From Newswire…
On 12 November 2001, in front of a small group of Auckland analysts and a much larger audience of New Zealand small shareholders watching by webcast, Fisher & Paykel Industries Limited – the company two Auckland brothers-in-law had set up in 1934 with a £40 cheque and a £210 loan against a second-hand De Soto – ceased to exist.
In its place stood two new entities. One, Fisher & Paykel Appliances Holdings, kept the kitchens. The other, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare Corporation, kept a humidifier business that had begun as a sideline in 1971 and was, on the day of the demerger, valued at a little over a billion New Zealand dollars.
Twenty-five years later, in May 2026, the appliance business is owned by the Chinese giant Haier and is no longer listed in New Zealand. Fisher & Paykel Healthcare is the largest company on the NZX, with a market capitalisation of around twenty-one billion New Zealand dollars and three quarters of its revenue earned overseas. The two halves of the original firm have, in market value, diverged by roughly two orders of magnitude.
Sir Woolf Fisher was, by then, twenty-six years dead. Maurice Paykel was 87, in fragile health, eight months from his own death in June 2002, and one of the few people present who had been in the room when the partnership was founded…
Read the full story on Newswire HERE.
