Described by one business associate as ‘a good bugger’ and ‘straight up’, and that’s exactly how Daniel Smith comes across from the Rangiora base where Daniel Smith Industries started trading in 1991.
Alongside his wife Annette, he runs a lean operation with just 45 staff and stresses that he has “NO financial connection or shared holdings” with the other Smith family companies. Indeed, Daniel questions why his two brothers, Albert and Tim, decided to become his biggest competitors in the heavy lifting game. “I was dumb and young, left school at 15 and made myself a few mill and they followed me vigorously. That’s what I think – they might think differently.” The Smith family’s profile also appear on this year’s Rich List.
Ranked 10th on Australasia’s Cranes & Lifting Top 50 list with 48 crawler and mobile cranes, Daniel says a realistic value of his plant and equipment would be about $55 million. And, while DSI has produced healthy profits over the past 20 years, he says there are lots of cranes around and “when a crane’s working it’s an asset, when it’s not working it’s a liability.”
Interestingly, Daniel originally sold most of his equipment in 2006 to Australian-listed Verticon for $41m but bought it back just two years later – minus the tower cranes – for just $13m when Verticon ditched its New Zealand assets. Nowadays most of his activities are in Australia because of what he describes as “a perfect storm of events” in New Zealand where cheap cranes and low interest rates have created “a very competitive low-margin construction environment.”
Operating with virtually no debt, the Smiths also build, own and lease a portfolio of 50 commercial and retail buildings in rural Canterbury that have a net value of $50m – the largest asset being their 19ha Rangiora base valued at $15.4m.
Describing himself as “streetwise but not qualified” like his brothers, Daniel says that they all bid and compete for the same work on a daily basis and that, while the family has good business and moral values, “it didn’t really need to happen that way really.”