What type of businesses are you looking to buy?
Ones with shared values and strong management teams. We like agriculture and infrastructure. Our portfolio is property, the primary sector with fishing, farming and forestry, direct investments such as GoBus, shares, cash and fixed income, so we're re-populating the weighting.
How is the 480ha Ruakura inland freight and logistics project going?We lodged resource consent applications [for 78ha] with the Hamilton City Council in early October, so that was a momentous occasion, culminating in many years of work. It will take to close to Christmas before these will be issued and then that frees us up to start development in the New Year. The key thing for us is to secure anchor occupiers to the site, for example logistics businesses. If that is all successful, we will push some dirt around later next year. There is the potential to employ 10,000 to 12,000 people there. It's 5.5km long and over 1km wide so when you're standing in the middle of it, it's a very impressive piece of land.
What has Tainui Group Holdings done to benefit people?
We employ 3800 people in the businesses we own, for example at The Base, we employ 1800 directly and indirectly. In the last 10 years, we have spent nearly $500 million in the region so it's all regional economic development. The operational spending from all the companies we directly and indirectly own would be the better part of $2 billion over 10 years.
TGH has distributed well north of $100 million over eight or so years but closer to $150 million since its inception. That goes to help people get education, some of the kaumatua get hearing aids and glasses and to help maintain community facilities at the marae. So when you think about what we are bringing to the community, we try to keep a low profile but there's a lot going on that we're associated with. This all benefits the community.