Serko outlook lifts as AI travel tools offset Middle East war war
Serko’s chief executive says the corporate travel company is weathering the travel disruptions caused by the US and Israeli war with Iran surprisingly well, recording a “very strong” final quarter despite the global volatility.

Serko on Wednesday reported a 34% increase in total income to $120.9 million in the 12 months ended March 31, 2026, compared with $90.5m a year earlier. ⌘ Read more

NZTE’s Peter Chrisp named new DOC conservation director general
Peter Chrisp has been appointed as the new director general of conservation and chief executive of the Department of Conservation (DOC).

The announcement was made by deputy public service commissioner Heather Baggott. ⌘ Read more

QuiznessDesk, Wednesday, May 20
The Bahamas lie off the coast of which US state?
How is ascorbic acid more commonly known?
Which of the following was not one of the famous Brontë sisters? Anne, Jane or Emily?
In what decade did the building of the Berlin Wall begin?
Which cartoon character’s name is Italian for “pine eye”?
A Kind Of Magic and Hammer To Fall by Queen are songs on the soundtrack to which 1986 film?
Kelly Rowland, Michelle Williams and Beyonce Knowles made up which band?
What is t … ⌘ Read more

Dairy prices edge up at season finale
Dairy prices have edged out a small gain as the New Zealand season comes to an end.

The average price at the last Global Dairy Trade auction of the 2025/26 dairy season, held overnight, lifted 0.6% to US$4,198 (NZ$7,193) per metric tonne (MT). ⌘ Read more

Seymour’s red tape ministry now four times bigger than agency it replaced
David Seymour established the Ministry for Regulation in 2024 with the goal of slashing red tape, improving the scrutiny of new laws and boosting the skills of the country’s regulators.

Two years on, while most Government departments are contracting, and Seymour called again this week for “less Wellington bloat, [fewer government departments](https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/bus … ⌘ Read more

Why buying back BNZ misses where real financial power lies
Winston Peters wants to buy BNZ back. The Crown is being asked to recapitalise Kiwibank. Both debates are misaligned with the asset and the layer of the tech stack, writes Andy Higgs, the executive director of Digital Identity New Zealand.

NZ First has now made it official policy to bu … ⌘ Read more

Three Ubco companies in liquidation owing over $35m
Tauranga-based electric motorcycle maker Ubco has been placed in liquidation, owing creditors over $35 million.

The company entered receivership with debts of $35.7m in January 2025 but was rescued by a group of New Zealand investors by July of the same year. ⌘ Read more

Winston Peters signals new way to bridge BNZ buyback $5b gap
More detail has arisen as to how New Zealand First may bridge a hefty $5 billion gap between the price it’s willing to pay for Bank of NZ versus paper valuations circulating in the market.

Commenting exclusively to BusinessDesk, NZ First leader Winston Peters said every aspect of a possible transaction to buy back BNZ from National Australia Bank (NAB) would be considered. ⌘ Read more

Business of Government: Public service Budget blues, rethinking the OIA and more
You don’t need a weatherman

Nicola Willis’s announcement of “fundamental” public service reform can be read through several lenses. ⌘ Read more

Ample Meats losses deepen as 2024 accounts finally filed
The Chinese-owned Taranaki meat processor that blamed its accountants for delayed financial statements deepened its loss in 2024 as revenue dropped, according to newly filed accounts.

Ample Group posted a loss of just over $1.9 million in the 12 months to the end of September 2024, compared with … ⌘ Read more

AI requires us to take ‘considered risks’ – Deloitte CEO
We are living through one of the most significant technological shifts in our careers, and it is happening at a rapid pace, Mike Horne, chief executive of Deloitte New Zealand, told Techweek26 attendees.

There was a palpable sense at the conference that the pace of technological innovation had accelerated to the point where its many potential impacts were becoming hard to comprehend. ⌘ Read more

Cross the Ditch, tax‑free(ish)!
Australia’s proposal to slap a 30% floor on capital gains makes New Zealand the friendlier side of the Ditch for company founders – at least for now.

Australia’s 2026 Federal budget tore up the old deal where, if an Australian investor held an asset for more than 12 months, they paid tax on only half the gain. ⌘ Read more

Firefox 151.0 released
Version\
151.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Significant changes
include the ability to clear and restart a private-browsing session, better
fingerprinting protection, control over the apparent location when using the
Firefox VPN, and more. ⌘ Read more

[$] openSUSE “terms of site” raise complaints about age restrictions
Many people in the Linux community began using the operating system—and
contributing to open source—at a tender age, often well before
their 16th birthday. Thus, a recent change in openSUSE’s terms of site (ToS)
that required users of the project’s web site to be “at least 16
years of age or the age of majority” in their jurisdiction has
raised objections. The terms have since been modified, though users
must still have paren … ⌘ Read more

[$] In search of faster this_cpu operations
The kernel’s this_cpu\
operations are meant to speed access to per-CPU variables. They are
more optimal on some CPUs than others, though. During a
memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Yang Shi proposed a
fundamental, and somewhat controversial, change to how these operations
work in order to provide better performance on … ⌘ Read more

[$] What’s brewing in CXL
Compute\
Express Link (CXL) is a technology intended to enable the provision of
“memory nodes” in data centers that provide (possibly shared) memory to
nearby CPUs. It has, Dan Williams said at the beginning of his
memory-management-track session on the topic at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, “been making
memory-management problems worse since 2021”. He used the sessi … ⌘ Read more

[$] Improving the per-CPU memory allocator
There are many places in the kernel where performance can be improved by
using per-CPU data. But, as it turns out, the kernel’s allocator for
per-CPU data has some performance problems of its own. Harry Yoo led a
session in the memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit to explore ways to
address those problems and accelerate the allocation and initialization of
per-CPU data. ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libpng and nginx), Debian (erlang, netatalk, and nginx), Fedora (mod_md and SDL2_image), Mageia (perl-libwww-perl, perl-HTTP-Message, perl-WWW-Mechanize-Cached, perl-File-XDG, perl-Path-Tiny, perl-YAML-Syck, postgresql15, and rclone), SUSE (agama, alloy, cacti, cloud-init, dnsmasq, emacs, firefox, glibc, go1.25, go1.26, google-cloud-sap-agent, google-guest-agent, ibus-rime, librime, imagemagick, kernel, libsndfile, nginx, ongres-scram, … ⌘ Read more

pgBackRest will continue
In April, David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for
PostgreSQL, announced that he had archived\
the project and it would no longer be maintained due to lack of
sponsorship. On May 18, he announced
that a number of sponsors have stepped forward to ensure its continued
development:

Over the last few weeks, a coalition of sponso … ⌘ Read more

US rebellion against AI is gaining steam
By Amrith Ramkumar, Katherine Blunt, Lindsay Ellis

The only thing growing faster than the artificial intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it, as former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt saw on Friday. ⌘ Read more

Jarden moves to split operations in a private equity transaction
Investment firm Jarden is poised for an internal restructuring that will place its investment bank in the hands of staff and transfer its wealth and asset management group to private equity.

This news comes five months after BusinessDesk outlined Forsyth Barr’s plans to split its investment banking, institutional equities and equity research businesses into a separate unit, distinct from its weal … ⌘ Read more

Willis targets agency mergers, 8,700 fewer public service jobs
Finance Minister Nicola Willis has announced a “fundamental overhaul of the public service”, targeting 8,700 fewer core public service jobs by July 2029 alongside a major reduction in the number of government agencies.

In a pre-Budget speech to Business North Harbour, Willis said the Government would reduce core public service numbers to no more than 55,000 full-time-equivalent staff by July 2029 … ⌘ Read more

Google New Zealand increases profit, sends $1.2b offshore to Singapore
Google New Zealand’s 2025 financial results were again dominated by payments to related parties offshore.

The tech giant’s local subsidiary reported revenue of $92 million for the 12 months to December 31, 2025, a 6% increase over 2024’s $87.2m. ⌘ Read more

Property mentor ‘slapped, spat at me’, former colleague claims
A shareholder in a property mentoring business has posted a video online of the director slapping her, and alleges it was the start of a pattern of behaviour.

Savannah Carter resigned as a contractor at Wealth Mentor after what she claims was a series of incidents of physical and verbal abuse by director and major shareholder Kyron Gosse. ⌘ Read more

QuiznessDesk, Tuesday, May 19
The country historically known as Abyssinia is now known as what?
Which of the following would live in a formicary? Owls, bees or ants?
In degrees Celsius, what is the average body temperature?
What was the name of the volcano that erupted in the year A.D. 79 and destroyed the city of Pompeii?
Which book by George Orwell includes the line “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”?
Who was the first man to reach the South Pole?
Which two brothers play … ⌘ Read more

Critical infrastructure’s AI moment arrives and why AI agents worry Five Eyes spies
It is December 2025, and a storm is sweeping through parts of the South Island, with emergency responders alongside a set of AI agentsresponding to it.

On Wednesday, One NZ’s AI and Data director, Summer Collins, told a crowd … ⌘ Read more

Everything you never wanted to know or say about integrated financial products
After almost four years of straining to make “integrated financial products” a thing, the Financial Markets Authority has bowed to popular opinion and ditched the unloved regulatory brand.

First spit-balled in a December 2020 official industry guidance, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) re-pitched the concept in a sector review two years later, like so: “‘Integrate … ⌘ Read more

Councils begin to tally cost of Iran war, rates impact unknown
Councils are beginning to understand the million-dollar cost of the fallout from the Iran conflict.

Auckland Council is anticipating cost increases possibly totalling $50 million in the coming financial year, depending on how long high fuel prices last. Greater Wellington says cost increases on its open contracts have been as high as 23%. ⌘ Read more

BNZ apppoints receivers to farmer’s Dairy Goat Co-op shares
Bank of New Zealand has appointed receivers over a dairy goat operator’s shares in the Dairy Goat Co‑operative, as well as its milk supply rights.

McGrathNicol’s Andrew Grenfell and Kare Johnstone were appointed by the bank on May 11 to the 92,902 shares King Country Partnership (2013) Limited Partnership holds in the Hamilton-headquartered co-op. ⌘ Read more

Airlines consolidate flights into NZ but passengers keep coming
Airlines are trimming capacity, rather than slashing it, in the wake of the fuel crisis, but the industry as a whole is largely in “wait and see” mode, a tourism industry audience has heard.

At a pre-event for the major tourism conference Trenz 2026, Auckland International Airport chief executive Carr … ⌘ Read more

Advanced startups wow Techweek audience across biotech and AI
The breadth and scope of current AI and advanced technology development in New Zealand were highlighted on the opening day of the annual Techweek conference on Monday through a trio of case studies covering biotechnology, family management and efforts to digitise and automate sign language.

[BioOra chief executive and managing director John Robson](https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/startups/tech-st … ⌘ Read more

Receivers sell Airwork to Irish ASL Aviation Holdings
Global aviation services group ASL Aviation Group Holdings has signed a conditional sale-and-purchase agreement to acquire Airwork’s business and assets on a going concern basis. The price has not been disclosed.

The Irish-headquartered group told New Zealand and Australian staff, as well as stakeholders, in a note last week that the sale encompassed Airwork’s NZ and Australian freight operations, business, and exist … ⌘ Read more

Receivers working on selling Tweeddale’s Honey empire
One of the largest beekeeping and honey businesses in the country is up for sale until next month after its bank tipped it into receivership.

Tweeddale’s Honey, based in Taihape, and the directors’ partnership (which owns the land) are both in receivership. ⌘ Read more

Tower plugs Amazon Connect AI into its call centres in global pilot
Seven months in, Tower Insurance says it has saved about 550 days of call time through Amazon’s pilot AI call centre programme.

The insurer is the only business in either New Zealand or Australia to take part in the global pilot of Amazon Connect, a cloud-based AI contact centre as a service (CCaaS.) Only six other organisations worldwide are involved. ⌘ Read more

[$] Swap tables, flash-friendly swap, swap_ops, and more
The kernel’s swap subsystem is charged with managing anonymous pages in
secondary storage when those pages are (hopefully) not being used and the
memory they occupy is needed elsewhere. This long-unloved subsystem has
seen a resurgence of developer interest in recent times, so it is not
surprising that it was the topic of three separate sessions in the
memory-management track at the
2026 [Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit](https://events.linuxfoundat … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, gimp:2.8, jq, kernel, and rsync), Debian (chromium, ffmpeg, firewalld, kernel, nginx, openjpeg2, openssh, php7.4, and redis), Fedora (apptainer, chromium, coturn, dnsmasq, firefox, kernel, libgit2_1.8, libmetal, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-js-challenge, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, open-amp, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, pgbouncer, pypy, python-jupytext, python-uv-build … ⌘ Read more

Iran Now Threatens Fees for Subsea Internet Cables in the Strait of Hormuz
Iran’s government “wants to charge the world’s largest tech companies for using the subsea internet cables laid under the Strait of Hormuz,” reports CNN. Their article also notes that Iran’s state-linked media outlets “have vaguely threatened that traffic could be disrupted if firms don’t pay.”

Lawmakers in Tehran discussed a … ⌘ Read more

NZ sharemarket down 1.5% after large tumbles
The New Zealand sharemarket came under broad-based selling pressure and fell more than 1.5%, with several stocks taking hefty tumbles.

The S&P/NZX 50 Index was on a gradual slide throughout the day and closed at 12,762.92, down 202.09 points or 1.56%. ⌘ Read more

Private capital’s pent-up firepower faces frustration
Private capital transactions in New Zealand extended their 10-year, lumpy run-up in 2025, although pent-up funds awaiting deployment face potential frustration amid geopolitical, election and interest-rate uncertainty, new research shows.

“The [private capital] industry entered 2026 with a more measured but still constructive outlook,” NZ Private Capital executive director Colin McKinnon said. ⌘ Read more

AFT Pharmaceuticals appoints new CFO
AFT Pharmaceuticals has announced the appointment of Stuart Houliston as its new chief financial officer.

Houliston, who will officially start in the role on June 15, 2026, brings with him financial expertise from the public markets and accounting profession. ⌘ Read more

Gentrack earnings drop on project delays in Utilities business
Gentrack on Monday reported lower first-half earnings due to delays in revenue from new projects and announced the purchase of Prospero Energy, trading as Factor.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation, excluding acquisition costs of $0.6 million, was $7.9m in the six months to March 31 compared to $13m in the prior period. ⌘ Read more

Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc4
The 7.1-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.

Some of the documentation updates might be worth highlighting: the
continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list
almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to
different people finding the same things with the same
tools. People spend all their time just forwarding things to the
right people or saying “that was already fixed a week/month ago”
and pointing to the public … ⌘ Read more

QuiznessDesk, Monday, May 18
The Hoover Dam in America was built on which river?
Little, Eurasian Eagle and Burrowing are all types of which species of bird?
Carbon, Oxygen and which other element make up carbohydrates?
Who created havoc in 1938, when his radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds was believed to be true?
By what nickname, meaning little barrel, is the artist born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi better known?
According to Oscar Wilde, what is `the name everyone gives to his mistakes … ⌘ Read more`

RIP Peter G. Neuman
We have received\
word that Peter G. Neuman, who, among many other things, ran the RISKS Digest for decades, has
passed away. He will be much missed. ⌘ Read more

Some weekend stable kernel updates
The 7.0.9,
6.18.32,
6.12.90, and
6.6.140 stable kernels have been released.
Each contains yet another set of important fixes. ⌘ Read more

Going with the flow: local government amalgamation
Chris Bishop’s announcement of compulsory local government amalgamation must have reverberated through the rubber chicken circuit supply chain like a sledgehammer.

Fewer local councils mean fewer council dinners, which means less work for caterers. ⌘ Read more

Major banks ready for agentic commerce, other stakeholders lagging: Visa
Global payment firm Visa says big Kiwi banks are ready for the rollout of agentic commerce at scale, but that other stakeholders on the acceptance side of the transaction have yet to catch up.

Agentic commerce on a global scale is the next frontier of e-commerce, with future transaction volumes variously estimated in the billions, even trillions, of dollars. ⌘ Read more

Inflation data may let the RBNZ off the hook in May, but rate hikes loom
Barring any major surprises, recent data has taken a May rate hike off the table, but most economists agree that rate increases aren’t far off.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is mandated to keep inflation between 1% and 3%. ⌘ Read more

The running boom brings business for brands, retailers
Four days a week, the Zone Blue run club gathers for runs of varying length on Wellington’s waterfront, on the track at Newtown Park, and at Freyberg Beach.

There’s a “take it easy” Tuesday evening run, a speed session on the track on Wednesday, and a 30-minute effort followed by a coffee on Saturday mornings. ⌘ Read more

PowerHub bets batteries can make wholesale power work for households
A company called PowerHub is hoping to bring a new focus to the New Zealand electricity market by offering residential and commercial consumers exposure to wholesale power prices while using battery technology to reduce exposure to extreme price spikes.

Spot market electricity prices are often significantly lower than standard retail rates, but previous attempts to expose households direct … ⌘ Read more