KEY POINTS:
You don't have to go far in East Tamaki to find a counterpoint to troubled whiteware company Fisher & Paykel Appliances.
Just around the corner from the former washing machine factory in Springs Rd, which was relocated to Thailand last year, the company's own high-tech offspring, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, is booming.
Its 50,000sq m glass-fronted factories off Highbrook Drive, the latest a $70 million addition opened in July 2007, house 1600 researchers, designers, assemblers and salespeople for a range of medical equipment for which demand is still growing, recession or not.
The company, now separate from its parent, took on an extra 150 staff last year and will add a further 100 this year.
Other high-tech manufacturers and software companies are also bucking the downturn. In some cases, like Healthcare, they are directly picking up the people made redundant in the sectors that have been hit harder.
Mike Poko, 39, a Mangere father of three, lost his job at F&P Appliances last September and started work last week in F&P Healthcare's dispatch room earning $16.18 an hour.
In between, he checked out rumours of riches to be made across the Tasman, but arrived at just the wrong time.
"I went to get a job in the mining industry but had no luck, they were closing down as well," he said.
He went to Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney. The best he could get was a job for a few weeks digging trenches.
"The pay rate was $22.50 an hour but it was 12 hours a day, six days a week, living out of a suitcase, working in the heat, no place to hide," he said.
"When I worked it out, with all the money, in the long term I would have been much happier where my family was back here. So I came home."
Zeny Alarcon, 49, worked at F&P Appliances for 16 years from the time she arrived from the Philippines until the electronics plant she worked in was moved to Thailand late last year. She got a job on the Healthcare production line in December.
Paige O'Malley, 22, an Aucklander who completed a mechanical engineering degree at Canterbury University last year, weighed up jobs in Australia before taking a job in Healthcare's research and development team. She's glad she did, because her friends who took up the jobs in Australia have now lost them. "The Australian jobs have all been cancelled," she said. "The mining jobs have all collapsed."
She has started at Healthcare on $48,000 a year, designing a humidifier that replaces conventional oxygen masks to make treatment much more comfortable for patients.
"You feel you are doing something for people who need it," she said.
The company is almost totally export-based, earning 46 per cent of its revenue in North America, 32 per cent in Europe and 22 per cent in Asia, the Pacific and elsewhere.
Chief executive Mike Daniell said health funding was holding up everywhere, even in the US where it is mainly from private insurance.
A much smaller high-tech company, Vista Entertainment Solutions, has grown by 10 people in the past year to 42 in Auckland plus six in London.
The business began by writing software for Auckland's Village Force (now Sky City) cinemas and is now the world's leading cinema software supplier, selling in 35 countries.
"There seems to be no recession in our market at the moment," said director Brian Cadzow. "Central and South America is our biggest market right now."
Hamilton's Pacific Aerospace has grown from 104 to 160 staff since January 2007 to meet growing demand for its light aircraft.
Chief executive Damian Camp said he had put plans to add a further 15 staff this year on hold "until we see how the next few months go". But he said orders were still coming in and the lower dollar had boosted profits.
