Rocket Lab, the launch company that started life in an Auckland workshop two decades ago, is about to join one of the most closely watched share indices in the world. The company confirmed it will be added to the Nasdaq-100 before the market opens on Monday 22 June, a milestone that places the business alongside the largest non-financial firms listed on the Nasdaq exchange.
The Nasdaq-100 tracks the performance of the 100 biggest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq, a list that includes the giants of global technology. According to the index operator, more than 200 investment products holding upwards of 800 billion US dollars are built around it. Earning a place on that list is a marker of scale and a turning point for any company, and for one with such deep New Zealand roots it is a remarkable moment.
Founder and chief executive Sir Peter Beck described the news as a defining one for the business. In the company’s official announcement he said the inclusion reflected “the extraordinary journey our team has been on, from a small company with big ambitions to a global space leader”. Beck founded Rocket Lab in Auckland in 2006 after starting his working life as an apprentice toolmaker at Fisher and Paykel and teaching himself rocketry along the way.
The practical effect of joining the index is more than symbolic. Funds that track the Nasdaq-100 are obliged to hold every company in it, weighted by size, so the change forces those funds to buy Rocket Lab shares to rebalance their portfolios. That buying happens regardless of where the share price sits on the day, which tends to lock in a steady base of demand for a stock once it is admitted. For a company that listed on the Nasdaq in 2021 under the ticker RKLB, it is a sign of how far the business has travelled in a short space of time.
Rocket Lab shares have had a spectacular run. The stock recently touched an all-time high of about 105 US dollars and the company now carries a market value of just over 60 billion US dollars, which is close to 100 billion New Zealand dollars. The shares dipped on the day of the announcement, slipping more than 10 per cent from their peak, a reminder that a stock priced for rapid growth can swing sharply in either direction.
The rise has lifted the fortunes of the man behind the company. Forbes estimates Beck’s wealth at around 5 billion US dollars, almost entirely tied to his Rocket Lab holding. He has held on to most of his shares and cut his own salary to a single US dollar to channel money into the development of Neutron, the larger rocket the company is building to compete for heavier payloads.
It is not only Beck who has a stake in the outcome. More than 32,000 New Zealanders own shares in the company, according to the New Zealand Herald, a level of local retail ownership that is unusual for a company headquartered overseas. Rocket Lab now lists its head office in Long Beach, California, but the New Zealand footprint remains substantial. The company runs two launchpads on the Mahia Peninsula on the East Coast, the site of the world’s first private orbital launch complex, and it builds and tests its Electron rockets and satellite systems in Auckland. A fabrication facility in Warkworth, north of Auckland, produced the nose cone for the new Neutron rocket.
The business itself is growing quickly. Rocket Lab reported revenue of 201.3 million US dollars in the first quarter of 2026, up 63 per cent on the same period a year earlier, while its order backlog more than doubled to 2.2 billion US dollars. The company still runs at a loss, posting a net loss of 45 million US dollars for the quarter as it pours money into Neutron, but it is sitting on a cash pile of about 1.5 billion US dollars to fund that work. Electron remains the most frequently launched small orbital rocket in the world, and the company has now completed more than 80 launches and deployed upwards of 250 satellites for commercial, government and national security customers.
The timing comes against a mixed backdrop for the wider New Zealand sharemarket and economy. The NZX50 has been trading cautiously in recent sessions, and interest.co.nz notes that higher fuel prices are expected to add around a percentage point to headline inflation, which is forecast to peak near 4 per cent in the June quarter. In that context, a home-grown company breaking into the upper ranks of the Nasdaq is a rare bright spot, even if most of its shares trade on a market on the other side of the Pacific.
For the thousands of New Zealanders holding the stock, and for anyone who has followed Rocket Lab from its early days launching small rockets off a remote peninsula, the move into the Nasdaq-100 is a moment worth marking. It is a long way from a workshop in Auckland to a seat among the largest companies on the Nasdaq, and Rocket Lab has covered that distance in less than twenty years.
What do you make of Rocket Lab’s rise, and are you one of the New Zealanders holding the shares? 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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