In June, the National Business Review’s (NBR) 2024 rich list estimated the Mowbray family were worth $20 billion, making them New Zealand’s wealthiest by far. What was once a humble toy company operating from a Cambridge garage more than two decades ago, the Zuru Group has grown into a business on track to hit $3 billion in revenue in 2024.
Zuru is wholly owned by brothers Mat and Nick Mowbray and now spans three divisions – toys, consumer goods, and construction, with over 5000 employees and 30 locations worldwide.
The Mowbray family displaces packaging, property and investment magnate Graeme Hart on the list, who has been the country’s wealthiest person for just over 20 years and is valued at an estimated $12.1 billion.
“Zuru describes itself as a robotics and automation company with a relentless focus on continuous improvement, which sees it automate at least one new process a week, resulting in some of the most efficient factories in the world,” NBR List editor Hamish McNicol says.
“This has resulted in the group being highly profitable and debt-free, and Zuru must now surely be considered one of New Zealand’s most remarkable business successes.”
Should We Tax The Rich List?
The wealthiest ten Kiwis are all billionaires, with a collective fortune of over $50 billion. Among them are tech entrepreneur and former Xero CEO Rod Drury, property investor and former politician Sir Bob Jones, and businessman and philanthropist Sir Michael Friedlander.
The most famous rich listers are, of course, the award-winning film producers and screenwriters Sir Peter Jackson and Dame Fran Walsh. Known widely for their work on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series, their success has had a lasting impact on the nation’s film industry and tourism.
With an estimated $1.3 billion, Bruce Plested, the billionaire co-founder of Mainfreight, also made NBR’s list. He recently told RNZ that he supports the idea of a wealth tax to help address concerns about societal inequities.
“The concern I think the wealthy have is that the government will squander it, and so there’s a certain resentment about paying more than you should,” he told RNZ’s Corin Dann. “If we had a good enough government, they could get away with it, and it could become part of the deal.”
New Zealand is one of the few OECD countries without a capital gains tax. In 2023, the then-Labour government surveyed the nation’s richest 311 families, finding that they paid an effective tax rate of
9.4%, less than half of the 20.2% that the average Kiwi paid. A longstanding political issue, time will tell whether Aotearoa follows suit and sees its richest pay up.