Editor’s Letter – November 2024

In this issue, as well as profiles of some of New Zealand’s most successful venture capital, private equity, and listed equity funds, we also showcase a new platform that links capital flow and export scale between Oceania and Asia, the Oceania Center. The opening of this platform and the link to the New Zealand fund management, venture support, and innovation sectors have a very personal and rather random link for me. I first met Kevin Sun, the founder and the chairman of The Oceania Center in Auckland over a decade ago when he was waiting at a Chinese restaurant. We struck up a friendship over the years. He would follow with interest some of my side hustles in terms of multi-scale climate change monitoring and added value export out of the Pacific, as well as venture capital work in New Zealand and the base that M2 holds in supporting this work. I, in turn, would follow his business exploits and watch as he helped take New Zealand brands through large market scale into China. We first started talking seriously about working more closely together a couple of years ago when he spoke about his ideas for the platform and even a physical centre that New Zealand companies could use as a footstep into China and wider Asia. I have been around many excitable pitches, but Kevin has always been one of those people who have had more action than hype. The actual opening of The Oceania Center in July, less than two years after he first started talking about it, is a testament to this. At the same time as this, Kevin and his team have been working to build pathways for capital flow to support the Oceania innovation ecosystem (something that M2 has spent 20 years championing). Also as part of this, Kevin and his team have supported my work in media, Pacific NGOs, and venture capital to help me secure only the second senior foreign fund manager licence to be approved for China. I am looking forward to working with The Oceania Center, both as a media partner and a fund manager, to further support venture, investment, impact work, and the scaling of New Zealand inc. The potential of this is profound but it is also built on the basis of individual friendship and trust, and the lesson to always be respectful to restaurant staff!