Business, bullets - and a tank

Buying a sawmill is a tricky business ... but
a war can make it downright difficult. In his
series on Kiwi success, SIMON COLLINS meets
a man who learned how to dodge the bullets.

Tony Goodman went to the Solomon Islands last year to buy a sawmill - and found himself in the middle of a civil war.

It was his first visit to the islands. He had been invited across from nearby New Britain, where he runs a joint venture with the local Arawe people to develop the island's timber and other resources.

"I just went there to look at a timber operation. As soon as I arrived, the place erupted into a bloody war," he says.

The sawmill he was visiting, near the airport, became the headquarters of the militant Malaitan Eagles and was under constant fire from Government forces.

Desperate to break out, the Eagles commandeered a bulldozer and covered it with metal to turn it into a makeshift tank. Mr Goodman was pressed into helping, and advised them to replate it with steel to make it bullet-proof.

"People were shooting all over the place at night," he says. "In the old days they would be just at the edge of the arrow range and do a raid and kill a few people, but the battles were almost make-believe.

"Now they have guns and it's got a lot more serious. The fighting is like a guerrilla war. It's hard to see the front line, but there was a front line near Alligator Creek near the airport."

The airport was closed, so Mr Goodman was forced to hole up in the sawmill and develop an alternative "escape plan".

In the end, he was saved by New Zealand's Foreign Minister Phil Goff, who flew in to broker peace talks between the warring factions.

"It was the only plane landing. He got them talking. He was very successful, it was the beginning of peace." And he got Mr Goodman out.

Not surprisingly, the Auckland entrepreneur decided not to buy the sawmill. But he is still running his timber operation covering 2 million hectares of New Britain, where he is planning to build a $200 million road across the island.

Around the globe, other New Zealanders are running software houses in Australia, merchant banks in China, music television in Europe and trading businesses everywhere.

Simon McMillan and Melissa Robinson, both 28, are setting up a hearing aid factory in Brazil for US-based multinational Starkey.

Former New Zealand Olympic hockey player Stuart Grimshaw heads Britain's Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank, former hotel doorman Jonathan Hendricksen has become a millionaire in Japan with the online advertising company ValueClick, and former Otago business student Miranda Waple manages marketing for L'Oreal in Paris.

At home, New Zealand engineering firms are designing geothermal power stations for the Philippines and planned the fire engineering for the Sydney Superdome, Auckland's Rakon makes the crystals for a good chunk of the world's cellphones, and Buckley Systems makes the electromagnets used to make 90 per cent of the world's silicon chips.

Business has never been totally constrained by borders, but nor has New Zealand business ever been so global.

In many ways Mr Goodman exemplifies the new spirit. In the 1980s, he founded the country's first successful cable TV company, Kapiti TV, north of Wellington. He later sold it to Saturn.

From his home in the Spanish-style subdivision of Palm Heights, near Henderson, he directs not only his New Britain operation but a variety of projects, including an economic development proposal for the Tuhoe people of Ruatahuna. His wife, Te Karere journalist Hinerangi Goodman, is Tuhoe.

Through friends in Auckland, he was invited to join a teak logging project near the Papua New Guinea capital, Port Moresby.

He decided against that, but while in Port Moresby he met Arawe leaders who were looking for a partner to develop their resources.

Ten years before, Malaysian and Chinese traders had started logging New Britain.

"They had come in and set up camp and taken logs back in great shiploads and couldn't care less about the restoration of the forest - they just raped the land," Mr Goodman says.

When he first visited Port Moresby five years ago, the Arawe had just expelled the Malaysians and started their own company to manage the forests sustainably. They were looking for a partner.

Their project was too big for the Kiwi to take on alone. So be brought in American investors, taking a 7 per cent share in the consortium himself.

The outside investors start with 65 per cent of the shares and the Arawe with 35 per cent, with the balance shifting gradually to eventually give the Arawe 90 per cent.

So far the group, Niu Britain Century, has invested about $4 million in bringing in equipment for a sawmill and designing the highway.

"It is very enticing because it is a land full of riches," Mr Goodman says. "The locals go around and pick up gold off the road."

In some ways, Simon McMillan and Melissa Robinson are at the other end of the business spectrum, working for an established multinational, Starkey, in Sao Paulo, a bustling city of 15 million people.

But as the murder of Sir Peter Blake showed, Brazil can be just as dangerous as the South Pacific.

Mr McMillan and Ms Robinson are audiologists who worked for Starkey in New Zealand before three months' training in Minneapolis and being assigned to set up Brazil's first hearing aid factory.

"It was a bit nerve-racking, but we are treating it more as an adventure," Mr McMillan says. "So we arrived with a fairly open mind and worked at it step by step."

They landed in Sao Paulo in October 2000. It took four months to register Starkey as a local company, and a year later they are still waiting for a licence from the Health Ministry.

One of their first tasks was to employ a Brazilian technician to work with them. They have also had support from other Kiwis in Sao Paulo.

"I know of about 15 other New Zealanders in the Sao Paulo area. One guy I went to school with has opened a bar here, and there are several people from the Dairy Board and a guy with a seed company."

Sao Paulo is "a fantastic, exciting city", but the negative side is the crime. "You have to be very careful driving at night - no one ever stops at red lights because of carjackers. Just about everyone we know has been assaulted and robbed at some point."

The couple read the Herald Online every day and say New Zealand will always be home.

"Business is becoming more internationally based and New Zealand companies need to have people experienced with other cultures and different ways of doing business," says Mr McMillan.

"There are fewer job opportunities in New Zealand than overseas. I think that will be the biggest difficulty with coming home."