New Zealand consumers often pay more than their overseas counterparts for hardware.
In recent years Apple has done a better job than most rivals when it comes to reducing the gap between New Zealand and US prices. How do the Apple iPhone SE and 9.7-inch iPad Pro measure up?
Apple iPhone SE NZ and US prices compared — click to enlarge
There are two iPhone SE models. The 16GB phone sells in New Zealand for NZ$750. The same phone sells in the US for US$400. At today’s exchange rate of 1.48 and taking GST into account, New Zealanders pay a 10 premium over US prices.
The premium for a 64GB iPhone SE is 12 percent.
New Zealand prices for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro are close to US prices. At the time of writing the premiums paid in New Zealand are between three and four percent.
Given the New Zealand dollar fluctuates, this is close to parity.
A major Herald investigation has found the 20 multinational companies most aggressive in shifting profits out of New Zealand overall paid virtually no income tax, despite recording nearly $10 billion in annual sales to Kiwi consumers.
The analysis of financial information of more than 100 multinational corporations and their New Zealand subsidiaries showed that, had the New Zealand branches of these 20 firms reported profits at the same healthy rate as their parents, their combined income tax bill would have been nearly $490 million.
Big companies not paying tax may be legal, it isn’t moral. They shuffle profits to countries with low taxes so they can avoid paying for the taxpayer-funded infrastructure and social spending that made them rich in the first place.
Two tax avoiding tech giants Facebook and Google grew wealthy on the back of the internet.
It was originally paid for by taxpayers in countries like the USA and the UK. The internet wouldn’t exist without taxpayers, nor would Google or Facebook.
Apple grew into one of the world’s largest businesses on the back of the iPhone.
Yet for much of its history, Apple mainly sold computers. A large number of those sales were to schools. It depended on government funded education to keep it afloat during the lean years.
Without taxes, there would be no Facebook, Google or Apple.
Large countries like the USA, UK and even medium-size ones like Australia have moved to close the loopholes allowing multinationals to avoid taxes. New Zealand has less room for manoeuvre.
In the long-term our best chance of dealing with the problem is by taking part in international initiatives.
In the meantime, there is something we can do. We could insist government purchasers only buy from the companies who pay their fair share of tax.
Sure, fair share is a debatable and nebulous term. The less than one percent paid by some companies on Nippert’s list is not fair.
Not buying from tax avoiders would mean no more government purchased iPhones, no government Google Apps accounts, no government advertisements on Facebook.
At least not until they pay up.
Not taking this approach amounts to rewarding bad behaviour.
This morning mail from Dick Smith arrived in my in-box.
You may think: “Nothing unusual there”. After all, many people who subscribed to the Dick Smith mailing list will have had the same message.
Yet, I didn’t subscribe to anything from Dick Smith.
Dick Smith’s receivers sent the message to an address I haven’t used since I left Australian in 2004.
While I never signed up to any mailing list, I did give my address to a sales person in a store in Sydney many, many years ago.
At the time, I wanted to buy something that wasn’t in stock. The salesperson asked me to leave an email address and phone number so the store could let me when it had stock.
He assured me the address would not be used for marketing purposes. It was only then that I agreed to hand it over.
This was so long ago I forgot what the product was.
To its credit, the old Dick Smith organisation kept its word through at least two changes of ownership. I just checked that old account. There have been no other communications from Dick Smith.
Yet my address has stayed on the database for at least 12 years. I wasn’t even aware it was there. And the receivers sold it without my consent.
I suspect this is illegal. It may be a breach of contract. It is certainly a breach of trust.
The only conclusion I can reach is that any promise to keep data safe is worthless.
Update: More bad faith from the Dick Smith receivers. The form to opt out asks for my full name, then wants me to confirm my address. That could be just another way of confirming data for the database. There’s no mention of my rights here either.
Judging by incoming mail, press releases and social media, technology start-ups think we care about their money-raising.
They often spend precious resources telling us how much they have raised or expect to raise.
Start-ups also want to tell us they or were mentioned in an important publication or were invited to take part in an event. I’ve seen press releases boasting about some allegedly famous venture capitalist, who no-one in New Zealand has heard of, making a passing comment about a start-up.
So what?
None of this is news. Almost no-one cares. That’s not media rudeness or arrogance. That’s what access to web stats tells us. We know readers don’t click on those stories. They are not interested.
They don’t care much when the start-up is in their own town and involves people they may know. They care less if the boast comes from a start-up based halfway across the world.
And yet still the deluge of press release material and assorted marketing hype continues to flow.
Bubble
The world of venture capital and start-up finance exist in a bubble. One that rarely connects to the real world.
Things that matter inside the bubble have little resonance outside.
No doubt the latest funding round is of utmost importance to everyone involved in the start-up.
But until there is something tangible to show, the press releases are just so much noise and wasted public relations effort.
They can even harm the business, because journalists will see them as attention-seeking time-wasters and ignore the start-up when there is something worthwhile to say.
For the rest of us, start-ups only become interesting when a product or service ships. The product has to useful or fun. It has to have a real market. It has to be better, cheaper or otherwise different from what has gone before.
Now tell me something interesting
Now here’s the curious thing. Most of the time the product or service being developed is interesting. The idea that kicked-off the start-up may also be interesting. Far more interesting than much of the banal waffle the public relations types push our way.
If you want to create a buzz about a new product, service or other business, tell us why it is better than what went before. Explain how improves lives, saves time, entertains us or boosts productivity.
Don’t bore us with dry financial details, save that stuff for your investors. Instead get us excited about the proposition.
Drury and his team told us all the key who, why, what stories years ago. We’re hooked. So when he talks about the money raised and what he intends to do with it, it’s a message worth hearing.
As the Craig’s broker in the NBR story explains TradeMe is a mature business. There’s not much room for the kind of fast growth it has seen in the past and it faces pressure on margins.
Which is where the Radio New Zealand story comes in. The latest price change is about better margins. Sellers now have to pay a 7.9 percent fee. It quotes Lance Wiggs: “ I think they’ll probably gain $2 million to $5 million to even $10 million positive”.
TradeMe is still easier and cheaper than the obvious alternative. The standard eBay success fee is 10 percent.
While Trade Me is potentially vulnerable to a competitor, to date no-one seems to have come close to challenging what is, in effect, a monopoly on on-line auctions in New Zealand.
