2019 CEO Survey: Richard White, WiseTech

Richard White, WiseTech CEO Picture: Britta Campion

Every year, The Australian’s John Durie asks some of the biggest names in Australian business five key questions about what’s coming in the year ahead.

Here, in his own words, is what WiseTech Global CEO Richard White sees ahead in 2020.

You can read more from the CEO Survey.

How is your company affected by low-interest rates and what is needed to boost the economy?

There are always winners and losers with both high- and low-interest rates, but I think on balance, lower interest rates along with low inflation is a magic formula for sustainable longer-term growth of business and value. I support some form of unconventional monetary policy (but not necessarily quantitative easing) when interest rates get very low, and it is almost certainly going to have to take more than from interest rate cuts in any case.

What is the impact of government regulations on your company, including those applying to the financial sector?

Our technology facilitates regulatory compliance across the world, so changes in regulation are a positive driver for business and product adoption. In many ways, we can assist with compliance and create better, safer systems for our customers and for the societies and countries our customers serve – especially at the borders.

What percentage of company revenues are spent on research and development, and how is your company using technology to improve performance?

As a pure tech company, we are relentless about innovation, spending a third of our revenues on R&D, and with more than 47 per cent of our people focused on product development each year. Over the last five years, we’ve added more than 3000 products and enhancements to the platform, acquired more than 35 software companies and also invested more than $300m in our technology pipeline across our more than 35 development centres.

We are accelerating this R&D spend every year. In addition to building technology for the industry, we’ve also developed architectures for our own internal use around workflow, software development and universal components to increase our own efficiency. We “drink our own champagne” – as we say.

What are the three major policy issues facing the country and what should be done about them?

● Planning long term for a tech and knowledge worker economy is a top priority – education and a focus on technology education are critical.

● Being able to attract top technical talent into Australia is vital to fill the gap in the short term to develop that longer-term technology and knowledge worker economy

● Looking at R&D programs worldwide, Australia has created (though not the fault of the current government) a significantly more complex and rigid and certainly less advantageous set of programs than Israel, Ireland or the UK.

What are the major impediments to long-term growth facing your company and what can or is being done about them?

The biggest and most important in our view is the “war for talent”, and the specific talents are technology and logistics industry skilled creatives. Sustained supply of these two sets of skilled people and the ability for them to work together are essential for us to grow as quickly as the opportunity afforded us demands.

There are huge rewards to be gained, and there is a limited set of skilled individuals available in Australia. That gap must be made up a) from the education system, b) buying strong technologists and software teams and c) from being able to bring skilled migrants to this country.

We live in one of the most amazing and desired countries in the world, and we also benefit from incredible diversity of talent. But we also need to recognise that importing the right skills and ideas is critical if Australia is aiming to become a leading technology hub for the region. Current policy doesn’t support strongly enough highly skilled engineers coming to Australia, so there is room for improvement.

Imagine how many great companies, tech or not, that we could build if we had those high-value, high-skilled people bringing their life long value creation ability to this country.