Between 1990 and 2025, New Zealand’s real economy grew 150 per cent. Real manufacturing output grew 28 per cent. Non-food manufacturing — the part that isn’t dairy or meat processing — grew 5 per cent. Services grew 187 per cent.
Those are the headline numbers from a Newswire analysis of Stats NZ’s production-side GDP series, which runs quarterly from March 1972 through December 2025. They back up what factory-closure headlines already suggest: the country’s manufacturing base has effectively stopped growing in real terms, even as the rest of the economy has more than doubled in size.
Manufacturing’s share of the economy has roughly halved
| Year | Total GDP (1990=100) | Manufacturing (1990=100) | Services (1990=100) | Mfg % of GDP | Services % of GDP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 15.4% | 60.7% |
| 2000 | 132 | 116 | 136 | 13.6% | 62.4% |
| 2005 | 160 | 139 (peak) | 168 | 13.4% | 63.5% |
| 2010 | 173 | 121 (GFC) | 187 | 10.7% | 65.4% |
| 2015 | 196 | 128 | 214 | 10.1% | 66.4% |
| 2020 | 230 | 139 | 255 | 9.3% | 67.2% |
| 2025 | 250 | 128 | 287 | 7.9% | 69.7% |
Because manufacturing has grown so much slower than everything else, its share of real GDP has fallen from 15.4 per cent in 1990 to 7.9 per cent in 2025 — essentially halved. Services have gone the other way, from 60.7 per cent of GDP to 69.7 per cent. New Zealand has become a service economy with a commodity-processing tail.
The split that matters
Stats NZ separates manufacturing into two high-level subsectors: food manufacturing, and manufacturing excluding food. The two have moved in opposite directions.
| Year | Food mfg (1990=100) | Mfg-ex-food (1990=100) | Mfg-ex-food % of GDP |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 100 | 100 | 12.0% |
| 2005 | 169 (peak) | 127 (peak) | 9.5% |
| 2015 | 168 | 112 | 6.8% |
| 2025 | 184 | 105 | 5.1% |
Food manufacturing — overwhelmingly dairy and meat processing — has grown 84 per cent since 1990, broadly in step with the economy. Everything else in manufacturing — metal products, chemicals and petrochemicals, machinery, wood and paper, textiles, plastics, electronics — has collectively grown 5 per cent over thirty-five years. That’s 0.14 per cent a year. Flat.
As a share of GDP, non-food manufacturing has dropped from 12 per cent in 1990 to 5.1 per cent in 2025. More than halved.
If you want a one-sentence summary of what has happened to New Zealand’s productive economy over the last generation: the commodity-processing tail has kept up with growth, and everything else in manufacturing has sat it out.
Which subsectors are below their peaks
The aggregate picture is one thing; the subsector breakdown is sharper. Using Stats NZ’s industry productivity series, seven manufacturing subsectors can each be compared to their own historical output peaks.
| Subsector | Peak year | Peak index | 2024 index | From peak |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Petroleum, chemical, polymer & rubber mfg | 2019 | 1,360 | 604 | −56% |
| Metal product mfg (incl. Tiwai) | 2004 | 1,653 | 1,226 | −26% |
| Wood & paper products | 2022 | 1,750 | 1,513 | −14% |
| Non-metallic mineral | 2023 | 1,771 | 1,596 | −10% |
| Manufacturing (aggregate) | 2006 | 1,538 | 1,398 | −9% |
| Machinery & transport equipment | 2023 | 1,683 | 1,636 | −3% |
| Food, beverage, tobacco | 2024 | 2,198 | 2,198 | at peak |
Four of seven subsectors are below peak. Petrochemicals is down 56 per cent, heavily shaped by the Marsden Point oil refinery closing in April 2022 — a single plant departure that sits visibly in the aggregate. Metal product manufacturing, which includes the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter, is 26 per cent below its 2004 peak. Wood and paper products are 14 per cent below their 2022 peak; non-metallic mineral products 10 per cent below 2023. Only food, beverage and tobacco manufacturing is at its all-time peak in 2024.
The 2005 inflection
A pattern that keeps showing up in this data: the peaks cluster around 2000–2007, not around the Global Financial Crisis or COVID. Manufacturing-aggregate output peaked in 2006. Metal products peaked in 2004. The Māui gas field’s peak share of electricity generation was 2001. The same inflection point, from several angles.
A previous Newswire analysis set out the hypothesis: New Zealand’s heavy-industrial base was disproportionately dependent on the Māui gas field, and what looked like organic 1990s growth was in part a one-time windfall that ended when the field matured. The current wave of factory closures — Heinz Wattie’s, McCain Foods, Juken New Zealand — sits inside a much longer structural drift that started 20 years ago, not this year.
Where the growth actually went
Services. From 60.7 per cent of real GDP in 1990 to 69.7 per cent in 2025. Financial and insurance services, professional services, information and media, healthcare, real estate, public administration — the sectors that absorbed almost all of the new economic activity generated over the last generation.
Primary industries — farming, forestry, mining — grew 2.9 times, roughly keeping their share. Manufacturing is the sector that failed to grow with the economy.
Every developed economy has seen manufacturing share fall since the 1970s. That’s not unusual. What’s distinctive in New Zealand is how concentrated the remaining manufacturing growth is — two subsectors (dairy and meat processing) carry nearly all of it. Strip them out and the sector stopped growing in real terms around the time Marsden Point was still refining crude, Tiwai was running four pot-lines, and Māui still had years of gas ahead of it.
The caveats
Chain-volume GDP series don’t add exactly to headline GDP — there’s a small aggregation error from the rebasing, typically under one per cent. The share figures are close to but not perfectly accurate; the direction and the scale of the shifts are robust.
Output measures don’t speak directly to employment. Whether manufacturing job numbers have fallen in line with output, or whether productivity has shifted faster than output, is a separate question that Stats NZ’s Household Labour Force Survey answers — and that’s the obvious follow-up piece.
And a generation of structural change is the product of many forces: the global commodity-cost environment, the NZ dollar, trade policy, the availability of cheap gas, Tiwai’s operating decisions, capital investment elsewhere, and more. None of that is unpacked here. The narrow finding is what matters: over 35 years, New Zealand’s non-food manufacturing sector has essentially flatlined in real terms while the rest of the economy has tripled.
Sources
Real GDP by production, chain volumes, annual year-ended March, from Stats NZ Aotearoa Data Explorer (dataflow SNA_GDP, December 2025 quarter release). Industry productivity output indexes from Stats NZ dataflow PRD_PRD_001, released 2024. Both retrieved 19 April 2026.
Has the local manufacturing base in your region thinned out over the last thirty years, or held up? What’s being made in New Zealand right now that’s genuinely new? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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