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Zespri logo - Source: ONE News -
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Zespri International directors and executives on Wednesday hammered home the company's contribution to the kiwifruit sector and horticulture exports.
Zespri's annual meeting came in the wake of a legal challenge and political lobbying by Turners and Growers to break its grip on exports.
Zespri chairman John Loughlin and CEO Lain Jager presented the company's payment of $800 million to the horticulture industry from its sales of 100 million trays of NZ kiwifruit in the context of the past decade.
They noted Zespri had successfully doubled the size of the market and its export earnings with a compound annual growth rate of 8%.
The 500 shareholders at the annual meeting in Tauranga were told to expect a final dividend payment for growers next month of 56 cents a share, which brings the full year dividend to 98.41c/share, up 22% on last year's dividend.
Zespri's 2,700 New Zealand growers own 3,110 orchards which this year produced over 390,000 tonnes of kiwifruit.
And the company said growers voiced "overwhelming support" for the industry structure and its importance for the future.
"There was strong criticism of recent initiatives by 1% shareholder Turners and Growers, whose representative at the meeting declined an offer from the chairman to speak," the company said in a statement.
Fruit distributor Turners and Growers - whose parent company GPG broke up grower control of the apple industry and took over the growers' Enza company, and intellectual property which had been owned by orchardists - has called for deregulation of the kiwifruit industry.
On Tuesday, it sued Zespri in the High Court in Auckland, accusing the exporter of abusing its control of exports outside Australasia.
The company has accused Zespri of unlawfully paying more to growers who are prepared to sign exclusivity agreements. It alleged the kiwifruit exporter was "preserving its monopoly" by tying growers, suppliers and harvest operators into exclusive contracts, and attempting to control new varieties of the fruit.
Zespri discounted the proceedings as a "publicity stunt" for the GPG campaign to destabilise the kiwifruit industry.
Last month, Turners and Growers published a report attacking Zespri, after the exporter last season declined a bid from Turners and Growers for a joint marketing effort involving around 300,000 trays of local fruit. This forced Turners to fill orders with Chilean fruit while New Zealand growers destroyed 2.5 million trays of domestic production to support prices in international markets.
But Loughlin described New Zealand kiwifruit as a huge success story on the eve of 20 years of its "single point of entry structure".
"Twenty years ago we were a fragmented industry, with seven exporters out-bidding each other onshore and undercutting and price bargaining in the real marketplace," he said.
The industry at the time had faced significant increases in volumes, a high New Zealand dollar and high interest rates, with no collective way to deal with these challenges.
The development of a single brand and greater co-ordination of supply chain, innovation and marketing activities, formed the foundation of what had become a $1.5 billion industry and the world's most successful horticulture marketing company, Loughlin said.
Three directors were retired by rotation today, and two, Keith Thorpe and Graham Cathie, stepped down. The third, Tony de Farias, and two other men, Ray Sharp and Tony Marks, were elected.
