‘It’s worth fighting for. It’s worth saving’
Chris Blenkiron doesn’t do social media, yet, writes Kevin Norquar, TikTok could be the very thing that helps save his business, Tiwai Point.
Popular social media platforms are knights in shining aluminium armour, as chief executive Chris Blenkiron strives to prevent Tiwai Point smelter shutting down.
‘‘No Tiwai, no TikTok,’’ rolls off his tongue as he enumerates reasons the often controversial Southland smelter should not close.
Tiwai Point, Southland’s biggest employer, is set to close in 2024, unless Blenkiron can find a way to save it. The New Zealand Aluminium Smelter boss is working night and day to do just that.
Married with a toddler, he had worked until 10.30pm the day before, risen at 4am, and had a 10pm meeting that night when we spoke over lunch in Auckland.
‘‘I have a house in Invercargill, I have a daughter and a wife in Invercargill, 15 of the last 16 weeks I’ve either been in Auckland or Wellington,’’ he says.
He is set on is telling ‘‘anyone who will listen’’ why Tiwai should not close.
‘‘The Tiwai story is an incredible story to get under the
skin of. It’s worth fighting for. It’s worth saving, and that’s the path that kind of led me to say, ‘I’ll go and have a crack at that’.’’
For someone with scant social media presence, it seems out of character to hear him cite TikTok as a potential saviour. TikTok is a video-sharing app that allows users to create and share shortform videos. It is chasing the likes of Facebook and Instagram as a social media platform, last year reaching 1 billion daily users globally.
‘‘Our customer in Japan is a major supplier of hard drives and hard discs,’’ Blenkiron explains. ‘‘So our aluminium is the only aluminium they can use to make the hard discs, because we are ultra-high purity. We’re the only ones that make them on a renewable resource. Our customer is very passionate about that, they provide about 70% of the market globally on these hard discs, and it’s Tiwai aluminium that goes into those.’’
It’s way, way more than TikTok: ultra-high purity aluminium has become critical componentry for things such as iPhones, EVs and the semiconductors valued by the hightech industry.
His point is that social media channels such as TikTok would not exist without ultra-high purity aluminium, as the devices millions use to access them couldn’t exist.
Blenkiron, 37, appointed chief executive in 2021, is not a dedicated social media consumer.
‘‘I’ve often been called a young fogey. It’s not really been a thing for me. Usually, anything on Instagram are very slimmed down shots of the back of my wife’s head on holiday. I have been told on the LinkedIn side I should do more of that.’’
Blenkiron arrived when aluminium prices were soaring, after owners Rio Tinto struck a deal with Meridian Energy to keep the smelter open through to December 2024. But its life could
be extended by China’s decision to cap production for environmental reasons, which pushed up prices.
Energy and Resources Minister Megan Woods told Rio Tinto its behaviour was ‘‘not good for New Zealand or Southland’’, so the task Blenkiron faces seems monumental.
The Manawatu¯ -raised son of a car salesman, and grandson to a carnival showman, loves a challenge.
‘‘When someone says, do you want to give this a try? Usually I’ll say yes, I just don’t see much
downside to giving things a try. Because of that, things just start to fall into place,’’ he says.
‘‘When something has a mandate for change, when there’s a requirement to do something with an entity or a function … that’s appealing because you have a mandate to go out to try some stuff, give it a go.
‘‘Most of my roles have been in that space, they’ve started small and grown in complexity, the fundamental problems and the challenges are actually very similar across most of them.
‘‘When someone says, do you want to give this a try? Usually I’ll say yes, I just don’t see much downside to giving things a try. Because of that, things just start to fall into place.’’
Chris Blenkiron
You’ve got to have a bit of vision, to point people in a direction.
‘‘Those are the sorts of gigs that I’ve naturally just gone towards, even just inside a business.’’
Talks to customers, businesses, rotary clubs, government officials and politicians have been part of the Tiwai rescue plan. That has required long hours and many nights away from home.
‘‘I’m talking about our story and debunking some of the myths about Tiwai. That’s a really important part of unlocking a future for us but you spend a lot of time in hotel rooms,’’ he says.
‘‘For us, it needs to be firmly focused on the future, that’s the bit that we need to save. We can’t change steps in the past but we can make real decisions going forward.
‘‘What are you trying to get to, where are you going to be in five years, how do you set yourself along the road the best you can? Those are the big decisions that are really, really important to help navigate and sometimes really hard to see today where you’ve got to be.
‘‘The people side of things, that’s always a big driver. That’s always been my focus, and it continues to be.’’
His wife is equally passionate about her radiation therapy work, with Mercy Ascot ‘‘kind enough to let her work remotely two days a week with the planning of treatments. She loves doing it’’.
Passionate is also how he describes Tiwai staff. ‘‘They should be really proud. And we probably haven’t told some of these stories as clearly to them in one respect but certainly, outside the gates, a big part of my role is to engage like this.’’
Stories like producing aluminium with ‘‘exponentially’’ lower carbon emissions than overseas rivals. Close Tiwai and carbon emissions globally go up significantly, he says.
Tiwai has dialled back electricity load eight out of the past 10 years to put the power back into the grid, he says. Yes, it has caused environmental damage in the past but it is spending millions fixing that up. The onsite landfill was closed in 2022, the smelter is working with Nga¯ i Tahu on the site cleanup.
‘‘We segregate our waste. Some still goes to managed landfills across the region, in a properly sorted way. We’re working with our waste and trying to reinject it back into the process,’’ Blenkiron says.
‘‘We do need to front up. We need to say yes, [environmentally] things could have been handled better. Yes, there was some behaviour in corporate ways that we could have done better.
‘‘If you put these things together and you say, OK, if you put that in the right spot, the story that sits there is it’s worth saving. There are 1000 folks that work in that place that are passionate about it, a low-carbon regionally based export-driven business. Tick, tick, tick. That’s a great story.’’
His own story starts with growing up on the outskirts of Palmerston North, near
Ashhurst. He went to a private intermediate school in Marton, secondary school in Palmerston North. He emerged from Otago University with a marketing and a management degree, and grand plans to travel the world.
Instead, he made it back to Palmerston North, landed a marketing job with a building products firm and thought, ‘‘actually, I don’t want to travel, I just want to work’’.
That said, jobs in Auckland, Melbourne and Indonesia followed. Chemicals, steel, waterproofing, profit and loss leadership: his career was more by fluke, than by plan, he says.
‘‘It was, ‘that looks like fun’. I’ve always had a bit of a ‘give it a crack’ [attitude]. I’ve always had little things on the side that I’ve been trying to work on, lose money on and never be successful, little entities.’’
That remains core to the way he sees things, central to the advice he would give to a recent graduate. ‘‘Sometimes the dumbass things are the good things to do, putting yourself into a position that you just give things a go,’’ he says.
‘‘Sometimes those are the wrong decisions, and you learn ‘OK I don’t do that again’. Doubting yourself is not the way to do it.
‘‘I’ve just sat on planes, met someone who said ‘would you like to come and talk to me about my business?’ Just put yourself out there to say yes to things, give it a crack and try things out.
‘‘If you can point things in the right direction and get it moving, if you surround yourself with people that have certain skill sets, generally you’ve put yourself in a position to be successful.
‘‘I’m not an operations leader. I’m not an engineer. I’m the first person – I understand – that has held control at Tiwai who isn’t an engineer or a metallurgist. I’m fascinated by the process but I don’t understand the depths of detail.’’
Oddly, saving Tiwai Point is not the part of life he finds most tricky, most energy sapping, most confusing. ‘‘We’ve got a 20-monthold daughter, that’s the hardest, the most nerve-wracking,’’ he laughs.