New Zealand’s largest listed winemaker has told the market it now expects to make more money this year than it forecast only a few months ago, in a sign that the worst of the United States tariff shock may be behind the country’s wine exporters.
Delegat Group, the Auckland family company behind the Oyster Bay label, lifted its full year operating net profit guidance to a range of $60 million to $62 million for the year ending 30 June 2026. That is well up on the previous forecast of $50 million to $55 million, and it sent the company’s shares sharply higher when the news landed on the NZX.
In its market announcement, Delegat said the upgrade reflected stronger annual global case sales, particularly in the final quarter of the financial year, along with lower US tariffs on its shipments from February and a more favourable foreign exchange rate. The company is still forecasting global case sales of 3.3 million cases for the year, a number it has held steady through a turbulent twelve months.
Investors liked what they saw. Delegat shares jumped 46 cents, or about 12.6 percent, to $4.10 in early trading after the announcement, one of the better single day moves on the local market this year. For a stock that spent much of 2025 under a cloud, that is a notable turnaround.
To understand why the upgrade matters, it helps to remember how rough the past year has been for the company. In April 2025 Delegat cut its earnings guidance by 16 percent after the US Administration slapped a 10 percent tariff on imported goods. The United States is one of Delegat’s most important markets, and the company said at the time that the new tariff had created significant uncertainty among its American distributors about how much wine they were willing to ship in the final quarter. Guidance was pulled back from a range of $55 million to $60 million down to $47 million to $50 million, and the company warned of a roughly 5 percent fall in case sales.
That was the low point. The tariff on shipments has since eased, and the heavy lifting Delegat did to hold its sales volumes appears to have paid off. The company has effectively clawed its way back past where it started, with the new top end of guidance now above the figure it was chasing before the tariffs hit.
The currency has helped too. A weaker New Zealand dollar makes exports more profitable when overseas earnings are converted back home, and Delegat sells almost all of its wine offshore. With the bulk of its revenue coming from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Ireland, swings in the exchange rate move straight to the bottom line.
What makes the result more striking is that it has been achieved against a backdrop of serious oversupply in the wider industry. Marlborough, the region that produces the sauvignon blanc grapes Oyster Bay is built on, has been wrestling with a structural glut of fruit that has pushed down grower returns. The region ranked a lowly 16th in ASB’s latest regional economic scoreboard for the March quarter, with the bank pointing to that oversupply weighing on profitability. Some growers are reported to be considering mothballing vines, and analysts expect the road back to healthy margins across the sector to be a slow one.
Delegat sits in a different position to many of those growers. As a fully integrated company that grows fruit, makes the wine and owns the brand, it captures value all the way along the chain rather than simply selling grapes into a soft market. The strength of the Oyster Bay name in supermarkets and restaurants overseas gives it pricing power that a contract grower does not have, which is part of why it can lift profit guidance even while the region around it struggles.
The upgrade is also a useful read on the health of New Zealand’s wine export trade more broadly. Wine is one of the country’s largest export earners, sitting alongside dairy, meat and forestry, and the United States has become its single biggest market. When tariffs landed last year there was real concern about what they would mean for a sector that had grown used to easy access to American shelves. Delegat’s recovery suggests that, at least for the strongest brands, demand has held up and the tariff hit has proved more manageable than first feared.
None of this means the celebration should run too long. The guidance is a forecast, not a final result, and the company will only confirm its actual numbers when it reports its full year accounts in late August. Geopolitical tension, further tariff changes and the ongoing grape glut all remain live risks. But after a year defined by bad news, a profit upgrade and a double digit share price jump is the kind of story the New Zealand wine industry badly needed.
What do you make of Delegat’s bounce back, and do you think New Zealand wine has weathered the US tariff storm? 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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