Opportunities for sustainable initiatives

Opportunities for sustainable initiatives

NZCTA recently organised a panel session on ‘new areas and opportunities’, focusing on renewable energy and to include clean energy and smart vehicles

Garry Ko from RCR Group (CCCANZ member) was invited by NZCTA to be a panel speaker at the NZ China Business Assembly Forum. This is an excerpt from his speech.

Stonewood Group is one of the largest local Chinese-owned businesses which was started by the Chow brothers. John, the older brother, has a vision to build a billion-dollar business in New Zealand, a place we call home. Five years ago, we bought RCR Infrastructure – a 128-year-old Kiwi company that is a major electrical and mechanical services provider with more than 100 staff and a major EPC of solar farm in Oceania.

Over the past two to three years, we have experienced significant growth and successfully turned around the business. With eight branches across the country, we provide major services to our telecommunication, electrical and food networks, with more than 30 million NZD or 150million RMB turnover. We have also acquired two other businesses including a major battery services company.

John, our chairman, has been challenging the RCR management that we cannot just stick to changing light bulbs and cleaning filters. Therefore, we start looking at future engineering back in 2021. We focus on data centres, EV charging, networks and solar.

In three years, we have installed more than 6MW of solar panels, tens of thousands of EV chargers and 8MW batteries installed for data centres across in New Zealand. At the same time, we’ve earned the trust from major corporations in New Zealand including Woolworths, KiwiRail, Fonterra, Chorus and more, which entrust us to service their electrical and mechanical infrastructure every day and night.

But we haven’t stopped here. We’ve discovered there are not enough projects and developments in the solar and EV spaces to achieve zero emission by 2050. To put it into prospective, we need to build 500MW of solar farms between now and 2050 to achieve our green power transition. We also need over 200,000 fast chargers to transit of our fleets to EVs, including electric buses and electric bikes.

Therefore, we have gone from being the contractor to a developer. In 2023 we started a new subsidiary call RCR Green and we have now developed a gigawatt (GW) pipeline of solar farm projects at various stages.