51 in the top 500 – what does it mean?

The latest Asia Pacific Deloitte Technology 500 results are out, New Zealand looks pretty good, with 51 companies making the list.

It looks even better on a per-head of population basis – with New Zealand demonstrating real strength.

I’d hasten to add that I do not really believe this result – as the sample is all companies that entered into the Deloitte 50 in their respective country. The bar to make the top 50 in say Taiwan is much higher than in NZ, which means that many companies that would otherwise make the top 500 may not bother applying.

Meanwhile I do not know how relevant the list is in the other Asia Pacific countries, and nobody would really know just what percentage of otherwsie qualifying companies never bother applying.

Regardless – there are some interesting facts to be gleaned. We are strong in internet companies – equal to Japan fgor goodness sake, and beating Australia.

But we have had no fast growing green tech start-ups. That’s a shame, and probably points to lack of market and tough laws, and is really something you’d hope that New Zealand could get serious about.

We are also under-represented (or perhaps fairly represented given our GDP) at the top of the table. Our businesses seem to be for lower annual revenues, and our average rank well down. I wanted to present that number, but the actual list does not copy and paste from the pdf at all well. I’ll ask Deloitte for a better version.