Win Back Lost Revenue From New Zealand's Pacific Customers

In the latest reporting season, 6 issuers in Aotearoa reported consolidated revenue lower in real terms than a year earlier. Stats NZ measured its consumers price index at 4.1% in the year to June 2026 and 3.1% in the year to March 2026. Deflating the latest results by those figures gives a real decline for Pacific Edge, Genesis Energy, AoFrio, Meridian Energy, Mercury NZ and Tourism Holdings. The companies' own filings, or 2 independent compilations of them, put the fall on the record.

Pacific Edge, the Dunedin developer of the Cxbladder urine test, reported the steepest fall of the 6. Its revenue excluding other income dropped 47.4% to $11.5m in the year to 31 March 2026, a real fall of about 49%. Medicare had stopped reimbursing Cxbladder from April 2025. Novitas, the Medicare contractor, published a draft determination numbered DL40378 on 14 May 2026. The draft proposes reimbursement for Cxbladder Triage and Triage Plus. The company also changed tack at home toward a national haematuria evaluation pathway with Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora.

In its annual report for the year to March 2026, Pacific Edge links that pathway to healthcare equity. The report states that about 70% of New Zealanders have access to Cxbladder testing. Test volumes in Asia-Pacific rose 9.7% to 1,443 in the third quarter of the 2026 financial year. US volumes fell 19.5% to 4,003 over the quarter. The company processed commercial samples from 7 markets through its laboratories and distribution partners over the full year.

Genesis Energy's revenue fell 24% to $2,821m in the year to 30 June 2026. The real decline comes to about 27%. Its net profit after tax fell to $85m from $169m. Meridian Energy's revenue dropped 19.7% to $3,883m. Meridian still posted net profit after tax of $130m against a $452m loss in the prior year. A pair of independent compilations put Mercury NZ revenue down 7.8% at about $3.22b. Mercury's own release led with higher earnings.

Wholesale electricity prices change a generator's reported revenue even in a year of better volumes and margins. Retail customers deal with a separate rulebook. Part 11A of the Electricity Industry Participation Code, the Consumer Care Obligations, took full effect on 1 April 2025. It obliges retailers to publish a consumer care policy in plain, accessible language. The Electricity Authority's guidance to retailers lists accessible formats for non-English speakers among its suggestions.

Those obligations apply to homes across New Zealand. There were 442,632 people of Pacific ethnicity in the 2023 Census, 8.9% of the population. Auckland was home to 275,100 of them, 16.6% of the city's residents. Census respondents reported more than 110,000 Samoan speakers, about 38,000 Tongan speakers and about 8,500 Fijian speakers. People identifying as Māori numbered 887,493, or 17.8% of the population.

The Ministry of Health's Tupu Ola Moui chart book counts 25,038 Fijians in New Zealand in 2023, up 73.3% on 2013 and the largest percentage rise among Pacific groups. Samoans added the most people over the decade, 68,931. Tongans followed with 37,491. Outside Fiji, Australia counts 68,947 Fijians and the United States 54,006. The government in Suva funded a diaspora policy and 14 diplomatic missions in 1 budget.

To train a machine translation engine takes a large body of sentences paired across 2 languages. The CCMatrix corpus supplied 70 million parallel Indonesian sentences to Meta's No Language Left Behind project. That project classed languages with fewer than 1 million publicly available sentence pairs as low-resource. Its team grouped Tagalog and Standard Malay with the high-resource languages. Google Translate added Fijian, Tok Pisin and Tongan in 2024. Huri Translations sets a Fijian mental-health passage from Google Translate beside the output of its own engine and a version signed off by a native linguist.

For a consumer brand selling to Pacific families in Auckland, Huri transcreators rewrote the taglines and calls to action in Fijian and Fiji Hindi from intent. The brand chose among several headline versions. Body text followed the English source line for line. The transcreators replaced a literal tagline with an unintended second meaning in 1 of the languages. Calls to action written from intent drew more engagement in testing than the literal versions.

AoFrio, an Auckland company making connected refrigeration controls, reported a 21.5% fall in revenue to $33.8m for the 6 months to 30 June 2026. Motor sales fell 50.5% to $10.6m after its largest US motor customer switched to local suppliers under higher tariffs. IoT revenue rose 6.8% to $23.2m. Directors set a new heading in August with approval for 4 more sales roles aimed at the iQ software and Food Retail lines. The iQ Food Retail product went live by May 2026 with a mobile app and support documentation.

Tourism Holdings' total revenue fell 5% to $852.9m in the year to 30 June 2026. Stats NZ's June figure puts the real fall at about 8.7%. Rental and services revenue rose 11% over the year. The 5% decline applies to a total including vehicle sales.

In Port Moresby, BSP reported revenue up 14.4% in its latest year. Kina Securities also reported higher income. Inflation near 2% through early 2026 leaves the 2 lenders ahead in real terms. A University of Melbourne team trained a joint machine translation model for Tok Pisin, Bislama and Solomon Pijin for the WMT 2026 shared task. The team described its collected parallel data as broad and heavy with religious text. More than 10 million people speak the 3 creoles.

Fiji recorded 986,367 visitor arrivals in 2025, against 894,389 in 2019. Tourism revenue rose 10.9% on 2024. Remittances from Fijians abroad equal about 8.5% of gross domestic product. The Reserve Bank of Fiji took a fresh bearing in June 2026 and cut its growth forecast for the year to 1.5%. Businesses in the bank's retail survey expect sales to grow 2.0% in 2026, down from 6.8% in the August 2025 survey.

The narrator in the video on this page is a Fijian text-to-speech voice. Huri Translations built it from studio recordings with Fijian performers. Huri has built voices in 10 more Pacific languages so far. They are Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan, Rarotongan, Hawaiian, Marshallese, Chuukese, Carolinian, Yapese and Kosraean. Huri engineers turn a reviewed Fijian script into a finished audio track without booking a new studio session. The census count in Fiji puts the iTaukei population at 475,739.