Māori SMEs

We define a ‘Māori SME’ as a business or enterprise with the following characteristics:

• the business owner(s) define it as a Māori business

• it is not owned by another enterprise

• it is not a Māori authority

• it has at least one employee (including any proprietor paid as an employee) and fewer than 100 employees.

To find our Māori SME population, we pooled all of the self-identified Māori businesses identified from our partners Poutama Trust and NZ Māori Tourism together with those identified in the Business Operations Surveys; then removed any that did not fit the characteristics above.

The Business Operations Survey incorporates a two-part question, asking Māori businesses to self-identify and to indicate what factors significantly influenced that identification.

Some of the collections used to examine Māori SMEs in Tatauranga umanga Māori are comprehensive, and others take a sample. Where coverage of a collection is not total, we cannot be sure that a representative sample has been taken. There is no ‘total account’ of Māori SMEs, only what we know so far. So, there is no existing design of a representative sample. For example, BOS samples enterprises with at least six employees. We believe Poutama Trust focus on SMEs that are likely to survive. We know that NZ Māori Tourism’s focus is tourism.

Throughout Tatauranga umanga Māori, we view Māori businesses from the latest data we have for them. We matched our Business Register to the various sources, and extracted information on those businesses as they appear now. That means that changes occurring before the present reporting period are incorporated throughout.

In Tatauranga umanga Māori 2021, we moved away from reporting on Māori small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and began reporting on other Māori enterprises (OMEs).