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Recent key developments in MAKE│NZ
This week we’d like to introduce you to one of our three new board members who have joined us recently. First up is Renee Joblin, Owner Operator of Joblin Engineering:
Can you share a quick summary of your background in manufacturing and what got you interested in the field?
I’ve spent most of my career around factories, workshops, and production lines — the places where things actually get made. I started in quality assurance then food safety before moving into health, safety, and wellbeing roles across manufacturing, agriculture, and construction. These days I balance that with running Joblin Engineering, our family-owned engineering company in Canterbury, alongside my husband Gareth.
What got me hooked on manufacturing was the mix of brains and brawn — creative problem-solving meets practical application. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing a physical result from your work and knowing you’ve helped make the process safer, smarter, or smoother.
What got you interested in joining the MAKE│NZ board?
I joined the board because I love what MAKE│NZ stands for — real collaboration and a strong voice for New Zealand manufacturers. I’ve seen how much innovation and grit exists in this sector, but also how isolating it can feel for small and medium manufacturers trying to navigate everything from regulation to workforce challenges.
Being part of MAKE│NZ gives me a chance to help connect those dots — sharing what works, building community, and helping ensure manufacturing gets the recognition and support it deserves. Plus, I’m a bit of a systems nerd, so any excuse to help make good processes even better is right up my alley.
What do you think is the biggest opportunity—or challenge—for manufacturing in the next 5 years?
I think the opportunity and the challenge are the same thing: change.
Technology is moving fast — automation, data, sustainability, smarter supply chains — and manufacturers who adapt early will thrive. But that same pace of change can overwhelm smaller businesses that are already stretched thin.
So, the real trick will be supporting capability growth — giving people the skills, tools, and confidence to modernise without losing what makes New Zealand manufacturing special: our ingenuity, our quality, and our ability to pivot quickly when things get tough.
If you could offer one piece of advice to emerging leaders in manufacturing, what would it be?
Stay curious and stay human.
Manufacturing isn’t just about machines and processes — it’s about people. The best leaders I’ve seen (and tried to be) are the ones who ask good questions, listen to their teams, and don’t hide behind jargon or hierarchy.
If something goes wrong, learn from it. If you see a chance to improve, take it. And never underestimate the power of a good cuppa and a genuine chat with someone on the workshop floor.
Outside of manufacturing, what’s something you’re passionate about that people might not know?
When I’m not buried in systems, spreadsheets, or safety plans, I’m usually busy with my family or the community groups I help run — like Selwyn Women in Business and the Selwyn Business Group. I love seeing people connect, grow confidence, and back themselves.
I’m also a bit of a wellbeing advocate. I believe balance isn’t about doing less — it’s about doing what matters most, and doing it well, oh and I make stained glass sun catchers…
We’re big advocates for sharing your knowledge with others and learning from unexpected sources, and I recently stumbled across a great example of this.
The collaboration between Formula 1 pit crews and hospital workers
If you can’t watch the video, the long and short of it is after struggling with infant mortality rates being high when moving between the OR and the ICU post heart surgery, two doctors one day caught an F1 race on the tv and realised the efficiency of the pit crews was exactly what they needed. They called Ferrari, who was more than happy for them to come out and visit the pit crew. Taking in all this knowledge about how to rapidly lift a car, change it’s tires, refuel, and send it back out to the track in six seconds, they returned to the hospital and tailored all of that to fit around doctors, nurses, and babies. This was such a success in productivity and communication increases that other hospitals reached out to other racing teams to help tailor their processes and procedures.
Perhaps getting on the phone with Ferrari or McLaren may not be the most achievable thing for a manufacturer in New Zealand, but there are certainly other unlikely sources both in and out of manufacturing that might just have the solution you’re looking for.
Last night we heard from Professor Alexander Brem from the University of Stuttgart in Germany. He spoke with us on the current and changing landscape that is manufacturing in Germany – especially in the automotive manufacturing hub that is Stuttgart (the home to headquarters for Bosch, Mercedes, and Porsche to name a few). He shared the ongoing battle automotive manufacturers are having when it comes to considering electric vehicles – a change in core competencies for many of these companies. They’ve spent their time with the combustion engine, something very technical and complicated , and now when looking to electric, the engine is far simpler but the battery is a whole other beast. They’ve also, like a large amount of us, been battling the fights that are competition with China and ever changing tariffs coming out of the US. There is one other battle that’s more precise to Germany, and that is the ongoing war between the Ukraine and Russia. Alex mentioned that recent estimates from NATO have predicted the war expanding further at the latest in 2029. So a good thing for weaponry manufacturers and those involved in military manufacturing, but not so much for everyone else…
But it’s not all doom and gloom. For the automotive side, Mercedes most recent line of electric vehicles are doing much better than the prior run. It seems they’re working out a design that appeals to the public after some slip ups.
Ultimately, it was nice to hear from Alex that, much like the rest of the world, there are ups and downs in manufacturing in Germany. Sure, there are great things coming out of the bigger companies in place like Stuttgart, but they’re also facing the some of the same issues we have here in Christchurch.
Recent key developments in New Zealand
•The University of Canterbury runs a second-year course for their management students, called Innovation Management. As part of the course, students work in groups to come up with innovative solutions to a problem presented to them by a ‘Client’. This year, MAKE│NZ was one of the two clients, and the problem we set was recruiting young people into manufacturing careers. We’ve had seven groups of four students each work on our problem, and the suggestions they came up with have been quite constructive in part. More on that another time.
Last week, the students presented their findings, and I had the opportunity to talk to all the groups briefly. One of the things we talked about was their perception of manufacturing in New Zealand. What I found was an eye-opener, even though it probably shouldn’t have been. Out of all the students I talked to, one had started to study engineering before changing to management and had worked in manufacturing. Another one’s dad was a senior manager in a local manufacturing company. For the rest, there was a complete blank. Before they started work on the project, they never had any exposure to manufacturing whatsoever.
We often talk about a negative perception of manufacturing as a reason for young people not being interested in a career in our sector. But if this biased sample is anything to go by, it’s not a negative perception. It’s the fact that for these young people manufacturing has never been part of the world they live in, their life experience, in any way. It might as well not exist. It’s not a subject of children’s play, it’s not talked about at school, it doesn’t feature in popular TV programmes, and it’s probably not featured in any of the shared social media feeds young people are consuming these days.
We mentioned ‘biased sample’ above. That is because with the exception of one, none of the other students’ parents were employed in the manufacturing sector. There are about 250,000 employees in our manufacturing sector, and one would assume that for their children the world of manufacturing is not completely unknown.
Shared cultural experience is an important factor in political decision-making. It provides the interpretive lens through which people understand political issues. Shared narratives—whether from historical events, religious traditions, popular media, or collective traumas—create common reference points that shape how communities perceive threats, opportunities, and values. They also have a direct influence on political and economic decision-making. What a society has collectively experienced influences which issues feel urgent, and which activities feel important to invest in.
Unless and until we manage to improve the perception of manufacturing as a key contributor to wealth creation in New Zealand and make it part of our shared cultural experience, it will continue to be ignored in government decisions on economic development, and as a career choice for young people.
And it is, first and foremost, a perception issue. The United Kingdom’s manufacturing sector contributes less to GDP directly than ours does, and yet manufacturing is still a big part of the country’s identity. In a recent survey, 93% of people felt that UK manufacturing is important to growing the UK economy. The challenge for New Zealand’s manufacturers will be that shared cultural experience develops over time, and perception won’t be able to be shifted easily or quickly. A little bit of support from our political leaders, however, could help to push things along …
•The New Zealand Government procurement has just published its updated (5th edition) Rules for Procurement. We’ll comment on these in detail in a future newsletter. The most important change is probably a clear(er) commitment to considering the benefits to our national economy: “a new rule requiring agencies to include economic benefits to New Zealand in all procurements. There will be a minimum 10 percent weighting for evaluation purposes on economic benefit criteria.”
What hasn’t changed, at first glance, is the lack of an obligation on prime contractors to apply key parts of the government’s rules – like considering benefits to the New Zealand economy, when selecting subcontractors (new Rule 31). Given that, for the big government contracts in particular, a significant proportion of the work is passed on to subcontractors, that is disappointing.
Recent key developments in the World
•Some ‘simple truths’ are worth keeping front-of-mind. The more valuable your product is to your customer, and the more unique it is in the market, the bigger your profits can be:
“Our third-quarter total net sales of €7.5 billion and gross margin of 51.6% were in line with our guidance, reflecting a good quarter for ASML.” said ASML President and CEO, Christophe Fouquet, at the release of the company’s results for Q3, 2025. The net profit margin was 28.3%. These results are slightly down on Q2, when the ratios were 53.6% and 29.8%, respectively.
As a privately-held company, Buckley Systems Ltd. doesn’t publish its financial results. Being in a similar line of business, it would be interesting to find out how much of a gap there is between their gross margin, and that of ASML …
•The New Zealand Prime Minister recently kicked off a debate that focused on whether young people can really find work when they leave school if only they tried hard enough. This is a debate that is not only happening in New Zealand.
Youth unemployment is a universal and persistent problem across the OECD; in half of the OECD member countries the youth unemployment rates are at least twice as high as the national average:
There are now signs of a new twist to this, with the arrival of the use of AI on a broad(er) front. AI gets the praise – or the blame – for lots of things these days, but as Sherlock Holmes famously said “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” Fortunately, we now have some data from the US and Germany. For the US, there is a very interesting analysis published by Seyed Hosseini and Guy Lichtinger from Harvard, showing the impact of the arrival of generative AI on employment:
The authors also looked at trends for companies that (widely) used Generative AI in their operations, and those that didn’t. As we can see, there is a significant difference in junior employment between the two groups, but not so for seniors:
In summary, the authors conclude that “The decline in junior employment is driven primarily by reductions in hiring. Adopting firms substantially curtailed junior hiring after 2023Q1, with exits also decreasing modestly, implying that net declines occurred mainly through slower entry rather than layoffs.”
In their study on the topic, Stanford University authors Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen looked at the age-related impact of Generalised AI on employment across a range of different occupations, and also separately for two different LLMs, Chat-GPT4, and Claude. For the latter, they didn’t find any significant differences, but across all occupations they found the impact of Generative AI on recruitment rates by age and AI adoption in their study reflecting the finding of Hosseini and Lichtinger:
Quintiles 4 & 5 represent companies with the highest adoption rates. Their findings show that the negative impact on recruitment is concentrated on career entrants in companies with a high rate of Generative AI adoption.
For the six occupations included in their study, software developers and customer sales representatives showed the strongest decline in recruitment; the effect was far less pronounced in first-line production supervisors, for example.
For Germany, and based on a recent publication, a similar picture:
Data shows are the differences for each sector in the number of vacancies advertised between the first half of 2023, and the first half of 2025.
•Those of us who attended last night’s Fireside Chat session with Prof. Alexander Brem from TU Stuttgart in south-western Germany heard about the challenges German car manufacturers are facing; these have been well-published by now. Alex also talked about the impact this crisis has on the long and complex upstream supply chains in this industry. Car manufacturers today are assemblers first, and manufacturers second, relying on big suppliers like Bosch or Continental, but also a large number of SME suppliers in Germany.
The most recent survey of SME data, published by the German accounting software company DATEV, shows that – across all sectors – SME turnover lags significantly behind developments for all businesses:
A breakdown into sectors of the economy shows that, after hospitality, manufacturing SMEs are faring second worst when it comes to declining sales.
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