This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including exploring the NCEA and UE results of every college around NZ, the collapse of the Du Val property empire, revealing claims a former funeral director at Tipene Funerals was swindling grieving clients and charting the 10-year police probe that brought down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2024. Today we take a look at some of the year’s power lists.
NZ’s 20 busiest residential builders
G.J. Gardner Homes remains New Zealand’s busiest house-building business, although its annual output has fallen 49 per cent since 2021, according to a comparison of figures released by specialists BCI.
BCI’s national study of house-building businesses is sold to its clients and is not available to the public. However, New Zealand country manager Ben Hurrell supplied the Herald with the latest results.
The Herald compared data from when the house-sale market peaked around October 2021 to the March 2024 year to show the contrast. BCI does not do that, instead issuing monthly updates via rolling annualised data in its What’s On Report.
The busiest residential builder, G.J. Gardner, built 824 homes in the March year, almost half its 1643 output in the October 2021 year. The master franchisor is Deacon Holdings. Its joint managing director, Grant Porteous, said he and wife Ellie were not disappointed with completions because performance remained strong “in such a declining and challenging market”.
NZ’s 10 largest dairy farmers
After dairy’s rollercoaster ride of the past decade, 10 big names have emerged as the country’s top producers.
In recent history, the sector has gone through a milk price bubble, a debt crisis, all the while facing increased competition from other land uses.
Added to that has been a big strategic shift from the country’s dairy company, Fonterra, away from volume for the sake of volume to maximising the value of New Zealand milk.
While production has come off its peak, it remains quite elevated, despite declines in the dairy herd.
The experts put that down to better genetics.
They contribute billions of dollars to New Zealand’s economy and are responsible for thousands of milking cows and farm hectares. So who are the country’s largest dairy farmers?
Jamie Gray uncovers the big players in the dairy sector.
NZ’s highest-paid CEOs
Average pay increases for the country’s most powerful chief executives have levelled off amid the recession but a new record has been set for the highest-paid NZX-listed company boss.
Chief executive remuneration packages increased by an average of 3.58 per cent in the 2023 financial year, according to the Business Herald’s Executive Pay Survey which covers 52 companies listed on the stock exchange.
The increase was much less than the nearly 15 per cent recorded for 2022 when CEOs cashed in on a rising sharemarket that pushed performance pay linked to share prices higher.
The latest survey reflects a stagnant local sharemarket in 2023 with the S&P/NZX-50 index declining 0.66 per cent last year, a poor performance relative to other markets such as the S&P 500 index, which climbed 24.23 per cent.
The average chief executive pay for the top-listed companies still climbed to $2.288 million, up from $2.209m in 2022, with a record 25 CEOs receiving at least $2m in 2023.
NZ’s highest paid charity executives
They may not be for-profit, but the top end of the charity sector is serious business with executives of our country’s largest charities managing billions and in some cases earning as much as - or more than - Cabinet ministers.
The Herald analysed the Charities Register to find entities with both annual revenues and assets of more than $70m. Nearly three-dozen entities made the cut and this group accounts for a significant slice of the economy. The 32 charities in the survey pool recorded more than $8b in combined annual revenues, manage more than $25b in assets, and employ 51,740 people in full- and part-time employment.
The pool reflects a broad range of charitable structures, ranging from health and social service providers, Māori and iwi groupings, religious orders, most of the country’s universities, and several commercial businesses geared towards charitable ends.
Business investigations reporter Matt Nippert crunches the numbers - and compares vice-chancellors, general secretaries and chief executives - to deliver New Zealand’s first charity executive pay survey.
NZ’s highest-paid company directors
Nearly 300 directors sit on the boards of New Zealand’s biggest public companies, annually collecting more than $45 million in fees.
Matt Nippert surveys the small print in NZX50 annual reports to identify the biggest – and biggest-earning – players in New Zealand corporate governance.
NZ’s highest-paid public sector bosses
The country’s public sector bosses generally received muted pay boosts in the last fiscal year, as the climate of wage inflation registered more significant increases among the lower ranks.
A Herald analysis of chief executive pay in the sector shows that the heads of the country’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) – the likes of KiwiRail and Transpower – took home both the biggest pay packets and enjoyed the heftiest increases in the year. SOEs are Crown-owned companies, and they’re expected to be profitable, efficient and comparable to private businesses.
As such, SOEs were unaffected by the official public sector pay restraint of recent years, and their increases have more closely mirrored the fatter rises in private sector pay over the period. Remuneration advisers, Strategic Pay, reported that pay increases for the heads of medium-sized and large private sector organisations peaked in the year to March 2023 at 7.6%.