It was a year in which New Zealand's business landscape was fundamentally changed and the debate about what sort of country we wanted to live in reached new heights.
More New Zealand business moved overseas and more overseas businesses wound back their New Zealand operations, particularly in the financial sector. The
Australian stock exchange eyed up the NZSE for takeover and although that failed a number of our top companies, including sharemarket darling Baycorp, listed on the AEX.
The champagne corks - Lindauer we trust - eventually popped in London when the long battle for Montana ended. British liquor company Allied Domecq emerged victorious over Lion Nathan in the messy bid for control of the country's largest winemaker which highlighted the concerns of small shareholders and proved an early test for the new Takeovers Code.
One local business following the trend to go global did it from home. The creation of Fonterra, the world's ninth-largest dairy company, was a success story born from the merger of the country's two largest milk processors with monopoly exporter, the Dairy Board.
Grappling with the issue of how more local businesses could compete on the world stage was the subject of the Knowledge Wave conference. Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School warned New Zealanders they had to change their attitudes.
The only things that separated the country from catching the wave of success were confidence and the commitment to succeed, he said.
"We have a lot of the most important conditions in place, but somehow there has not been this national commitment to translating this potential into reality."
But not everybody was convinced that catching the knowledge wave was necessarily a good thing, especially if it involved messing with the stuff of life.
Protests mounted after the Government decided to allow field trials of genetically modified organisms, albeit under strict controls, and research organisations stepped up their security to prevent sabotage.
2001 – The year in review
