When the opportunity arose to join Port Otago’s board, the appeal for Paul Rea was "getting back to Dunedin".
For it was the city where he undertook his tertiary studies, had "a lot of fun", met his future wife and joined global giant Mobil which led to a 20-year stint overseas. "Dunedin has a place in my heart," he said.
Mr Rea recently took over as chairman following the retirement of David Faulkner after nine years in the role.
He was appointed a director of Port Otago and its wholly-owned subsidiary Chalmers Properties in 2011.
He and his wife Heather had shifted back to New Zealand at the end of 2010 to live in the home they had earlier built at Millbrook Resort.
At that stage, he was 55 and thought he should do some "non-executive stuff" but having done almost all his executive career overseas, there were no networks living in a place like Arrowtown.
He went to Auckland a couple of times but found that too hard so, when the Port Otago opportunity arose, it seemed like a perfect fit.
Taking over from Mr Faulkner was something that had been discussed some time ago and he was happy to put his hand up.
As far as his leadership style, he quipped that Mr Faulkner was an engineer and he was "just a wannabe engineer", but — given his own background — his strengths were in different areas.
Originally from Lumsden, Mr Rea was schooled in Invercargill before completing a commerce degree at the University of Otago, graduating in 1975. He met his future wife within his first month at university and they married in his last year.
Mr Rea’s 35-year working career was spent with Mobil Oil, initially in New Zealand before moving offshore in 1989.
During his years overseas, he was managing director for Mobil in several countries, including Guam — where he once hosted a lunch with five heads of state — and Micronesia, Malaysia and Egypt — before being appointed global convenience retail manager within the company’s Virginia-based headquarters.
During his time in New Zealand, he was the company’s logistics manager, responsible for oil terminals and airport depots, as well as crude oil imports, processing decisions and Mobil’s share of coastal shipping.
He cited his time in Egypt, from 2000 to 2003, as a career highlight. He successfully merged Mobil Egypt and Exxon Egypt into a single entity and, during the same period, he was also responsible for businesses in Cyprus, Lebanon and Sudan.
It was a great place to live; there were so many things to do and there was a "really classic, old-fashioned expat scene" there, he said.
It had been a very rewarding career and he would not do anything differently if he had it over again.
He likened it to getting on and off a bus; never really knowing where it was going when you got on — like ending up in Guam — but taking all opportunities. It was an example of diversity "long before its time".
When it came to the importance of Port Otago to Dunedin and the wider Otago region, Mr Rea described it as a critical asset.
He said he would not have taken on the chairman’s role if the company had a "typical board". What it had was what he described as the "A-team".
Chief executive Kevin Winders — "isn’t it nice to have a CEO who is a Dunedin boy" — was very independent and very respecting of the board and he "doesn’t suffer fools". His leadership team was strong and the company was in very good shape.
Earlier this week, Mr Rea, Mr Winders and chief financial officer Stephen Connolly presented the company’s half-year financial results to the end of December 2019 to the Otago Regional Council’s finance committee.
They announced a half year profit of $7million, down from $8.3million for the same six months to December 2018, citing difficult spring conditions, but said the results were solid, thanks to sales of investment properties.
The next half-year was uncertain given the impact of Covid-19 and the slowdown in global exports to China, particularly as the log business — a staple for the port — was "drying up". The container business had also been impacted.
It could not create the volumes it moved; that was driven by exports. Taking the most optimistic view of Covid-19, there would be two months of logs lost, he said.
During Mr Rea’s tenure on the board, there had been a focus on the port itself. He believed the company was now well positioned for the future, as a large amount of capital had been spent on infrastructure including channel deepening, warehouse and wharf extensions, the logging facility at the Dunedin Bulk Port, asbestos elimination and tug and dredge replacements.
With that base infrastructure now largely in order, the company would continue investing to support growth but also move its focus on to optimising supply chains for customers.
As the port wanted to operate efficiently and be "good neighbours" it had sustainability programmes for the financial, environmental and community aspects of its operations.
The business was not sustainable if it did not get on with its neighbours and, while it had always been active around that, it now wanted to be a little more scientific about it, he said.
Over the next few months, an independent consultant would be undertaking a materiality survey interviewing all stakeholders, including councillors, the community and customers, asking them what was important about what Port Otago did, and what was important to them when it came to what it did.
From that, it hoped to get a set of priorities of what the company did first.
Such a survey was a new sort of theme across established businesses — the Port of Tauranga recently did the same — and the board was very excited about it. "It’s not just jumping on the climate change band-wagon, it’s broader than that," Mr Rea said.
He believed Dunedin was in "great shape", saying cruise ships gave it a new vibrancy; 250,000 cruise passengers sailed past Taiaroa Head annually.
The area was "perfectly placed" for cruise ships to visit. The wider Dunedin area benefited from that with the highest rate of off-ship participation of any port in New Zealand.
Dunedin also probably had the best set of attractions for visitors — "a hell of a lot of stuff" for them to see and do — and the relationship with cruise passengers was very good; locals valued them and understood what they brought to the area.
Along with his Port Otago directorship, Mr Rea was also on the board of New Zealand family-owned Waitomo Petroleum.
"I’m happy to be doing something like this and one other board is good. Any more and it might look too much like a full-time job," he quipped.
Given his vast experience in the fuel business, his involvement with the board of the Hamilton-based business was "intuitive".
Coincidentally, back in 1992, Waitomo Petroleum was a joint venture with Mobil — Mobil subsequently sold its share back to the family — but in the first year that it operated as a joint venture, Mr Rea was chairman of the company.
Mr Rea was enjoying the Central Otago lifestyle and Millbrook was now the place the couple had stayed the longest.
Involved with the Arrowtown Creative Arts Society, he had had a lifetime interest in photography. "Even back at university, I would book the university dark room and process my prints. Later, I’d black out the bathroom at home and do my developing in there."
He now focused on landscape and travel photography and had, with fellow photographer Russell McLean, exhibited "Poles Apart: Two Photographers Two Hemispheres" in Arrowtown last year.
Mr Rea was a keen walker and golfer — "I’m not going to say how many days a week" — and he and his wife were enjoying having three golfers billeted for this week’s New Zealand Open at Millbrook and The Hills.
Genial and down-to-earth, Mr Rea said he liked "to be humble". I’ve always been like that. [I’m] just a regular guy."
