Readers' Comments

Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 3 March 2003

Note: the comments below are the unabridged submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.

From: Tony Levaggi
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: Oversea tech success

i don't think New Zealand can learn a hell of a lot from
Ireland, Finland or Israel as there are special factors
applying to all three. Ireland is a relatively low-
cost/well educated base like NZ but has the massive
advatage of being in the EU - a market of 300+million
people. Even joing a single market with Australia wouldn't
help us there. For US companies it also has the advantage
of being English speaking.
Israeli tech companies benefited from huge military
investment by the government - partly subsidised by the
money America gives to Israel. Not much chance of that here
at the moment.
Finland is probably most interesting as their success is
largely locally produced, by Finnish companies. It was also
acheived despite Finland being a relatively high-wage, high
cost country. Intriguingly, Finland still follows a social
market model, rather than the free market model followed by
New Zealand since the eighties. One part of the Finnish
economic model was that domestic companies and industries
were relatively protected from competition and particularly
take-over.

Is there an infant Nokia lurking in the undergrowth of the
NZ tech sector?




From: Alan Brown
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: o'seas investment

#1: hostile telecommunications environment. This is also the reason most
IT companies have bailed out in the last 15 years

ONE COMPANY is holding NZ to ransom - cynically and maliciously. It used
to be a benign govt monopoly. It hasn't been benign for a long time.

#2: Other govts provide large incentives and subsidies. NZ doesn't.

If you're not in tourism or farming in NZ, the future is overseas.

Perhaps this is why there are more than 6 million NZ passport holders, yet
only 3.75million people in the country...

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