Windcave took out the Supreme award at last night’s 26th AmCham-DHL Express Success & Innovation Awards for companies doing business with the USA.
Founded in New Zealand in 1999, Windcave has consistently led the way in the innovation of payment technology. Today, the company’s footprint extends across over 40 countries and supported by a dedicated team of over 400 experts. Windcave specialises in various payment solutions - from in-store and unattended to online transactions. The Judges were particularly impressed by Windcave’s approach to innovation and delivery of quality solutions, and the ambition demonstrated through the growth of their business in the United States.
All winners received an airfare to anywhere in the USA on United Airlines, and the supreme winner also receives US$5,000 of advisory services from Sweeney Vesty, introductions to venture capitalists, economic development agencies in the USA as well as to other valuable connections. Over the last twenty-five years our sponsors have provided over $400,000 worth of prizes to our award winners.
Selina Deadman, Vice President, Commercial, DHL Express, who announced the Supreme Winner, said: “Windcave NZ has built a strong reputation as an innovator, with their commitment to continuous improvement driving their success. Their impressive expansion into the US market highlights the strength of their insights and strategy. DHL is proud to congratulate them on this well-deserved award."
The Hon Todd McClay, Minister for Trade & Investment spoke at the dinner about his recent US visit and the work the government is doing to maintain a strong relationship with the USA in spite of the recently introduced tariffs.
Other winners included specialists in servicing aircraft engines; a plant-based, non-synthetic dietary supplement designed for appetite and weight management; travel; investment in one of New Zealand’s leading crime prevention companies; and a charity (Kiwibots) that helps students to learn science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.
The award winners: Exporter of the Year to the USA – Technology Windcave
Exporter of the Year to the USA – Services Pratt & Whitney Air New Zealand Services t/a Christchurch Engine Centre
Exporter of the Year to the USA - Consumer Goods Calocurb Ltd Investor of the Year to or from the USA Axon Enterprise Inc for investment in Auror Bilateral Connections with the USA Rob Coneybeer for the Far Out Foundation
Contribution to Tourism with the USA Travel USA Ltd
Social Impact with the USA The NZ Robotics Charitable Trust Inc/Kiwibots
Supreme winner - Windcave.
The AmCham Supporter of the Year – ANZ Bank
In addition to AmCham, DHL Express, United Airlines, the awards are supported by: ANZ Bank, Auckland International Airport, Insprie Labs, Ironside McDonald Intellectual Property, Lockheed Martin New Zealand and SweeneyVesty. Media supporter - The Business. Wine sponsor - Constellation Brands Event Manager and sponsor - Event Revolution
Previous winners of the Supreme Award have included Peace Software; Airways Corporation; HumanWare; Tenon; Orion Health; Zeacom; SMI Group; Fonterra; Pratt & Whitney Air New Zealand Services t/a Christchurch Engine Centre; Buckley Systems; Greenshell New Zealand; Vista Entertainment; Fisher & Paykel Healthcare; Douglas Pharmaceuticals, Zespri International; Tourism Holdings; Peter Beck, Seequent Ltd, Oritain Global, Auror Ltd and Toku Eyes.
Immigration Minister Erica Stanford will head to the United States this week to lead a delegation of immigration and investment private sector participants to promote our Active Investor Plus visa, with events hosted by Invest NZ who have organised the delegation.
“Since our changes were implemented on 1 April, the Active investor Plus visa has generated significant new proposed investment in New Zealand of over $1 billion, with US investors submitting the most applications.
“Heading to the US will provide an opportunity to meet with potential investors who want to know more about what New Zealand has to offer.
“We’ve said that New Zealand is open for business, and investor migrants are clearly attracted to our growing reputation as a safe, pro-business, high-potential economy.
“Attracting investment to New Zealand is crucial to boosting economic growth. It will also support our businesses to expand, hire and grow – and that means more opportunities for New Zealanders.
“It’s fantastic to see this response so far. We welcome investors’ capital, knowledge, contribution to New Zealand’s economic growth, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to meet with them.”
The delegation will travel to meet potential investors in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco at events hosted by Invest NZ.
Minister Stanford will travel to the United States on 15 September and return on 21 September.
Source: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand – Sept 11th, 2025 – Dawn Aerospace has successfully flown the Aurora spaceplane carrying California Polytechnic State University’s student-built payload, reaching Mach 0.79 and an altitude of 37,000 feet.
This flight on June 24th—Aurora’s first from Dawn’s newly operational launch facility at Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre—carried Cal Poly’s payload, making it the first U.S. student-built experiment to fly aboard Aurora and marking a major milestone for university-led research in reusable spaceplane development.
“This mission is putting student-built hardware on the frontlines of aerospace innovation,” said Dr. Kurt Colvin, Cal Poly professor and payload advisor. “Working with a next-gen spaceplane like Aurora gave our team firsthand experience integrating a payload for a reusable commercial spaceplane — a paradigm shift from traditional expendable rocket launches.”
Cal Poly’s payload was designed to test whether student-built hardware could withstand the rigors of high-altitude, spaceflight-like environments. Using a modified data system from Bolder Flight Systems, the mission focused on proving that the team could build and operate a payload ready to integrate with a commercial spaceplane. Just as importantly, it served as a training mission—giving students hands-on experience and laying the groundwork for future Cal Poly launches from the upcoming Paso Robles, California Spaceport.
Aurora’s horizontal launch architecture — taking off and landing like a conventional aircraft — offers unparalleled benefits for academic institutions:
Rapid, repeatable operations enabled by true reusability, cutting turnaround time from months to days.
Dramatically lower infrastructure costs by eliminating the need for costly vertical launch pads and fixed facilities.
Expanded university access through commercial partnerships that open new pathways for research and innovation.
This mission builds on Dawn’s recently announced partnership with the State of Oklahoma and the Department of Aerospace and Aeronautics (formerly Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority), to bring the Aurora spaceplane to the Oklahoma Air & Space Port in Burns Flat—operations set to begin with first flights in 2027. This collaboration underscores a major leap forward in scaling reusable suborbital spaceflight across the United States with operations at the Oklahoma Air & Space Port set to extend Aurora’s flight profile to 338,000 ft (100 km). By teaming with Cal Poly, Dawn is demonstrating how academic institutions can help lead this transformation while highlighting the opportunity for U.S. research units to leverage Oklahoma’s forward‑looking spaceport as a national hub for innovation and direct access to space.
“Flying on Aurora is of serious strategic importance,” said Colvin. “It’s hands-on access to the future of commercial spaceflight.”
This mission underscores Cal Poly’s expanding leadership in space research — spanning microgravity pharmaceutical development, regenerative medicine, space health, advanced materials testing, and defense readiness. With reusable operations and fast turnaround, Aurora enables iterative development cycles that would be impractical with traditional rockets — accelerating innovation across industries. By providing recoverable payloads and real-world testing environments, Aurora helps billion-dollar sectors such as biotech, semiconductors, and national security iterate faster and more cost-effectively.
“Aurora is the perfect tool for students to not only learn the theories of aerospace, but also design, build, qualify, and operate in the real world,” said James Powell, Spaceplane Chief Engineer and Co-founder. “Because we recover the payload, customers gain deeper insight into performance and can more easily modify and upgrade for future flights.”
As the pharmaceutical industry increasingly looks to space for breakthroughs — like those planned for the upcoming Starlab space station, expected to launch on SpaceX — Cal Poly is ensuring its students are trained on platforms that keep their research at the frontier.
About Dawn Aerospace
Dawn Aerospace, founded in 2017, is developing the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever to take off from a runway. Their spaceplane Aurora combines the extreme performance of rocket propulsion with the reusability of conventional airplanes to enable high-frequency, low-cost access to high altitudes and space. In 2024 its flagship aircraft, the Mk-II Aurora spaceplane, broke the sound barrier (Mach 1.12) climbing to 82,500 feet, and set a record for the fastest climb to 20 kilometers (65,600 feet).
In July 2025, Dawn Scout Space flew a SDA payload onboard Aurora also at supersonic speeds. Dawn Aerospace is set to deliver its next-gen Aurora in 2027 to Oklahoma Spaceport, which will fly speeds up to Mach 3.5 (2,270 mph) and altitudes up to 100 km (328,000 ft).
In addition to its spaceplane program, Dawn Aerospace is a leading provider of propulsion systems for satellite developers, with its technology currently on 38 operational satellites.
https://www.dawnaerospace.com/
NZ Post has resumed most parcel sending services to the United States and US territories, including gift sending for personal customers as well as full services for most businesses.
NZ Post General Manager of Export and International Solutions, Jared Handcock, says "We know how important it is for our customers to stay connected with friends, family and customers in the US. We’ve worked quickly to make the necessary changes to meet new customs requirements and get services moving again."
Personal sending: gifts can be sent with digital customs forms
Gift sending to the US has resumed today in selected stores, using digital customs forms. Paper customs forms will only be accepted for letters and documents with no commercial value.
Gifts under NZD $150 can be sent via Economy, Courier or Express without being subject to taxes and duties, when using a digital customs form. Items over this value, or items which are not gifts, must be sent using our Express service and any duties and taxes will apply and be charged to the receiver.
Customers will be asked to provide more detailed item descriptions and contact information for the sender and receiver when completing the digital customs form, to meet US customs requirements.
Business sending: services resume with simplified customs process
Most businesses can now also send to the US, with Economy, Economy Tracked, Economy Plus, Courier and Express services. These are now available with “Delivered Duty Paid” for on-account NZ Post business customers, allowing the sender to cover duties and taxes. This is in addition to our new Courier Select_US for business senders, as announced last week.
To meet US customs requirements, business senders will need to provide more detailed information and use electronic labelling. It’s important that all senders refer to the new requirements for sending items to the United States. Please visit our website at nzpost.co.nz/international-delivery-updates.
We're continuing work to update our other online tools which will enable all business customers to resume sending, and personal senders to send all items, not just gifts.
“We know how important this is for our customers, and we are very happy to see the majority of US sending back up and running.” says Handcock.
www.nzpost.co.nz
AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region gives customers more choice to run workloads and securely store their content in New Zealand while serving end users with even lower latency
Amazon plans to invest more than NZ$7.5 billion and support an average of more than 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs annually in New Zealand, adding approximately NZ$10.8 billion to New Zealand’s GDP
Active AWS customers in New Zealand include AMP New Zealand, Kiwibank, Ministry of Transport, New Zealand Post, One New Zealand, TVNZ, University of Auckland, Wellington City Council, Xero, and more
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. The new AWS Region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as financial services, retail, education, government, and nonprofit organizations, greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in New Zealand. As part of its long-term commitment, Amazon is planning to invest more than NZ$7.5 billion in New Zealand to support the construction, connection, operation, and maintenance of its data centers in the country. For more information about AWS Global Infrastructure, visit aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure.
"The new AWS Region in New Zealand will help serve the growing demand for cloud services across the country and empower organizations of all sizes to accelerate their digital transformation," said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS. "With this launch, businesses can now leverage advanced AWS technologies, from core cloud capabilities to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all while meeting local data residency requirements. By investing in New Zealand's digital infrastructure, we're proud to support the country's economic growth, foster innovation, and help position it as a technology hub in the Asia Pacific region."
“The launch of the AWS Region in New Zealand is an exciting moment. This investment in digital infrastructure and Amazon’s commitment to digital skills can accelerate New Zealand technology businesses and help New Zealanders to move into highly skilled, secure, and well-paid technology jobs—which exist right across the economy, from tech companies to various sectors including agriculture, finance, retail, professional services, government, and many more,” said Graeme Muller, CEO at NZTech.
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region consists of three Availability Zones at launch, giving AWS 120 Availability Zones across 38 AWS Regions globally.
With today’s announcement, AWS has plans for 10 more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Chile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
The AWS Region in New Zealand is sovereign-by-design, just as the AWS cloud has been since day one.
AWS offers the broadest and deepest portfolio of services, including analytics, compute, content delivery, database, generative AI, machine learning, networking, storage, and other cloud technologies.
To support the growth in cloud adoption across Asia Pacific, Amazon continues to invest in upskilling students, local developers and technical professionals, nontechnical professionals, and the next generation of IT leaders in New Zealand through offerings like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder. Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the New Zealand government, Amazon has committed to train 100,000 people in New Zealand in cloud skills and has already provided training to more than 50,000 individuals. As part of its commitment to contribute to the development of digital skills, AWS will hire and develop additional local personnel to operate and support the new AWS Region in New Zealand.
Organizations in New Zealand that choose AWS to run their workloads include AMP New Zealand, AsureQuality, Contact Energy, Education Perfect, Foodstuffs South Island, Halter, Kiwibank, MATTR, Mercury NZ, Les Mills, Ministry of Transport, Mitre 10 New Zealand, New Zealand Post, One New Zealand, Sharesies, Steel & Tube Holdings, Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, TradeMe, TVNZ, University of Auckland, Vector, Wellington City Council, Xero, and more.
AWS Partners in New Zealand include Accenture, Arcanum, CustomD, CyberCX, Datacom, Deloitte, The Instillery, Lancom, MongoDB, Westcon-Comstor, and more. For the full list of AWS Partners, visit aws.amazon.com/partners.
Amazon is committed to becoming a more sustainable business and reaching net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge. Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge and became its first signatory in 2019.
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region will be underpinned by renewable energy from day one, supported by a long-term project with Mercury NZ for the Turitea South wind farm. This project supports the development of new renewable energy capacity in New Zealand and advances Amazon’s sustainability goals. The partnership with Mercury NZ, an AWS customer, demonstrates how digitalization and decarbonization can advance together to support a sustainable future for New Zealand.
Amazon investment in New Zealand
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region is the latest Amazon investment in New Zealand to provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies.
In 2016, AWS enhanced New Zealand’s connectivity to the global AWS network by establishing diverse, high-capacity subsea cable connections, improving network reliability and performance for customers.
In 2020, AWS launched two Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Auckland. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds.
In 2023, AWS established an AWS Direct Connect location in Auckland, allowing customers to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data center, office, or colocation environment.
In 2023, AWS expanded its infrastructure footprint in New Zealand with the launch of an AWS Local Zones location in Auckland. AWS Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industry, and IT centers, enabling customers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users.
Amazon estimates the ongoing operation of the new AWS Region will add approximately NZ$10.8 billion to New Zealand’s gross domestic product (GDP) and support an average of more than 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs, including facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and others, at external businesses annually.
Secure, reliable, and energy-efficient cloud infrastructure
AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance.
AWS is constantly working on ways to increase the energy efficiency of its data centers—optimizing data center design, investing in purpose-built chips, and innovating with new cooling technologies. A report by Accenture, commissioned by AWS, estimates AWS infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises, and when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99%. For more information about AWS sustainability efforts, visit aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability.
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region will enable customers with data residency preferences or requirements to store their content securely in New Zealand, enable customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Asia Pacific. Customers from startups to enterprises to government organizations and nonprofits will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud provider to drive innovation, reduce costs, and accelerate transformation.
About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 120 Availability Zones within 38 geographic regions, with announced plans for 10 more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Chile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.
Amazon.com, Inc. Media Hotline Amazon-pr@amazon.com www.amazon.com/pr
Source: Amazon.com, Inc.
Arizona is central to US security interests. It is a rising economic powerhouse that is strategically positioned between two of the world’s largest economies California (fifth), and Mexico (twelfth), providing easy access to consumers (86 million+ within a one-day trucking radius), labour (skilled and unskilled), and capital. Arizona benefited disproportionately from Biden-era industrial policy initiatives (especially the CHIPs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act). Arizona’s international trade flows increased 12% in 2024 to over NZ$56.33 billion, compared to average export growth of just 2% in other US states.
Key industries include defence, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare. Following TSMC’s March 2025 announcement of a further $100 billion investment, Arizona has attracted $NZ$359 billion+ investment into the semiconductor industry - the highest anywhere in the US.
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The world’s ability to forecast extreme weather events will be extended and enhanced with a $12m NZ Government grant to Te Whai Ao — Dodd-Walls Centre researchers in photonic and quantum technologies.
The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Endeavour funding announced today by Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Dr Shane Reti, comes just in time as NASA’s EOS-Aura satellite runs out of fuel in 2026. The grant means a quarter of a century of uninterrupted space-based climate monitoring will be continued, and cutting-edge space-ready photonic technologies will be advanced.
Team lead, Dodd-Walls Centre Principal Investigator, Professor Harald Schwefel, says the move will preserve a key environmental data series that forecasters and climate scientists are very concerned about losing.
“We estimate the public and private global costs of its loss could be greater than $1B per annum and tens of millions of dollars for New Zealand,” he says. “It is difficult to even imagine the true global costs of loss of this data. For New Zealand alone, the value of our forecast system is of the order of a billion dollars per annum and the accuracy of the forecasts from short-term weather to long-term climate is critical”, he says.
The NASA satellite detects the faint microwave/THz signal of climate gases from the earth’s atmosphere, including above Antarctica during polar winters. This is when other satellites can’t operate due to the lack of light. While in general, the Ozone Hole has been recovering, some of the largest recorded holes have formed in the last decade. Scientists are only just beginning to understand how poorly information about climate gases is being captured in climate models and how their interactions affect local weather
Despite the risk to global infrastructure and human life without the EOS-Aura satellite, there are no follow-up missions with this capability planned by other countries, due to the prohibitive costs.
Kiwi Ingenuity
Professor Schwefel says the research programme provides an amazing “tech-in-a box” alternative to the giant NASA satellite.
“Integrating NZ’s capabilities in quantum technology, photonics and atmospheric science with innovations in the NZ aerospace industry, our device will cost less, be more compact, more energy efficient, and detect the wide range of atmospheric gases that the previous satellite did,” Dr Schwefel says.
The team, led by experts in photonics and atmospheric science at the University of Otago, is building critical capability for space-based climate monitoring with next generation photonics. Together withindustry partners such as Paihau–Robinson Research Institute and Earth Science New Zealand as well as international counterparts from the United States, Finland, Australia and Spain, the group is using a technique called quantum-inspired non-linear frequency conversion.
A previous MBIE Smart Ideas grant enabled them to convert relevant microwave/THz radiation frequencies into the optical domain. This meant they could launch very compact, energy-efficient radiometers (radiation measurement devices) on low-cost CubeSats.
Now they will be able to develop the device to improve its sensitivity and to measure a wider range of gases. They will explore the use of Rydberg atoms - enormous, human-made atoms which are highly sensitive to external electric and magnetic fields. They plan to prove the device using high altitude balloons launched with the help of Kea Aerospace. Then they will develop a space-ready payload to fit into a CubeSat for ongoing measurement.
Economic Value
Professor Schwefel says as well as using the information on atmospheric gases to improve forecasts of extreme weather events, the grant will have far-reaching economic benefits.
“This will create opportunities for new commercial enterprises and new precision engineering outputs. It will also grow New Zealand’s precision instruments and aerospace industries. The photonic technology alone provides a platform for other high-value applications from quantum networks to breath analysis and spectroscopy,” he says.
Te Whai Ao – Dodd-Walls Director, Professor Frédérique Vanholsbeeck backs that view.
“A large proportion of our spin-out companies got their start with a Smart Ideas grant. Both the Smart Ideas and the MBIE Endeavour Funds have provided a pathway to commercial success in high-value areas which the private sector wouldn’t risk. This project is a real example of how years of dedicated research can culminate in significant business opportunities,” she says.
Background
The project team is led out of the University of Otago, with key individuals placed at the Earth Science New Zealand (formerly NIWA/MetService), Paihau-Robinson Research Institute, and the Universities of Auckland, Canterbury, and Waikato. Key international partnerships include NASA/JPL, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, ANCDF Canberra, UC3MMadrid, and Colorado School of Mines, USA. Key industry partners are Kea Aerospace, Whitika-LuxFidelity and Shamrock Industries. Community engagement will be led by Tūhura Otago Museum and Aerospace NZ.
Source: https://www.doddwalls.ac.nz/
Denver, the capital of Colorado, has become one of the primary hubs for New Zealand businesses in the United States, employing around 400-500 people, reflecting deepening commercial and investment ties between our two countries. Colorado State is an economic heavyweight, ranked 6th in the US for economic performance. With key industries including aerospace and technology, and with strong people to people links, Colorado holds significant relevance for New Zealand’s priorities.
The signing of the Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) between New Zealand and the State of Colorado in April 2025 underscores a shared commitment to advancing collaboration in science, innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship, and signals a mutual intent to further deepen these. The MoC represents New Zealand’s second state-level arrangement with a US state, following the signing of the New Zealand-California MoC on climate cooperation in 2022.
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Colorado: The hub for New Zealand business in the Western United States
Coalition parties have agreed that overseas-based investors with a New Zealand investor residence visa will be allowed to buy a house here, to encourage more investment to grow the economy, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says.
“The ban on foreigners buying residential housing will remain. However, the Government wants to bring additional investment, skills, ideas and connections to New Zealand, and the Active Investor Plus residency visa allows that.
“It offers residency to a migrant who invests a minimum of $5 million to help grow the economy, passes a good character test, and has acceptable health.
“But, because Active Investor Plus residency visa-holders do not have to be in New Zealand for six months of a year, the foreign buyer ban means some do not meet the threshold for buying a house under the Overseas Investment Act.
“The Government has therefore decided that people with an Active Investor Plus residency visa will be allowed to buy or build one home.
“The minimum value of the house that can be bought or built will be set at $5 million – which equates to less than 1 per cent of New Zealand houses.
“This change navigates a path between those who do not want foreign ownership opened up, and the desire to attract high net worth investors by deepening their connection to our country to help grow the economy.
“There have been more than 300 applications for the Active Investor Plus residency visa since it was re-launched on April 1.
“If all these applications are approved and proceed, it means a potential total minimum investment of $1.8 billion in the New Zealand economy.
“Globally, New Zealand has a deserved reputation as a great place to live and we want to grow our economy. By opening our door just a little to allow significant investors to own a home, we will help attract more of those who want to contribute to the community and country.”
Note:
Individuals who received residence visas under the previous Investor 1 & 2 visas will also be eligible.
The Active Investor Plus categories are:
Shott Beverages Ltd a New Zealand company producing real fruit and coffee syrups. They are passionate about product quality, known for using only the finest ingredients and picking fruits at the peak of their season. SHOTT’s concentrates are cold brewed to lock in authentic flavors and are naturally non-GMO. Their commitment to quality and innovation just earned them a prestigious FABI Favorites award at the 2025 National Restaurant Association Show. This recognition underscores their growing influence on the Food & Beverage (F&B) industry both today and in the years ahead.
With standout products in hand, SHOTT Beverages started their export journey about ten years ago in South Korea and several other smaller markets before entering the U.S. Now, three years into their U.S. expansion and fresh off their celebrated FABI award win, we sat down with their CEO,David Shearer, to hear his reflections, lessons and key wins from growing in this competitive market.
This is a must-read for Kiwi F&B companies eyeing the U.S. market:
The power of the pivot:When Shearer reflected on the early days of SHOTT Beverages entering the U.S., he noted that their strategy has done quite the pivot, all for the better. There is no single path to success. Each business outcome or win can be reached multiple ways. Pivoting isn’t just necessary at times; it’s essential. Don’t just embrace the pivot, own it. It can be the key to even greater success. More than three years into the U.S. market, SHOTT Beverages continues to learn and adapt, refining their strategy and approach as they uncover new insights.
Local teams as strategic assets:With more than 340 million people, the U.S. offers scale like few other markets. From coast to coast, there are a variety of cultural nuances and market dynamics at play. Therefore, SHOTT Beverages developed a deliberate strategy to hire local teams. They hired people who understood the communities they were serving, could find loyal customers and knew the nuances of the local market. This approach has not only been successful for SHOTT Beverages in the U.S. but is a winning strategy they’ve stuck to across all their export markets.
Turning booths into business:According to Shearer, SHOTT Beverages got their start in the U.S. by “putting their flag in the soil” at a local tradeshow three years ago. Since then, they’ve attended 17 tradeshows varying in size. Whether it was a small or large tradeshow, they leveraged these events as a form of marketing and sales to generate brand awareness and leads. As a B2B brand, tradeshows became their way of making connections, finding customers and making a name for themselves. This method helped them sharpen their tradeshow strategy, one where they can now focus on a few key tradeshows each year that yield the best return on investment. What began as quantity over quality, has evolved. Another lesson in the art of pivoting.
Logistics, logistics, logistics:Nailing logistics has been the biggest learning for SHOTT Beverages. The U.S. is vast, not just in its population, notes Shearer, but in its geography too. It’s like Australia with its distinct dynamics across its East and West Coasts. Unlike other markets where one distributor is sufficient, the U.S. requires two, resulting in longer delivery times and higher prices. They strategically combatted this by moving their distribution warehouse to Houston, Texas, allowing them to shave weeks off their supply chain movement. They also prioritized a more sustainable, long-term strategy to manage costs, maximize profitability and to ensure they had the right supply chain.
For Shearer, the U.S. market represented the “holy grail” and NZTE played a pivotal role in making that vision a reality. From the start of their export journey in South Korea to today as they continue to expand their business across the U.S., NZTE has supported SHOTT Beverages with their Go-To-Market strategy, co-funding projects, business advice and more. This support enabled them to invest heavily upfront, attack the market aggressively, and achieve strong growth in the U.S.
FollowSHOTT BEVERAGES LIMITED to watch their export story unfold and to celebrate their continued, rising success in this sector and market.
New Zealand in North America
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