The company behind Ikea’s flat-pack furniture has quietly become one of the biggest forest owners in New Zealand, and it wants to more than double the land it holds here.
Ingka Investments, the investment arm of the Ingka Group that owns most of the world’s Ikea stores, now controls about 43,000 hectares of New Zealand forest worth in the order of $648 million. That makes New Zealand the group’s fifth-largest forestry holding by country, behind Latvia, the United States, Estonia and Romania, out of a global portfolio of more than 500,000 hectares. The company has told RNZ it plans to push its New Zealand estate towards 100,000 hectares.
Ingka started buying New Zealand farmland in August 2021 and has since spread across Southland, Otago, Nelson, Hawke’s Bay, the Bay of Plenty and Northland. Of the current holding, about 17,175 hectares was already in forestry when the company bought it, while 23,838 hectares has been converted from farmland into trees. Roughly 31,500 hectares is in productive plantation, with the balance set aside for conservation.
Central Hawke’s Bay is where the shift is most visible. Ingka has turned six farms into forest since 2021 and now says it is the largest forestry owner in the district. One of its most recent purchases was an 850-hectare block about 15 minutes from Waipukurau, bought in 2025, adding to plantations such as a 650-hectare stand near Wallingford Station.
For a company that owns so much land, Ingka has kept a low profile, and its managers say that is deliberate rather than secretive. “We’ve got nothing to hide. We’re an open book,” Forestland country manager Kelvin Meredith told RNZ, adding that the company did not “need to wave the flag how great we are”. Operations manager Dylan Foster said the buying was not finished, telling the broadcaster that “if the right farm came up, we’d definitely look at” it.
The operation is a real employer in a part of the country that needs the work. Ingka runs about 250 staff across its New Zealand forestry business, and that number swells to roughly 800 people during planting season, when crews move through the blocks planting, releasing and pruning young trees over the first ten to twelve years of a rotation. About 60 percent of the timber is exported, chiefly to China, India and Korea, with the remaining 40 percent sold into the domestic market.
The expansion lands in the middle of one of rural New Zealand’s most heated arguments. More than 300,000 hectares of sheep and beef country has been converted to forestry since 2017, and the Climate Change Commission has projected that another 900,000 hectares could follow by 2050 on current settings. Farming groups have warned for several years that whole districts risk losing the families, schools and stock trucks that keep a rural economy turning when productive hill country is planted in pine. Successive governments have tried to slow the conversion of the most productive farmland into carbon forests without shutting the door on genuine timber investment.
Ingka is at pains to separate itself from the carbon-farming operators that have drawn the sharpest criticism. The company says it has not planted any of its New Zealand trees purely to earn carbon credits under the Emissions Trading Scheme, and that its business is growing wood to cut, mill and sell. It has said it may look at carbon offsetting in future, but that harvesting timber, much of it destined for its own supply chains, is the point of the exercise.
Fire risk is one area where the company has faced questions. A blaze on Ingka land near Porangahau in 2025 burned about 240 hectares, and New Zealand does not require forest owners to carry fire insurance. Meredith said the company took the responsibility seriously and would meet the cost of any damage it caused, telling RNZ it “will not shy away from paying”. Forest manager Blake Jones described using wetland setbacks and buffer zones as an environmental filter to protect waterways running through the estate.
Because Ingka is a foreign investor, its purchases of forestry land need consent from the Overseas Investment Office, which weighs the benefits a buyer brings against the sensitivity of the land. Forestry has its own streamlined pathway under the overseas investment rules, a setting that has itself been contested by those who argue it makes it too easy for offshore money to buy New Zealand hill country and plant it out.
For all the debate, the underlying driver is simple economics. Owners of marginal sheep and beef country have been offered prices for their land that pastoral farming cannot match, and a company the size of Ingka can take a very long view, waiting decades for a return that lines up with its need for a steady supply of timber. Whether doubling that footprint to 100,000 hectares is good for the districts involved depends on who you ask, and on whether the jobs and export earnings that come with a working forest outweigh what is lost when the last of the stock leaves the hills.
What do you make of one of the world’s biggest retailers becoming a major New Zealand landowner? Should there be tighter limits on foreign forestry buyers, or is the investment and employment worth it? Share your view 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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