Five biggest corporate fumbles of 2025
Sunday, 21 December 2025
ANALYSIS: 2025 started off tough for business and got tougher as time went on. In the beginning, a combination of high interest rates and reduced consumer spending led to the highest liquidation count in a decade.
Towards the end of the year, the impact of interest rate easing and Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas provided more opportunity for wary Kiwis to prise open their wallets ‒ even if they’re still not prising them open very far.
But the country’s business community can not blame macro-economics or even the Minister of Finance for everything. There have been a raft of unforced errors by business in 2025 ‒ here are five of the most memorable ones.
1. What the heck is happening at Spark?
Spark NZ went from the only show in town (in its Telecom days) to the market behemoth about 10 years ago to, increasingly, a telecommunications player without much of an edge, even while it clings to its number one position in mobiles with just over 40% of the market.
As The Post’s Tom Pullar-Strecker pointed out, a lot of this is by design: the result of “highly successful National government-led reforms that culminated in Telecom being cajoled into transferring its copper network to a new entity, Chorus, in 2011 and the construction of the ultrafast broadband network … the result of those reforms has been faster and cheaper telco services.”
Which is all good for Kiwis, but perhaps less so for those holding Spark shares. While the company remains highly profitable and pays out a proportionately high amount of its profit to shareholders, the signs from 2025 have not been encouraging: Spark’s net income fell 20% between the 2024 and 2025 financial years, and chairperson Justine Smyth said the 12-month period was “one of the toughest periods in Spark’s history as we faced economic headwinds and lower customer spending”.
One way in which the company chose to tackle these issues was to decide to sell its majority stake in its data centre business in August 2025 to private equity firm Pacific Equity Partners. Spark ‒ which retained a 25% toe in the data centre waters through a new vehicle ‒ said the sale would allow it to use the $468m to reduce debt and refocus on core telco business.
Not all analysts were convinced. Some looked at the company’s sale of its remaining 17% stake in specialist mobile tower company Connexa to Canadian interests, along with the data centre business stake sale, and declared Spark was “selling the family silver”.
2. What the hell is happening at the FMA?
The Financial Markets Authority went into 2025 with questions about how much trust it had within industry stakeholders. While measures of that trust appeared to improve in a survey held mid-year, the end of the year proved a bit of a shocker for the regulator.
An FMA report on shadow insider trading released in August caused an outcry from corporate lawyers, who said it “undermined public confidence in the integrity of markets” ‒ which, if true, is rather poor form from a body so integral to those markets. The report in question raised the spectre of a practice known as “shadow insider trading” in whichpeople once or twice removed from a situation share information that is material to a company’s fortunes. The report suggested this was an increasingly common practice, without any evidence of instances of it ‒ nor anything to suggest the regulator had acted on it.
Then came another bombshell when the FMA chairperson stood aside several weeks ago. The regulator has had 50 people resign during the year, with a further 25 having taken redundancy (its entire staff numbers only about 350). The Post revealed nine staff had initiated personal grievances, seven more than the Commerce Commission and Reserve Bank combined. The cherry on top was an internal report released to NBR this week showing just 59% considered themselves to have a long-term future at the regulator, while just 62% believed their leaders modelled “expected values and positive behaviour”.
3. Crying over Fonterra’s spilt milk
Quel dommage! said some commentators when it emerged French dairy giant Lactalis, led by the man otherwise known as the “French Howard Hughes” and “the Emperor of Cheese” was to buy Fonterra's consumer-facing brands and operations in New Zealand and offshore (excluding China) in a $4.2 billion deal. With $2 per share in tax-free capital returned to farmers as a result of the sale of the likes of Anchor, Mainland, Fernleaf, Western Star, Perfect Italiano, Kāpiti, Fresh'n Fruity, and Bega brands, dairy farmers (largely) rejoiced and approved the deal, which will be completed in 2026 pending regulatory approvals.
But a host of others were perturbed by it, even while Fonterra will continue to supply raw milk and ingredients to Lactalis under an accompanying long-term agreement. The Post’s Sam Stubbs wrote that the Fonterra brands business clearly had potential, hence the $3.8b Lactalis was happy to stump up for it.
“My concern in selling it ‒ which, to be clear, is Fonterra’s right ‒ is that this is yet another example of a formula that has been repeated time and time again by New Zealand businesses. It goes something like this ‒ a foreign buyer comes in and buys assets, with locals mesmerised by the size of the cheque. But time then shows the buyer was the smart one, who has actually bought the crown jewels of the company.”
4. Hello Fresh: When “no” means anything but
Judge Kathryn Maxwell’s summing up in her $845,000 sentencing of home delivery meal kit company HelloFresh in October gave one of the best opening quotes one can expect to hear while sitting through hours of a corporate legal case: “Arguably, in the eyes of HelloFresh, ‘yes’ meant yes, ‘maybe’ meant yes, and ‘no’ mean[t] yes.”
Maxwell was being asked to assess the business model used by the German multi-national, some of which appeared to rest on the company reactivating ex-customers’ accounts and charging them subscription fees without permission after misleading cold calls made from contact centres in Croatia, the Philippines and Australia. HelloFresh reactivated accounts without permission after the cold calls, but there was no phone number or email on its website, or in its app, so people could re-cancel the subscriptions they never wanted.
As The Post’s Rob Stock wrote, Maxwell’s summing up revealed many features of HelloFresh’s cold calling strategy, including both the legally sound and unsound, and provided lessons for consumers about how cold calling and sales campaigns are plotted, and executed.
The Commerce Commission, which ran hot all year taking a slew of actions against all sorts of companies from the big to the small, including Jetstar (fined $2.25m for misleading travellers about compensation for cancelled flights), was behind the HelloFresh prosecution, saying Kiwis needed to become more aware of subscription ‘traps’ ‒ subtle ways in which people are nagged or mislead into subscribing or find it difficult to unsubscribe ‒ as subscription-based services became more ubiquitous.
Honourable mention for misleading behaviour: Brand Developers, trading as The TV Shop, which was convicted in the Auckland District Court of 13 charges for breaching the Fair Trading Act for four years of misbehaviour including fake reviews of its products, misrepresenting bonus items and denying refund rights. It was the third time the company behind Thin Lizzy makeup and the Transforma Ladder had faced legal action instigated by the Commerce Commission.
5. Court cases a minor downside in a splendid year for banks
In general, New Zealand’s banking sector had a great year. They’ve been hauled before various select committees and excoriated by various banking sector commentators for unbridled greed, arguments only bolstered by the banks’ new record-high revenue and profit in a cost of living crisis, yet they’ve somehow managed to come out looking like solid corporate citizens with the concerns of everyman and everywoman top of mind.
There have been a few concessions on Open Banking they had to make (while still seemingly controlling much of this startup space) and endured a few grillings about executive pay. But in exchange they’ve seen a reduced requirement for the amount of capital they have to hold ‒ a long time bugbear ‒ and lowered interest rates have only ever swollen their mortgage books.
One bank has probably had things a little tougher this year. ASB Bank’s year saw it settle a class action for $135.6m over loan disclosure mistakes they made between 2015 and 2019 (ANZ faces the same class action but has refused to settle). The Government tried, but failed, to see ASB and ANZ’s class action effectively excluded from retrospective legal action laws.
ASB is still being investigated by the Commerce Commission for breaches of lending laws. And this week, it faced another possible almost $7m penalty after admitting it breached money laundering and terrorism laws in a case brought in the High Court by the Reserve Bank. ASB admitted liability for all seven causes of action ‒ not actually being involved in financing terrorism or money laundering itself, but systems that were not vigilant enough to capture such activity, were it occurring.
Honourable mentions
Fletcher Building: Continues to have terrible years, although hope springs eternal at the construction and building supplies conglomerate, which is seeking to whittle itself down to survive a building sector slump.
Comvita: A testy meeting capped off a year in which the honey products maker has struggled to turn the business around. One possible road to redemption came through an offer from Christchurch’s Florenz, but shareholders rejected it. Where to for this company in 2026?
The Warehouse Group: The company ends the year undertaking a major restructuring while decrying other operators for too much discounting. Even before the likes of Ikea came to down, The Warehouse was struggling ‒ will it regain its footing enough to be able to meet the competitive situation head on?