Trade Minister Todd McClay says Thailand and New Zealand have agreed to market access improvements for our exporters and announced a new agricultural cooperation programme.
“In Bangkok today we signed an agreement increasing the volume of New Zealand dairy products that can enter Thailand under a preferential tariff rate. For some products this will mean a preference increase of between 10 and 20 per cent,” Mr McClay says.
“We also agreed to launch a new programme that will help Thailand to improve its domestic dairy production and processing.”
“This is a positive step forward for our bilateral trade relationship.”
“Thailand is now our eighth largest market. Total goods exports between our countries have increased almost 150 per cent since the Thailand New Zealand Closer Economic Partnership was signed.”
Mr McClay met with the Thai Airways President who also confirmed that Thai Airways will be launching daily flights between Bangkok and Auckland later this year.
“This new service will be a welcome addition for travellers, international students and business people. More than 100,000 Kiwis travelled to Thailand last year and tens of thousands of Thai tourists visited New Zealand,” Mr McClay says.
| A Beehive release || July 26, 2017 |||
Understanding key trends in the economy is crucial for the Reserve Bank, even though the trends can only be estimated and never directly observed and measured.
Assistant Governor and Head of Economics Dr John McDermott said today that three trends were particularly important: the neutral interest rate; potential output growth; and the equilibrium real exchange rate.
“These trends are the anchors around which we aim to stabilise the economy, and thereby inflation over the medium term,” Dr McDermott said in a speech. “While these trends are unobservable and the Reserve Bank has no control over them, they’re important to pin down so that monetary policy can be set appropriately.”
These unobservable factors are often denoted in economic models with a star (or asterisk). So, metaphorically, one might say it is necessary to estimate the position of the economy’s stars in order to navigate monetary policy appropriately.
“Core inflation is another important unobservable concept, because by filtering out temporary factors it provides a better guide to future medium-term inflation,” he said.
Dr McDermott’s speech provided an update on how the Reserve Bank thinks about the trends in the New Zealand economy and the changes in the trends over time. Currently, the neutral interest rate is estimated to be around 3½ percent; potential output growth is 2.9 percent; and core inflation is 1.4 percent.
The neutral interest rate has been slowly falling for some time. In part, this reflects developments in potential output growth – the sustainable growth rate of the economy. Despite a boost from strong net immigration in recent years, growth in potential output has remained much lower than in the past two expansions due to nearly no contribution from productivity growth.
More information:Looking at the Stars speech
Foreign Minister Gerry Brownlee has welcomed further engagement between New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
“The establishment of a people-to-people dialogue has been announced during Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s visit to New Zealand,” Mr Brownlee says.
“New Zealand and the United Kingdom enjoy a broad and enduring partnership. At its foundation are the connections between the people of our two countries.
“The Foreign Secretary and I agreed that enhancing those connections will help support a stronger political and economic relationship between New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
“The dialogue will provide a forum for discussing a wide range of issues of mutual interest, including how we might improve the opportunities that exist for our citizens to live and work in each other’s countries.
“The relationship New Zealand shares with the United Kingdom is an important one. The UK is our fifth largest trading partner and one of our closest international security partners.
“As the United Kingdom looks to reshape its relationships around the world following its decision to leave the European Union, we see enhanced engagement as an opportunity to further strengthen the friendship the UK and New Zealand have enjoyed for so long,” Mr Brownlee says.
The people-to-people dialogue will be convened at officials’ level at six monthly intervals. It will complement the existing trade policy dialogue, and strategic dialogue on foreign policy.
| A Beehive release || July 26, 2017 |||
Living up to New Zealand’s reputation as a standout digital nation, the tech sector and the government will stage a major international tech summit in Auckland next year, NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller says.
The Digital Nations conference on February 18 and 19 2018 will be a forerunner to the Digital 5 summit to be held later that week in Wellington.
The D5 is a network of the world’s most advanced digital nations, with a shared goal of strengthening the digital economy. It was founded in London in 2014 by the United Kingdom, Estonia, Israel, New Zealand and South Korea.
The D5 provides a focused forum to share best practice, identify how to improve the member-countries’ digital services, collaborate on common projects and to support and champion our growing digital economies.
Muller says NZTech and event partner Conferenz, are working with government to bring some of the best international digital leaders to New Zealand to pick their brains for great ideas that can help make New Zealand more prosperous.
His comments come hard on the heels of the 2017 Digital Planet report by the Fletcher School at Tufts University that shows New Zealand is one of the world’s leading digital nations.
“The Digital Nations conference next year provides a unique opportunity to bring together New Zealand’s digital leaders, with international experts, business leaders, societal change agents and policy makers to envision what New Zealand could look like as a digital nation by 2030, and then agree on investments and policy to help us get there.
“By listening to the plans of other leading nations and then working on what it could mean for New Zealand’s education, health and financial systems, our productive sectors and the society, should help us move together as a country towards a more prosperous future during a period of profound change.
“NZTech is pleased with the close and proactive partnership with in the Department of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment as industry and government work together to prepare New Zealand for a tech focused future.
“New Zealand’s innovation ecosystem and institutional environment are both noted as strengths for New Zealand in the 2017 Digital Planet report and this Digital Nations conference partnership between industry and government is a great example of why we are seen as a leading country,” Muller says.
The Digital Nations conference is expected to attract more than 300 people including D5 Ministers and their delegations, invited international government representatives and New Zealand digital leaders and influencers representing all sectors.
| A Make lemonade release || July 26, 2017 |||
Dairy products give big boost to exports
Sustainable corn packaging inventor aims to turn biggest food brands green
Successful launch for new Auckland ferry Torea in Whanganui
Manawatu Gorge fate: Ashhurst will be bypassed
McClay says NZ-Thailand economic relationship upgraded
Fuji Xerox NZ voluntary suspends all NZ government contracts
How the Reserve Bank thinks about the trends in the New Zealand economy
New talks with UK to strengthen friendship
Gallaghers building 24 warehouses at Tatu Industrial Park
Seabed mining decision delayed
$1.25m boost for recycling farm plastic waste
One of New Zealand’s longest-running pioneering business success stories, Gallagher Power Fence Systems Limited, has announced plans to expand operations in Kenya at Tatu City.
Gallagher will build 24 warehouses on four-acres at Tatu Industrial Park, the leading industrial area with Special Economic Zone status in East Africa. The warehouses will be used for storage of security products and for lease. Construction will commence in September 2017 and create approximately 100 jobs as part of the multimillion dollar investment.
Whilst visiting Tatu City, Sir William Gallagher, Chairperson and CEO of the company, said that the move was a strategic step in Gallagher’s growth and expansion plans in the region.
“Over the last 18 years, we have experienced immense support from various partners and customers in Kenya. We are proud to be playing a role in creating employment opportunities, and we aim to reach a wider clientele through the facilities that we will be setting up here at Tatu City,” he said.
Gallagher is also in the process of building an electric security fence on the boundary of Tatu City. The fence will will be equipped with CCTV cameras, floodlights and access control at entry and exit points, all monitored in a dedicated control room by Tatu City’s security team.
“We are delighted yet again to attract a global investor and service provider with strong local roots to the ever-growing list of Tatu City partners,” said Stephen Jennings, Founder and CEO of Rendeavour, the owner and developer of Tatu City. “Gallagher is a household name in dozens of countries around the world, and the company’s quality and standards are such that they have built a strong business in Kenya.”
About Gallagher Power Fence Systems Ltd (www.gallagher.com)Gallagher are a global leader in the innovation, manufacture and marketing of animal management, security, fuel systems and contract manufacturing solutions.For 75 years Gallagher has designed and delivered innovative solutions to a global customer base. GPF Kenya was established 18 years ago in Nairobi and established itself as a highly reputable supplier and installer of high quality cost effective security systems.
All installations are designed and installed to comply with National and International requirements. Gallagher inspects and certifies all installations as appropriate, ensuring that the systems comply with Gallagher’s stringent code of practice and quality standards.
About Tatu City (www.tatucity.com) Tatu City is a 5,000-acre, mixed-use development with homes, schools, offices, a shopping district, medical clinics, nature areas, a sport & entertainment complex and manufacturing area for more than 150,000 residents and tens of thousands of day visitors. Schools and businesses are already open at Tatu City, and a range of houses are under construction to suit all incomes. A Special Economic Zone, Tatu City is a unique live, work and play environment that is free from traffic congestion and long-distance commuting.
| A Gallagher release Nairobi, July 11, 2017 |||
Logistics company DHL Supply Chain is staging an augmented reality trial with one of its Australian customers as it assesses the productivity benefits that AR can deliver to warehouse operations.
The project, using smart glasses to aid ‘picking’ during order fulfillment, builds on a series of pilots the company has run in a number of other countries, according to Andrew Weyer, DHL Supply Chain vice president, information technology, Australia & New Zealand.
The decision to invest in AR is based on DHL Supply Chain’s assessment of the emerging technologies that comprise ‘Industry 4.0’, Weyer said.
DHL Supply Chain develops its own internal ‘hype cycle’ that assesses the trends likely to have the biggest impact on its business and then works with its vendors and customers in co-creation efforts to develop proof of concepts, he said.
In 2014, DHL Trend Research released a paper — Augmented Reality in Logistics — that identified potential AR use cases in three key areas across the logistics industry:
• Warehousing operations, including pick by vision and warehouse planning.
• Transportation optimisation, including ‘completeness checks’ (ensuring a pick-up load is complete), complying with international import and export regulations (easily assessing trade documentation for example), dynamic rerouting (sending new directions to a driver to optimise travel), and freight loading.
• Last-mile delivery (areas such as parcel loading and drop-off, last-metre navigation, and using augmented reality to boost delivery security through customer recognition).
For the company’s first major foray into AR it partnered with a customer — printer vendor Ricoh — and software company Ubimax.
The 2015 project used Google Glass and Vuzix headsets and involved a Ricoh warehouse in the Netherlands.
“It was a joint decision between us and Ricoh to say, ‘Let’s identify a new digital trend that we can bring into the facility and try to prove some benefits’,” Weyer said
The three-week pilot involved 10 staff equipped with head-mounted displays. During the pilot, they collectively picked more than 20,000 items and fulfilled 9000 orders.
The benefits were substantial, with the augmented reality headsets delivering a greater than 25 per cent productivity boost.
X, the subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet and the new custodian of Glass, earlier this month announced the relaunch of the headset with a focus on the enterprise; DHL is one of the Glass customers X has highlighted.
In the wake of the Netherlands pilot, in August last year DHL Supply Chain announced it would expand the AR program across different industries and stage further trials in the Netherlands, the US and the UK.
“This is one of the things we do in the group: We prove something in one area, then we industrialise it and we try to extend it to other areas and leverage it as a standard solution,” Weyer said.
The scenario where AR has been found to deliver the most significant boost is where an individual warehouse worker is fulfilling multiple orders and making ‘less than carton’ picks, Weyer said.
Difficulty with obtaining Google Glass units in APAC has meant that in this region DHL has partnered with US technology company Vuzix. (Vuzix’s M100 and M300 smart glasses run on Google’s Android mobile platform.)
DHL Supply Chain has already staged a proof of concept in Japan with a major retail customer, Weyer said.“There were some challenges with the POC around the technology,” he said. One of them was the impact of latency between the server and the glasses units being used on the warehouse floor.
“Those problems have since been solved and we’re now looking at a circa 10 per cent productivity improvement from the glasses,” he said.
In Australia, DHL Supply Chain has kicked off a proof of concept with Canon.
“We’ve identified an area of their operations where they’re doing a multiple picking-type operation. We then looked at the [AR] solution and identified two areas we could optimise even further,” Weyer said.
Changes to the AR software have meant that the heads-up display is “more dynamic,” he said: “It automatically fits to the number of trolleys that you’re actually picking into.”
The other enhancement was that in addition to highlighting the container in which a worker should place the current item, a different colour is used to highlight the next tote box — meaning that in the case of any minor system latency, the employee is able to keep working.
The local project is entering user acceptance testing this week.
The Australian pilot will see vision picking directly compared against a manual picking operation, voice picking and RF picking to better assess the productivity improvements that AR can deliver.
The smart glass units will be directly connected to wireless networks in the warehouse operated by DHL Supply Chain.
In most of DHL Supply Chain’s facilities across Asia Pacific the company has already installed standard wireless access points to drive RF-based picking, Weyer explained.
RF picking involves equipping warehouse workers with wearable Wi-Fi-connected terminals that can direct them to the appropriate area of a facility and tell them the item and quantity needed to fulfil an order. The technology has proven particularly important in the pharmaceutical area, Weyer said.
“We’ve got quite a large life science and healthcare operation across a lot of the countries in APAC, especially in Australia,” Weyer explained. In Australia the company does about 80 per cent of the direct to pharmacy distribution of life science and health-care products, he added.
“That RF capability allows us to be more accurate. You’re dealing with patients’ lives: You need to make sure you’re picking the right batch, the right expiry date. You don’t want someone mistaking an R for a 1 or a zero for an O — because you’ve just mixed up a batch number. If I need to do a recall, I need to know where I can find that product; if I’m not using RF and I introduce human error.”
Weyer said that one benefit of the facility chosen for the AR pilot is that it’s managed by an operations maturity standard used globally by DHL Supply Chain. That means that a range of measures to assess warehouse productivity are already in place.
“That operations maturity standard introduces a whole lot of disciplines around the operation; kicking off with things like early morning performance dialogues — what do we need to achieve for the day, what are our KPIs, what are our SLAs, planning the resource allocations to different activities,” he said.
“We’ve got daily reporting on the current productivity and we’ve got daily dashboards that are running. As we put those different technologies in, we can actively understand the impact of them off the base that we’ve already got in place.”
| A DHL release || July 25, 2017 |||
New Zealand start-up manufacturer REYEDR (pronounced rider) has announced the latest in augmented reality (AR) smart tech for the safety-conscious motorcycle enthusiast.
The REYEDR HUD is a heads-up display that retrofits to a motorcyclist’s helmet and shows speed, navigation, distance and more. It runs on the REYEDR smartphone App to provide the rider with key information about the bike, route and ride group. It also has the ability to alert emergency services in the event of an accident.
Using a retrofit approach, the HUD fits on the chinbar of any full-face motorcycle helmet and converts it into a smart device. A transparent screen sits just in the periphery of the motorcyclist’s vision, allowing riders to keep their eyes on the road while still maintaining awareness of key riding conditions.
REYEDR reduces distraction by providing information needed within the motorcyclist’s natural line of sight. There is no need to refocus to see the virtual image, so riders can keep eyes on the road at all times. The GUI (graphical user interface) is designed to be non-distracting and display the right amount of information — colours change to draw attention when needed.
For instance, navigation arrows and distance to the next turn-off change from green to orange to red when approaching the corner. Similarly, speed colours change from green to orange when approaching the speed limit and red when riding at the speed limit and over.
REYEDR showcased the HUD device at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The system connects via Bluetooth 5.0 connection and a social-ready smartphone app (compatible with iOS and Android devices).
Motorcyclists can find interesting rides and connect with a larger community of bikers that share similar interests. Riders can save photos and/or a map of their route for a personal log, which they can share with others.
Horticulture New Zealand has teamed up with WorkSafe New Zealand to create a health and safety toolkit specifically designed for horticulture businesses.
"Managing health and safety in the workplace is a critical issue for horticulture businesses," Horticulture New Zealand chief executive Mike Chapman says. "Keeping up with what is required is something we can help growers with.
"Working with WorKSafe, we have been able to customise a toolkit, called Keep Safe, Keep Growing, which includes both a written booklet and an easy-to-work-through online guide to help growers identify and manage health and safety risks.
"The guideline is targeted at those who are responsible for the management of health and safety in a horticulture business. It covers the steps that growers should take to build a health and safety system.
"Features include a guide for visitors to a property, tools and training resources for workers and contractors, and the ability to create risk assessments for Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) audits that are part of many horticulture businesses."
Horticulture New Zealand represents 5,500 commercial fruit and vegetable growers who employ 60,000 people. A copy of the Keep Safe, Keep Growing guide will be posted to all growers over the coming days. Additional copies will be available from Horticulture New Zealand on request. The online guide can be found here.
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