ABSTRACT
‘Does geography matter?’ is a question that particularly fascinates academics based in New Zealand, a market-oriented island economy located in the south west Pacific. We would like to answer this question with an emphatic ‘yes’ and suggest that more attention be given to geographic connections being created in the global economy. Using Fonterra Cooperative Ltd, the New Zealand based-dairy giant ranked sixth in the world in terms of revenue, as a case study we discuss how we came to this conclusion. Fonterra illustrates that it is indeed possible to grow a global company from ‘the edge’ of the global economy and raises doubts about arguments pertaining to disadvantages of remoteness and is a particularly interesting example of an actor on the resource periphery (Hayter et al. 2003).
