shuffling news and advertising back and forth to mutual advantage.
This happy state of affairs reached its zenith when Reuters, in which the newspaper proprietors held 12 percent of the global value went public and generated a windfall which saw the retirement of the last of the benign old newspaper families.
Since this triumphal hour the ensuing professional managers displayed a touchingly innocent absence of cooperation.
This culminated in their failure to join forces in the purchase of TradeMe and thus allowing it to be sold at an international value instead of a local one.
If there are two less conniving, two less cunning mercantile institutions in Oceania, then they should be revealed. Ideally, prior to the Commerce Commission’s final verdict on the NZME-Fairfax merger.
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Monday 13 March 2017 ||
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