New Year Honours: Graeme Lowe

By PETER GASTON

In a fairytale rags-to-riches story Hastings businessman Graeme Lowe built a $50 million meat empire on an initial stake of £1000.

Today the fairytale went a chapter further when 68-year-old Lowe was named as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year honours.

Speaking by cellphone from his boat in the Bay of Islands, Lowe said he was humbled by the honour.

It had been very much a team effort.

"I could not have achieved what I did without the support and assistance of family, friends and my workers."

Lowe, named the 1979 Business Executive of the Year, emigrated to New Zealand in the early 1960s and initially worked as a purchasing officer for BirdsEye.

In 1964 he decided he wanted to work for himself before he was 30.

He bought a butcher's shop in Hastings for £1000, the start of a meat empire that established plants throughout the North Island.

Lowe entered the meat export business on his own account after the two dominant Hawkes Bay freezing companies, the Vesty-owned Tomoana and the Hawkes Bay Farmers Meat Company's Whakatu works refused to kill for him.

"I was having to have stock killed out of the district. That was the motivation for the Pacific beef plant at Hastings."

When his application for a licence to run a sheepmeat plant at Oringi, near Dannevirke, was rejected by the Meat Licensing Authority, Lowe campaigned successfully for the delicensing of the industry.

Over the next 15 years he developed more freezing works than any company and at one stage owned or had interests in works in Hawera, Hastings, Dannevirke, Paeroa, Te Aroha and Dargaville.

Lowe attributes his success to being an innovator and an entrepreneur.

His new plants, particularly Pacific and Oringi, were more efficient than the dinosaur Whakatu and Tomoana plants.

He embraced new technology which allowed him to man the killing chains with fewer people, cutting costs.

At one stage his company, Dawn Meats, handled 60 per cent of New Zealand's chilled meat exports.

Lowe actually created two meat empires. In 1987, after the closure of the HB Farmers Meat Company's Whakatu works, he sold his Pacific beef plant and the Oringi sheep meats plants to Richmond.

Nine years on, after developing another chain of works, he sold to Richmond again in a $27 million deal.

Along the way he has been an executive member of the Meat Industry Association and an alternate member of the Meat Planning Council.

In recent years Lowe, who began his working life in a tannery in England, has focused on the pelt and hide business.

He started with a processing plant in Hastings but in October last year bought Colyer Mair, New Zealand's largest leather processor, for $35 million from Richina Pacific.

Lowe also has vineyard and farming interests and has returned to the meat business through an interest in South Island firm Cromwell Meats.

One of his passions today is giving things back to his Hawkes Bay community and helping its sport.

"It's where I live and I enjoy sport."

Lowe, who played at county level as a lock or No 8 in Britain, has been an avid supporter of Hawkes Bay rugby for more than a decade.

His company, Lowe Corporation, has also been the major funder of the region's rescue helicopter.

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