Founders defied depressing times

The entrepreneurial spirit was stirring in 1934 when future brothers-in-law Maurice Paykel and the late Woolf Fisher defied the Depression by starting business in the luxury end of the consumer goods market.

Mr Paykel's mother had seen a home journal advertisement for a real American refrigerator, as opposed to her mess-making icebox, and persuaded her husband to send off a bulk order on behalf of friends and relatives.

When the consignment arrived some of them bailed out, so the younger Paykel teamed up with Woolf (later Sir Woolf) Fisher, to seek custom further afield.

Woolf, a commission salesman of anything from fruit drinks to lubricating oil, supplied by Mr Paykel senior, ended up marrying Maurice's sister Joyce.

After delivering one of the surplus fridges by barge to Whangarei, the two young entrepreneurs resolved on the way home to Auckland to start their own importing business.

All well and good, but Fisher and Paykel Ltd was still in its infancy when the first Labour Government imposed stringent import controls four years later, restricting the inflow of what it deemed to be non-essential items.

The partners made a do-or-die decision, applying for precious licences to import compressors and then getting local engineering firms to produce other components so that they could assemble their fridges and washing machines.

They never looked back, building Fisher and Paykel into a manufacturing icon which employs 3400 people including almost 200 engineers. The company also uses advanced computer software design to ensure it is able to survive in an economy no longer shielded from the world.

Mr Paykel, aged 86, but still a board member and licensed car driver, says he would not want a restoration of full import protection but believes there should at least be some controls on goods from countries that still subsidise their producers.

Another octogenarian manufacturing pioneer, who survived the removal of import controls when many others failed and who went on to produce world-beating technology is Sir Angus Tait, founder of Tait Electronics in Christchurch.

But it was not all plain sailing for Sir Angus, now aged 81, who was involved in radar development in the Second World War and made his first mobile car radios from valve components in the late 1940s.

An early business failed for what he now acknowledges was lack of proper financial guidance, and he felt morally bound to take out personal loans to clear its debts before he went on to establish Tait Electronics in 1969.

Today, he reinvests almost all the profits from his more than $100 million a year export-dominated business that employs a total of 800 people.

While he has had the satisfaction of watching some of his brightest engineers start their own high-tech companies, he is scathing of business people he says became too comfortable with "a fool's paradise held together by Muldoonism" and failed to prepare for the future.

He does not agree with the open-slather way in which the economy was deregulated, and sees a role for the Government in supporting local industry.

But he says some had only themselves to blame after taking subsidy money and "stuffing it in their back pockets."

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