Mike Bennetts

Mike Bennetts is a New Zealand business leader and the founding chief executive of Z Energy, the company formed from the purchase of Shell New Zealand’s downstream business in 2010.

Bennetts began his career in the oil industry at Europa in the early 1980s and spent four decades in global corporate roles spanning Africa, Asia and Europe before returning to New Zealand in 2010 to lead Z Energy. The task was to take a foreign oil company’s local assets, refineries, terminals, fuel stations and turn them into a distinctly New Zealand brand. Over more than twelve years as CEO, he did exactly that.

Under Bennetts’s leadership, Z acquired Chevron New Zealand in 2016, lifting its domestic market share to 49 per cent and listed on both the NZX and ASX following an IPO in August 2013. The company delivered billion in M&A activity during his tenure, won CEO and Company of the Year in the Deloitte Top 200 and achieved top-tier engagement and reputation scores nationally. Z was delisted in 2022 when Ampol purchased the company.

Perhaps more unusually for a fossil-fuel CEO, Bennetts co-founded the Climate Leaders Coalition in 2017 and served as convenor of its CEO Steering Group until 2022. The coalition now has more than 100 signatories representing nearly 60 per cent of New Zealand’s gross emissions and approximately billion in collective turnover, an initiative built from inside the very industry it aims to transition.

Bennetts stepped down as CEO in March 2023. He is now principal at Taumata Advisory Limited, chairs the Punakaiki Fund (an evergreen venture-capital fund), and has published Being Extraordinary, a book on leadership.

Bennetts’s profile is noteworthy because he led one of New Zealand’s most significant corporate transformations, turning inherited foreign oil assets into a national brand with 49 per cent market share, while co-founding the country’s most prominent climate-action business coalition from within a fossil-fuel company.

Sources: Taumata Advisory · Cleaning Up podcast · Climate Leaders Coalition