KEY POINTS:
Angus Tait, OBE, electronics-maker, business leader. Died aged 88.
The first way in which Sir Angus McMillan Tait will be remembered is as a leader in the global radio communications industry and founder of Tait Electronics of Christchurch. When he died this week, the company he built
was exporting equipment to more than 140 countries.
But Sir Angus, a humble man inclined to unease when awarded his knighthood in 1999, will also linger long in the memories of people who encountered his methods of building a business through teamwork and encouraging competent staff. And his determination that funding research and development was an essential key to progress.
He followed no golden pathway to success. Life began at some disadvantage when his father died in an influenza epidemic before Angus was born in 1919. But, early on, he was interested in things like crystal sets and, at 17, left Waitaki Boys High School for a job in a radio shop.
He sat a few trade exams and, in 1940, joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force and was sent to the RAF radar school in Scotland, working initially on radar for Coastal Command aircraft hunting U-boats.
Back home in Christchurch after the war, he worked at the Post Office, where mobile land radio communications were being developed. In 1948, he formed his first company, A.M. Tait, having sold mobile radios to two taxi companies. It employed about 100 people but, in 1967, went into receivership, an experience he found "dismaying".
He also confessed the business had failed "because it deserved to fail" as it had no person employed to do the financial management.
But Tait was convinced his ideas were sound and that developing two-way radio services worldwide was in its infancy.
A new company, Tait Electronics, started up in 1969.
Today, the company still quotes his comment to the bank manager when mortgaging his house to begin again after the bankruptcy: "I won't be making the same mistakes again. I'll be making new mistakes in future."
Tait then became the first company in Australasia to build the all-transistor mobile radio.
The Tait miniphone followed in the 1970s and, by the end of the decade, the company started exporting to Britain.
But the Labour Government and the tsunami of Rogernomics arrived in the 1980s, stripping away protections and leaving the local market wide open to imports. From 1984 onwards, other electronics firms - PYE, Philips, AWA and GEC - disappeared.
Tait, which had been moving into the Australian and Asian markets, still faced great competition in its domestic market and, in 1989, survived a local bank manager's recommendation that it be put into receivership. That was fortunately overruled on condition a general manager be appointed to add depth to the management. "We developed strong fingers - because we were hanging from the cliff face by our fingernails," Sir Angus recalled.
He also refused foreign offers to sell out in the 1980s, keeping the business, which has employed hundreds of Kiwis, protected by his majority shareholding, which is now a trust.
This week, Tait managing director Michael Chick, who has 850 employees, called Sir Angus an "immensely determined yet compassionate man", never seeking the limelight "but never shy of making his voice heard if it would help business and education in New Zealand".
The Tait Foundation has donated millions of dollars to a variety of causes.
Sir Angus is survived by his wife, Hazel, and children.
