How are the Government’s Commercial Businesses Faring? Currently, the government owns or part-owns eighteen large commercial businesses with combined assets totalling $78 billion. These businesses include three electricity generator/retailers, an airline, a post/courier company, a bank and minority stakes in three airports amongst other enterprises. Together these [...]
Staff news Welcome to Simon TDB Advisory would like to warmly welcome and introduce our new summer intern and part-time analyst, Simon McSweeney-Harte. Simon recently completed a BA/BCom majoring in Finance, Economics and International Relations and has begun studying towards his Honours degree in Economics at VUW. George begins MBA [...]
Dairy Sector - Extending the Boundaries As part of its frontier firms inquiry, the Productivity Commission asked TDB to investigate a pillar of the New Zealand economy – the dairy sector. Our paper looks at the economic significance of the industry, the regulatory environment, the extent of competition and the [...]
The year of Zoom Welcome to the November 2020 edition of the TDB Digest. For many of our readers, lockdown life this year saw just about everything moved to Zoom or other video-conference providers, from client meetings to team chats to Friday work beers. Despite the drop [...]
Fonterra: a long-run financial assessment As part of its current review of the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act (DIRA) the government asked whether the intended benefits of the 2001 industry restructure have been realised. While parts of the industry have flourished (eg, A2 Milk, Synlait and Open Country [...]
New Zealand Dairy Companies Review In TDB's Dairy Companies Review for the 2018 financial year, we looked closely at Fonterra’s performance in comparison with other NZ dairy processing companies. The transparency of Fonterra’s different businesses has improved, allowing us to analyse the performance of the company’s ingredients [...]
Fonterra - What's going on? With a reported loss of more than $590 million and no dividends for shareholders this coming year, how did Fonterra get this far down? Is the cooperative a victim of its own size, past success, structure or strategy? In a recent interview [...]
Are there too many electricity distributors? A long-standing debate in the New Zealand electricity sector is whether the country has too many electricity distribution businesses (EDBs). In our recent report looking at the potential benefits from amalgamation of the current 29 EDBs, we found that amalgamation is [...]