From June issue, NZ Manufacturer magazine.

 

How is business?

The business is in great shape and we’re genuinely optimistic about where we’re heading. In 2025, AoFrio’s revenue reached a record NZ$83.2 million, up 4.4% on the prior year with strong growth across our IoT business.

We expect full-year 2026 to exceed this, supported by the commercial launch of our flagship products SCS800 and AoFrio iQ, which open the door to meaningful growth in IoT and software across the US and European markets.

Part of what makes AoFrio a great company is the people on our team, and the relationship we have with customers. We have over 150 people in our organisation now, with around 100 of those in New Zealand.

The team is growing and we’ve managed to keep our staff engagement high. Our customer NPS scores are around +62 which is really high for our industry, and that comes down to the great people in the regions building strong relationships

Your blue-sky picture of future transformation must be a challenge that excites you?

It absolutely does. We built a respected business based on the manufacture of high-quality EC motors and controllers. That’s our heritage. But what we’re building toward now is something quite different: an AI-powered intelligence company. The foundation is already there.

We have almost a decade of data from 3.2 million connected devices in commercial beverage coolers, that competitors simply cannot replicate. What makes this genuinely exciting is that our hardware manufacturing heritage isn’t a constraint.

It’s the very reason we can credibly pursue this transformation. Helping build AoFrio into a great New Zealand technology company is something I find deeply motivating.

How long has AoFrio been a motor manufacturer?

We began manufacturing our own EC motors back in 2001 and launched the ECR2 in 2016. The company rebranded to AoFrio in September 2022, bringing more than 20 years of motor manufacturing history into its current form.

Motors and fans still play an important role in our business.

We continue to have great relationships with OEMs in the Cold Drink Equipment market, where our motors and fans are widely used in beverage coolers.

For example, we’re offering integrated solutions that combine motors with IoT and software, such as our AoFrio INSIDE bundle, which is proving attractive for many customers who want to enhance energy efficiency.

Transforming into a tech company is a real challenge. Can you explain?

Since 2017 we’ve been on a deliberate journey to become a hardware-enabled SaaS company. It’s required us to continuously add new capabilities while also shifting customer perceptions about the value we can offer, because our IoT and SaaS solutions essentially double the available market for us.

Having regional teams close to our customers has been central to making that work.

Over the last few years, we’ve been intentional about how we can set up our organisation for success and growth.

Part of that has been adopting new process and building out teams to improve the way we develop new products. It has been challenging, but we’re starting to see some great progress on that front.

Where do you see growth in the future?

In our core Cold Drink Equipment market, we’re defending our strong position in Latin America while expanding into the US, Europe, and APAC.

The long-term ambition is to hold 50% share of new-build beverage coolers in the US and 30% in Europe.

On the diversification side, we’re moving into adjacent food retail and ice cream commercial refrigeration segments.

We’ve already received a purchase order from a major global supermarket chain in South Latin America, with potential to roll out to 600 stores and a global network of 15,000 stores. Formal launch is planned for the second half of the year.

Can you tell readers about your growth phase?

The commercial refrigeration industry is at a genuine inflection point. For decades, coolers were essentially passive assets: expensive to run, hard to monitor, and costly to service.

The shift to connected, intelligent refrigeration is still in its early stages in many parts of the world, and the opportunity is significant.

There are significant challenges that IoT and AI-powered fleet management can solve, and the world’s biggest beverage and food retail brands are increasingly looking for trusted partners who can help them do that.

AoFrio is uniquely positioned to capture the demand for new connected cooler technology.

We have strong global market share of connected coolers in Latin America, which is an early adopter market, strong relationships in the sector, and more than nine years of operational data from 3.2 million connected devices.

That data is the foundation for the machine learning and AI capabilities that are increasingly central to what we offer.

We’re now moving into an accelerated growth phase, expanding our core cold drink equipment business into the US and Europe while diversifying into adjacent food retail and ice cream segments.

To fund this next stage, we’ve recently raised almost NZ$5 million in additional capital through a cornerstone investor, and we’re now undertaking a share placement and rights issue for existing shareholders to raise further capital.

Your global expansion sounds like quite a story. Want to share?

It really is. AoFrio is headquartered in New Zealand, but we now operate across six continents.

Latin America has been the foundation of that story. We hold 73% market share in South LATAM and 62% in North LATAM, and we’re proud of how we’ve built in the region.

NZTE has been instrumental in supporting that journey, and we’re now seen as one of New Zealand’s biggest digital exporters in the region.

Last year we also opened an innovation centre in Mexico as part of our commitment to the region.

From that base, we’re expanding outward. Our ambition is to grow US market share from 11% today to 50% by FY30, and to move from essentially zero presence in EMEA to 30% market share over the same period.

Those are bold targets, but they’re grounded in the relationships, the technology, and the data we’ve spent the last decade building.

Transformation using AI is probably keeping you up at night?

It’s more likely to keep me out of bed with excitement than lose sleep over it!

AI is accelerating the pace at which we can bring new things to market, changing what we can bring to market, and amplifying the benefit of things we already provide.

We’ve been using machine learning and algorithms to surface data insights in our products for a long time, and now AI is making that data exponentially more valuable.

Internally, AI is changing the way we work as well, particularly in our engineering, product and design teams. For example, our software developers are using AI to code faster, and validate and test ideas, which is really boosting productivity.

You can’t replicate human expertise, but AI can certainly accelerate and build on what people can achieve alone.