This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2023. Today we take a look at the year’s power lists.
KiwiSaver: Who’s really managing your money?
They manage billions of dollars of New Zealanders’ money and make decisions about where to invest it on a daily basis - but you won’t find images of them plastered over billboards or glossy brochures.
In some countries, investment managers can have near-celebrity status. And when they move from one investment management company to another, loyal investors follow.
But in New Zealand, it’s hard to find out who actually manages your money. When KiwiSaver providers were asked by the Herald to put forward a front person for their KiwiSaver schemes, they often selected the distribution or product manager - someone more involved in the marketing of the product than the day-to-day investing.
This list was compiled in January 2023.
McMillionaires: The top McDonald’s franchisees
Some McDonald’s Kiwi franchisees own five or six outlets: happy times for Happy Meals for this crew.
They’re often husband-and-wife teams who didn’t start out wealthy but had a big serving of chutzpah.
Much of the store profits aren’t going into the Chicago giant’s pockets either. Instead, they are enriching Kiwi business owners who bought franchises, supporting communities via sport and charity.
“In New Zealand, 90 per cent of McDonald’s restaurants are franchised by local businessmen and women who own and operate their restaurants as independent businesses,” the company says on its Kiwi website under “who we are”.
It’s a huge employer - it sought 2000 extra staff last September and many a Kiwi teenager started work there.
It takes guts, time, and a fair wad of cash to buy into the world’s biggest restaurant chain if you’re a Kiwi. Many of the stores are owned by the American parent.
To get a prized franchise these days, you’ll need at least $1.7m, perhaps money to buy the property, undergo a full-time unpaid year-long training programme and agree to a stringent set of rules, the corporation indicates.
Yet around 50 highly driven individuals or couples have done precisely that and often it’s second-generation owners these days.
They are the wealthy, busy owners of a select number of stores in areas with high populations, often operating 24-hour-a-day businesses spending millions every year on food, packaging, wages, electricity, cleaning, repairs and maintenance.
Their struggles? Insiders say that just like the rest of us: the fast-changing economy, inflation, rising wage bills, import holdups and labour shortages.
These entrepreneurial 50 or so are Kiwis working to the knock-out formula of the world’s biggest food retailing empire: 39,000 outlets, 119 countries.
This list was compiled in April 2023.
Power players in the PR industry
The best public relations people are often invisible. They’re the corporate ghostwriters, operating behind the scenes, advising executives on what to say, when to say it — and whether to say anything at all.
Look closely at a press standup featuring a famous executive or politician, and you’ll likely see their handler lingering in the background watching everything unfold, taking mental notes.
Over the past 15 years, the number of journalists covering news in this country has more than halved as tech companies gobbled up advertising revenue.
In compiling this power list, we aimed to draw attention to those who lurk behind the scenes, helping to tell the stories of some of New Zealand’s biggest companies. This was no easy task, given that PR today means so many things to so many people. The old stereotype of the spin doctor or Svengali, pulling the strings and shaping the message certainly still exists, but there’s much more to PR these days.
This list was compiled in June 2023.
Medicinal cannabis: The enforcers and budding entrepreneurs
It’s been a shade over three years since medicinal cannabis was legalised by the Government, which has sometimes hyped the young industry.
“We’re proud to support the medicinal cannabis industry as it sets out to follow in the footsteps of our wine industry which, from first planting on a commercial scale in the 1970s, has now reached over $2 billion in export value,” said Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor in April last year, as he stood on Puro’s organic farm near Blenheim, against a background of some 51,000 cannabis plants.
“Now is the perfect time to grow this high-value industry, as international demand for medicinal cannabis takes off,” O’Connor said.
“This project will bring significant scale to this new industry, providing domestically-sourced medicinal cannabis for Kiwi patients in pain and exciting export opportunities in a global growth market, providing further diversification of land use and export opportunities.”
But how is one of New Zealand’s youngest industries really getting on?
The Herald’s power list of the most influential players - the dope dozen, if you will - reveals those starting to realise its potential, but also some handbrakes.
This list was compiled in July 2023.
NZ’s booze barons and top liquor retailers
Liquor retailing is a huge business in New Zealand, with sales of beer and wine dominated by the two major supermarket groups, Foodstuffs and Woolworths NZ. However, the number of independent liquor stores has increased dramatically since the start of the century.
There are now approximately 11,000 licensed premises in New Zealand, including about 3000 off-licences, or takeaway bottle stores. The Covid pandemic also spawned a rapid rise in specialist online delivery companies.
According to Stats NZ, the volume of beer, wine and spirits available for consumption was 498 million litres last year, around the same as the previous year. The figures show that while wine and beer volumes have been decreasing, the trend for spirits is the opposite: the total volume of spirits increased by 3.2 per cent to 103m litres in 2022 and has risen by 12 per cent since 2014.
When it comes to value, the market is getting bigger.
the Herald looked at the key players and what they own.
This list was compiled in September 2023.
Craft beer: Epic highs and lows of brokers who launched a brewing revolution
Craft beer is at a crossroads.
As a 10-year boom cycle reaches a plateau in a tightening economy, there’s been a spate of liquidations, closures and sales since the advent of Covid. These are the problems of a maturing market — and beneath the headlines there’s a confidence that craft beer can continue to bring innovation and change to the wider beverage sector.
Beer is an industry that trades on tight margins and demands high volumes for assured success. A post-Covid hangover, and its lasting impact on hospitality, coupled with rampant inflation, have combined to put unbearable pressure on those margins.
For breweries, the price of everything has gone up: ingredients, freight, packaging, carbon dioxide and excise tax, while consumers are spending less thanks to inflationary pressures and higher interest rates. Like a game of chicken, many breweries have tried to absorb costs, not wanting to move first and give their competitors an edge in an industry where price is more important than brand loyalty.
As the craft market settles into its fourth decade dating back to the creation of Mac’s in 1981, it continues to be the driver of innovation — pushing boundaries around flavour, packaging, processes and authentic story-telling — but adding layers of long-overdue business acumen to passion projects.
These are the players who have either defined craft’s recent history or are setting out the road ahead.
This list was compiled in September.
Who’s who in NZ’s $2.4b wine industry
So your dream is to wander at sunset through your own vineyard then, as the evening chills, you whistle up the dogs and turn for home, where there’s an open fire and a glass of your own label awaiting your opinion.
Maybe it’s best to freeze that frame in your head-movie until you’ve met Hawke’s Bay boutique winery co-owner John Loughlin.
The well-known businessman, who with wife Kathryn founded the Askerne Estate Winery near the foothills of Te Mata Peak 30 years ago, isn’t a killjoy. They too chased the dream and have enjoyed “enormous satisfaction” achieving it.
But behind the idyll of a home overlooking their vineyards and all the wine awards and recognition, Loughlin says there’s been sacrifice, sweat and tears, forsaken overseas adventures and an investment that runs into millions of dollars.
It was a big enough challenge starting out three decades ago, he says, but these days, with land prices, capital, compliance and other costs and inflation, he reckons you’d need a “serious Lotto win” to establish a medium-sized integrated wine venture - a vineyard with its own winery.
Latest figures from industry group New Zealand Winegrowers show grower numbers fell in the 2023 financial year from 706 to 681. There were 739 wineries, compared to 744 the previous year.
Total New Zealand wine production was 360.7 million litres compared to 383 million litres in the 2022 year. Of the 2023 production, 315 million litres were exported, to the value of $2.4 billion.
So who are the big players of the New Zealand wine industry and how many of them are foreign-owned?
This list was compiled in September 2023.
The top consultants and contractors making the most money from the public sector
Government spending on outside help from contractors and consultants is a long-standing political football. And while stories of waste and eye-watering fees are perennial, they come into sharp focus in an election campaign.
In the 2021-22 fiscal year – the most recent for which the Public Service Commission has published data – spending on contractors and consultants by core public service departments and ministries rose to $1.2 billion, an increase of $303.7m or 32 per cent over the previous year.
While the Public Service Commission (PSC) publishes totals for each public agency, there is no data which aggregates how much each firm made across the public service - or indeed, across the wider public sector.
The Herald has made a limited tally. It looked at the 10 core public service agencies with the highest contractor and consultant spending and totalled the 10 most highly-paid providers of consultant and contractor services to those agencies.
This list was compiled in October.
Who owns Mitre 10 stores throughout NZ?
It’s New Zealand’s most popular, prominent home improvement and garden retailer, a vast and deeply embedded national network expanding fast, demolishing smaller stores for larger ones and moving into new areas to beat Bunnings, which landed here in 2001.
But who owns the 85 New Zealand Mitre 10 stores?
Property editor Anne Gibson names those behind a chain of shops bigger in most places than the local supermarkets.
This list was compiled in November.
How much NZ’s top bosses get paid
The country’s most powerful bosses have cashed in on the pre-Covid bull market, with the value of the average chief executive pay packet soaring over the past year.
Packages for chief executives of some of the country’s biggest firms increased by an average of 14.13 per cent in the 2022 financial year compared to the previous corresponding period as measured by the Business Herald Executive Pay Survey.
The average CEO pay for the top NZX-listed companies was a record $2.29 million in 2022, up from $2m in 2021 and $1.82m in 2020, a year in which the average fell 1.25 per cent on 2019 due to Covid-induced salary sacrifices.
This list was compiled in March.
Highest-paid public sector bosses
Many of the country’s top state sector and public service bosses have seen their annual pay bounce back from Covid-era reductions, while the top earner has pushed above $1.4 million for the first time.
A Herald analysis of public sector chief executive remuneration over the past three years reveals pay rises are back on the agenda now the Government has loosened pay restrictions put in place during the pandemic.
State sector chief executive remuneration had been declining since 2018 when Public Service Commissioner Peter Hughes overhauled the settings, including removing performance pay and taking a conservative approach to salary reviews.
This led to a 5.2 per cent decrease in annual average packages paid to chief executives over the five years to June 2022.
In addition, public service CEOs also took a six-month voluntary 20 per cent pay cut during Covid-19, which took the average pay reduction down to 10.3 per cent over that five-year period.
However, recent figures for the year to December 2022, and into the 2023 financial year, show the trend is reversing.
This list was compiled in June.