Kono's Paul Morgan speaks at the China business Summit earlier this year.
Kono's Paul Morgan speaks at the China business Summit earlier this year.
Kono NZ chair Paul Morgan says the company's success in China is down to its committed strategy to add value to NZ food and beverages and its effort to build a long-term relationship.
The company is a vertically integrated, family-owned Māori food and beverage producer. It produces and exports award-winningwine, cider, craft beer, seafood, fruit and natural fruit bars. Aspiring to be the world's best indigenous food and beverage provider, Kono has a global consumer focus, particularly in Asia where it has successfully established a wholly-owned trading entity in Shanghai.
Says Morgan: "Kono is a food and beverage producer. Our most well-known brand in New Zealand is Tohu Wines. But we are also a land owner, a water owner — we started many years ago on a journey to integrate our business with a focus on securing customer and consumer relationships around the world.
"The other aspect to our business is that we are focused on how we can create intellectual property, knowledge, and secure that for commercial benefit. Those are two things in our minds when we discuss our future direction."
Kono — which is an associated business of Wakatū Incorporation — farms 530 hectares of land and sea whilst based in the Nelson, Tasman and Marlborough region.
Kono started its journey 25 years ago in the 'live, fresh, and very expensive' lobster business. "It is still that today, Chinese people love lobster," says Morgan.
"They love banquets, they love family occasions and entertaining — and it's good for the lobster industry in New Zealand."
Kono started its journey 25 years ago in the lobster business.
Kono is a diversified businesses that started in China.
As part of that journey, it joined with the seafood industry, and invested in a WFOE (wholly foreign-owned enterprise) a decade ago.
"We now own the company, we have our own food licensing in China, and we have our own people there. That has provided us with more resilience and more certainty in our relationship with our customers in China, which is important because we are quite certain that we will have a long-term relationship with China."
"For Māori, we are comfortable with that.
"We came many millennia ago from Asia, into Polynesia and the Pacific, and ended up here in Aotearoa. We have the ability to engage relationship-wise effectively and quickly with our Chinese kin."
Morgan says with Kono's investment and strategy in China, it has to add a lot more value to its exports to China. Kono is investing in food science, science technology, including human clinical trials for food solutions to consumers, that requires committed strategy and capital to invest.
"We are migrating New Zealand's food offering into high-value ingredients, nutraceutical products, functional drinks — all of these are things that we can secure greater value." Says Morgan, in China, Kono's general strategy is to have customer-consumer relationships, and to find partners that it can do this business with. "That takes time and it takes money, you have got to be committed to it."
"We are happy we are moving forward, but most importantly for us we haven't lost sight of the long-term strategy of how we are going to invest as a company and build our future in China as a very important part of that opportunity going forward.
"We do need to see partnerships — whether it is at business level or government level in research, science development and tech transfer. China will quickly be number one in climate change management; they are quickly moving but we don't realise. They have got the technology coming through, and we need that sort of relationship to improve our business performance."
