Dame Wendy Pye, the first woman to be inducted into the NZ Business Hall of Fame, has earned another notch in her belt after being granted the first honorary doctorate in education from Massey University.
Pye was granted the doctorate in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the development of high-quality educational resources. She says she doesn’t know of any other publisher who has been granted the accolade.
She was knighted for services to business and education in 2013 and has received many other awards for her pioneering attitude to exports and the role of women in business.
New Zealand’s publishing queen lost her job as a divisional manager for the now-defunct NZ News publishing group in 1985, was given five minutes to clear her desk, and then marched off the premises despite 22 years with the company.
The then 42-year-old immediately set up an educational publishing company, Sunshine Books, in opposition to her old employer. While devastated at the time, the straight-talking entrepreneur admits the move gave her the necessary push to go out on her own.
She sold the North American rights to her business in the 1990s and set her sights on cracking the Chinese and Indian markets, which she calls the world’s “biggest opportunity.”
She says she has made good inroads with the Chinese government and major publishers and is looking at substantial growth over the next two years.
The 76-year-old says she has three challenges in her life: being successful in business; her husband, Don, doing well on the sharemarket; and winning at the racetrack (the pair own a number of racehorses, including recent steeplechase winner Speedy Jax).
“I love beating people at the track. When I do that people go ‘there is she is again, woah’ which is a good thing,” she jokes.
She says her investments on the American stock exchange, largely medical shares, have gone up substantially, which she attributes to the Trump administration.
Although Sunshine Books is investing heavily in multimedia learning with the Sunshine Super Reader, a solar-powered digital tablet pre-loaded with hundreds of e-books, she says the print side of the business is still going strong.
In October Pye announced that she had inked a deal for an undisclosed amount with multi-billion dollar, Nasdaq-listed Chinese education company Netease. Through its subsidiary Netease YouDao it provides online digital English learning tools that reach some 800m Chinese school students.
In 2017 Sunshine Books launched a series in China in collaboration with the Foreign Language and Research press, one of China's largest foreign language publishers.
Pye founded her international publishing empire on her core belief that literacy is a way out of poverty and has spent the past 34 years providing platforms for millions of children to learn to read.
“Literacy does change people’s lives and I know we can make a difference and, while I can make a difference and do something positive for the world, I intend to be doing it. I don’t have any inclination to hang up my boots. What else would I do in life?”
She has set up a foundation that helps provide children with education. “I’ve put a lot back into it.”
Photo: Stuff
2018: $115 million