Taking Stock 6 August 2026: The Scoreboard

James Lee writes:

“I just want to make a difference.”

It wasn’t the answer I expected.

I was sitting on a cold concrete step during an Ed Sheeran concert with the outgoing CEO of Air New Zealand. Between songs, I asked him what came next. After leading one of New Zealand’s most recognised companies, what did he want to do?

His answer was remarkably simple.

“I just want to make a difference.”

It resonated with me at the time because I have always believed that, when the time eventually comes to judge our lives - whether by our children, our own version of faith or simply the face staring back at us in the mirror - that is the question we should all be asked.

Did we make a difference to someone or something?

Perhaps it is because I am getting older, or perhaps it is because of my children: whatever the reason, I find myself thinking about that conversation more often than I once did. My definition of success has evolved over the years, but even today one of my proudest professional moments was watching Synlait Milk hire its 1,000th employee. We had been on that journey since the site was little more than an empty paddock, and seeing how meaningful employment could transform families, communities and an entire region changed the way I thought about building companies.

Perhaps that is why I remember it so vividly. It taught me that the greatest legacy a business can leave isn’t simply a higher share price. It is the opportunities it creates for families you will never meet.

Quarterly earnings, share prices, and building successful businesses will always matter. But increasingly I find myself asking a much simpler question - will my children inherit a country with more opportunity than the one I grew up in, and what role did I play in helping create it?

Will they grow up in a New Zealand that is prosperous, modern, safe and, yes, as Jacinda Ardern has said, kind? Will ambitious young New Zealanders believe they can build globally significant companies without feeling that success requires leaving our shores? Will this still be a country where optimism outweighs caution?

Those questions came flooding back this week when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon remarked that it is the role of business, not government, to create jobs.

He is right.

Governments do not employ hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders. Businesses do. Every meaningful increase in living standards has ultimately come from entrepreneurs willing to take risks, employ people and create something larger than themselves. Governments do not build software companies, manufacture products or win export contracts. Leaders do.

But while the Prime Minister’s observation is true, it is also incomplete.

Businesses create jobs, but governments create the environment in which businesses are willing to create them.

That distinction matters because employment is not the cause of economic success. It is the result of it.

The same is true of the NZX.

The NZX is not New Zealand’s economic engine - it is New Zealand’s economic scoreboard

If you don’t like what the scoreboard says, don’t blame the scoreboard. Change the way the game is being played.

For years we have debated why our stock exchange continues to lose relevance. It has almost become a national sport to criticise the NZX. At times I think some of the criticism is unfair. I have enormous respect for the efforts made over the years by leaders such as Mark Petersen, Tim Bennett and Mark Weldon. They all recognised the challenge and, in different ways, tried to address it.

Every few months another proposal emerges to improve liquidity, attract more listings or modernise the exchange.

But perhaps we have been trying to fix the scoreboard instead of improving the game being played beneath it?

Like every scoreboard, the NZX simply reflects whether businesses are growing, whether entrepreneurs are building, whether investors are backing ambition and whether a country believes its future is worth investing in.

Right now our scoreboard is telling us something uncomfortable.

We are losing.

There is an old saying in venture capital that captures this perfectly.

Silicon Valley didn’t become great because it had NASDAQ.

NASDAQ became great because Silicon Valley existed.

The exchange was never the catalyst. It was the consequence.

The same lesson can be found almost anywhere you choose to look. Sweden, with a population of little more than ten million people, has produced IKEA, Volvo, Ericsson, Atlas Copco and Spotify, along with countless other globally competitive businesses. Their stock market did not somehow inspire those companies into existence. Swedish culture, public policy, capital and ambition did. The exchange simply became the place where their success was reflected.

Their success wasn’t built by fixing a stock exchange. It was built by producing companies worth listing.

New Zealand has already proven it possesses the talent to do exactly the same.

Mainfreight now employs thousands of people across Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas, demonstrating that a logistics company founded in Auckland can compete with the world’s largest operators. Fisher & Paykel Healthcare competes globally from the edge of the Pacific. Xero transformed accounting software for millions of businesses. Rocket Lab has become one of the defining aerospace companies of its generation.

These companies are not accidents.

They are proof. Proof that New Zealand can build globally significant businesses.

The question is why they remain the exception instead of becoming the rule.

Why doesn’t Fisher Funds list and acquire AMP? Why doesn’t ZURU list locally while creating another thousand high-value jobs here? Why not Fidelity Life, Beca or, heaven forbid, investment banks such as Barrenjoey or Goldman Sachs following the same path they did in their own home markets?

Building a great company has never been particularly mysterious. A successful ecosystem only requires three ingredients:

It requires long-term pools of capital willing to back ambitious founders.

It requires entrepreneurs with the courage and ability to build businesses capable of competing globally.

And it requires laws and public policy that encourage investment, reward innovation and provide confidence that taking long-term risks will not be punished.

Remarkably, New Zealand already possesses much of that foundation.

Our entrepreneurs are among the best in the world. Every generation seems to produce another Peter Beck, another Nick Mowbray, another Cecilia Robinson, proving once again that geography has never limited Kiwi ingenuity.

We also possess one of the fastest-growing pools of long-term investment capital in our history. KiwiSaver now represents hundreds of billions of dollars of patient capital, accumulated by ordinary New Zealanders investing in their own futures. Yet a substantial proportion of that capital ultimately finds its way offshore because there simply are not enough New Zealand companies of sufficient scale to absorb it.

We have built an extraordinary savings machine, but too much of its fuel powers the growth of other economies instead of our own.

Imagine if even another five percent of KiwiSaver assets found their way into globally competitive New Zealand companies over the next two decades. The returns would not simply appear on portfolio statements. They would appear in laboratories, engineering firms, software companies and thousands of highly skilled jobs.

It is deeply unsatisfying to think that our retirement savings are helping build someone else’s future while too few opportunities exist to build our own. Today, capital is not the constraint we often imagine it to be. I would argue the real shortage is confidence.

Somewhere over the past two decades we have become exceptionally good at preserving wealth, but less accomplished at creating it.

We celebrate financial security. The NBR Rich List receives extraordinary attention despite, in many ways, its focus on big fish in little ponds rather than celebrating those swimming in the ocean. There is nothing wrong with owning a beautiful home, a boat, a bach or a BMW. They are symbols of success earned through hard work.

The problem is when they become the destination rather than the reward.

Somewhere along the way we stopped admiring the people who built the companies and started admiring the people who owned them.

We became more comfortable talking about property portfolios than product launches, more interested in protecting what we have than creating what we might yet become. Too many businesses reach 20 employees, then 50, then perhaps 100 before deciding that is enough. Growth gives way to preservation. Ambition quietly gives way to comfort. Boards become increasingly focused on protecting today’s value rather than creating tomorrow’s.

This is not simply a political problem. Nor is it simply a business problem.

It is ultimately a cultural one.

And this is where I think Luxon is only partly right.

For more than a decade, governments of different colours have made decisions that have slowly eroded business confidence. Competition policy has often favoured consolidation over dynamism. Foreign investment rules have too frequently treated international capital with suspicion rather than recognising the role it can play in helping New Zealand companies reach global scale. Housing policy has channelled enormous amounts of capital into existing residential property instead of productive enterprise. Monetary policy became singularly focused on inflation while the wider consequences for business confidence, investment and employment rippled through every sector of the economy.

Markets do not exist independently of government. They are shaped by it, which is why, while businesses create jobs, governments cannot distance themselves from the conditions that determine whether businesses feel confident enough to hire.

If we want a different scoreboard, we need a different game.

Fortunately, changing the game is surprisingly simple. We need to change three rules:

The first is making New Zealand the most attractive place in the world for New Zealand companies to employ New Zealanders. If tax settings rewarded companies for bringing high-value engineering, software development, research and executive roles back home, even shifting a small percentage of globally mobile employment into New Zealand would create thousands of highly-skilled careers and strengthen the ecosystem around them.

The second is redefining what constitutes our national interest when New Zealand companies are acquired. Too often our focus ends with the purchase price. It should extend to where decisions are made, where research is undertaken, where intellectual property resides and, ultimately, where jobs are created. Domestic employment should not be an afterthought in takeover decisions. It should be recognised as a strategic national asset.

The third is making New Zealand one of the most attractive countries in the world for employee ownership. The countries that repeatedly create great companies do not simply create wealthy founders; they create thousands of wealthy employees who become the founders, investors and early backers of the next generation.

Every engineer, scientist, software developer and salesperson who helps build a great New Zealand company should have the opportunity to share meaningfully in the value they create. A sensible tax regime could defer taxation on genuine employee equity until those shares are sold rather than when they are granted. Employee ownership does far more than reward success. It creates the next generation of founders, investors and entrepreneurs who go on to build the companies that follow.

None of these ideas, however, will matter if we fail to address the deeper issue.

Culture always wins.

The countries that consistently produce great companies do not simply have better tax systems or better stock exchanges.

They celebrate builders, they celebrate the people willing to risk failure in pursuit of something extraordinary.

One of my greatest frustrations is watching people who have never attempted to build anything ridicule those who have. Every successful entrepreneur has stumbled. Every great company has made mistakes. If we punish every fumble, eventually fewer people will step onto the field.

Peter Beck. Nick Mowbray. Cecilia Robinson. They should not remain remarkable exceptions, they should become the aspiration and, eventually, the expectation.

Luxon was right all those years ago when he said he wanted to make a difference.

I also think he is right that businesses create jobs.

Where I think Luxon is only half right is that governments do not create jobs, but they absolutely create the conditions that determine whether those jobs are created here, overseas, or not at all.

The greatest difference any of us can make is helping to build a country where the next generation believes creating the world’s next great company from New Zealand is entirely normal.

Because nations do not become wealthy by storing capital, they become wealthy by putting it to work.

If New Zealand once again becomes a nation of builders rather than simply a nation of wealth preservers, the NZX will not need fixing.

Like every good scoreboard, it will simply reflect the success that has already been created.

Perhaps that is the greatest difference any government, entrepreneur or investor can make.

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Travel

David Colman - New Plymouth - 7 August

Edward Lee and Gavin Parkes - Wellington - 10 August

Johnny Lee - Taupo - 1 September

Johnny Lee - Hamilton - 2 September

Johnny Lee - Tauranga - 3 September

Johnny Lee - Christchurch - 7 September

Chris Lee & Partners Limited