In November Sir Ken Stevens sold Glidepath, the baggage handling systems company he had owned and operated for 47 years, to a French robotics firm for an undisclosed sum.
Despite selling his business, Sir Ken Stevens plans to continue championing New Zealand’s export sector, as he has done for several decades.
From humble beginnings building a baggage conveyor belt for Air New Zealand, Glidepath had installed more than 900 systems in 68 countries and was ranked one of the world’s key players in the $US85 billion global baggage handling market before he sold it for an undisclosed sum in November.
The journey began in 1972 when, faced with redundancy, the 28-year-old bought Thompson Engineering. With a handful of employees, the West Auckland business initially fixed roller doors, lifts and baggage conveyor belts at Auckland International Airport.
Renamed Glidepath, the business won its first export order in 1978 and the rest is history. Describing itself as “the tenacious little company that could,” Glidepath does not disclose any financial information but had grown into a company employing more than 260 engineers, software designers, marketers and relationship managers in New Zealand, Australia, North America and Asia before Stevens sold.
He credited the success of the company over the years to providing excellent service, never losing sight of the company values and an emphasis on research and development.
Being frugal was also an important part of the business mix, and the ability to design and build systems in-house rather than outsource meant Stevens never required external funding.
“A couple of times we came up a bit short and have had to go to the bank as almost everybody does.”
An engineer by trade, Stevens encouraged a culture of listening, learning and leading the way with a “‘can-do, will-do attitude” and a good dollop of No 8 wire mentality. “It’s our upbringing” he says. “Playing in our backyards making things – trolleys, huts and things like that. It’s just what we do.”
Among other things, he sponsors a national robotics programme for schools. In 11 years of international competition, Kiwi teams have been crowned world champions and division champions 10 times.
Knighted in 2009 for services to exporting, Stevens has been a long-serving chairman of Export New Zealand. In 2012, he became the 15th “Flying Kiwi” to be inducted into the Hi-Tech Hall of Fame, and in 2019 Glidepath won the overall Westpac Auckland Supreme Business Excellence Award, as well as the Excellence in Innovation Award.
Stevens had been presented with a fair few offers for Glidepath over the years, but it wasn’t until the November offer he felt both the timing and the buyer was right.
"I thought that's probably enough, let someone else have a crack. You can hang around for far too long, you know what fish is like when it hangs around too long.”
Described as “a real Kiwi bloke who loves his family, rugby and yachting,” the father of two children resides with Lady Glenice in a modest Herne Bay property. They also have a 5ha lifestyle block on the Tawharanui Peninsula.
He plans to spend his newly found free time restoring a 1960s Bedford truck