Pattrick Smellie

4 days ago | businessdesk.co.nz | Pattrick Smellie

NZME shareholders got to meet their company’s board disrupter, Jim Grenon, in the flesh for the first time at the company’s June 3 annual meeting.The normally publicity-shy Canadian investor, who described himself as “a bit of a ghost on Google”, started by making the point that the experience was new territory for him, despite a long career in corporate life in Canada and the United States.“I’ve never once in had to pitch myself to the meeting in 50 years,” he said at an annual meeting that...

4 days ago | businessdesk.co.nz | Pattrick Smellie

An improving outlook for electricity supply this winter has allowed the Rio Tinto aluminium smelter at Bluff to ramp back up production and end its winter “demand response” action earlier than anticipated.The smelter had cut its electricity use by 50 megawatts (MW) under the 20-year supply agreement it settled with Meridian Energy in May last year, in anticipation of electricity shortages that sent wholesale power prices skyrocketing last winter.

4 days ago | businessdesk.co.nz | Pattrick Smellie

News publisher Stuff Digital is to be 50%-owned by auction site TradeMe in a deal that will put Stuff and its primary competitor, NZME, head to head in the fiercely competitive real estate and motoring advertising markets.Announced just hours before NZME’s annual meeting, where the final act in a tumultuous tussle for board rejuvenation will play out, the deal appears to make Stuff Digital an additional arm of TradeMe’s already wide reach in the New Zealand online classified advertising...

6 days ago | businessdesk.co.nz | Pattrick Smellie

Wayne Boyd, named a companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the King’s Birthday Honours List, has chaired more public companies than it’s easy to list in a single sentence.To name a few of the heavy-hitters, Boyd was at various times the chairman of Telecom (now Spark), Meridian Energy, Auckland International Airport, Freightways, and Vulcan Steel – a company he worked with for 30 years and held in special regard for its deeply embedded culture.As an adviser first to the NZ Māori...

1 week ago | businessdesk.co.nz | Pattrick Smellie

Proposals for electricity market reform are proliferating as the Government prepares to release and respond to the review it ordered into the sector by Australian consultants Frontier Economics.The consultancy is reported to have delivered its final report to the Energy Minister, Simon Watts, last Friday, just ahead of the release this week of an Electricity Authority (EA) issues paper proposing two immediate actions to curtail spiking wholesale prices during periods of tight supply.That was...