Tech is our second-biggest exporter, unless you ask Stats NZ

A record year by any industry measure

New Zealand’s biggest tech exporters have just posted their best year yet. TIN200 export revenue rose 15.1% to a record $18.4 billion in FY2026, which TIN says puts tech second only to dairy’s $24.3 billion. NZ-based jobs inside the cohort climbed 6% to 35,405, and video game exports reached $947 million. Healthtech and fintech led the charge, with Xero and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare still anchoring the top of the list and Auckland payments firm Windcave pushing straight into New York.

This is a genuine win. Local hiring is growing again after a bruising FY2025 in which offshore recruitment outran domestic. The depth is real too. In 2025, TIN reported 40 companies earning $100 million or more, up from 19 a decade earlier, with Xero and F&P Healthcare becoming the first TIN200 firms to pass $2 billion in revenue.

Ask Stats NZ and the sector shrinks by almost 90%

Now the awkward part. For the year to June 2025, Stats NZ counted just $1.93 billion in telecommunications, computer and information services exports, including $1.21 billion of software. TIN’s export figure for the same year was $15.31 billion. That is a gap of roughly $13.4 billion.

There is a third number in the mix. In 2025, NZTech put 2024 tech exports at $11.4 billion, ranking tech as the country’s third-largest export earner. Earlier still, a broader Stats NZ goods-and-services measure for 2023, cited in NZTech’s 2024 annual report, put tech exports at $10.7 billion, with the sector making up 8% of GDP and 11% of exports.

Three yardsticks, one sector, and the highest is roughly nine times the lowest. Even TIN’s own year-on-year jobs figures have shifted between reports. When nobody can agree on the size of a $15 billion-plus industry, that is not a rounding error. It is a measurement failure.

Each number is wrong in its own way

The narrow official category is built for services billed as computing. It does not capture the medical devices, hardware and embedded software that make up much of what Kiwi tech firms actually sell offshore. A ventilator humidifier or a payment terminal shows up somewhere else in the trade data, if it shows up as tech at all.

TIN’s list errs the other way. Firms must originate in New Zealand, keep a meaningful local presence, develop tech-based IP and earn a share of revenue offshore. That excludes Spark, Chorus and the local arms of Microsoft and AWS, but includes Fisher & Paykel Appliances, which is majority owned by China’s Haier and manufactures entirely offshore. Halter, a TIN200 rising star, is now incorporated in Delaware. The honest “New Zealand-owned, New Zealand-based” figure sits somewhere between the extremes.

Policy is being built on the smallest number

That matters because agencies anchored on a sub-$2 billion figure will treat tech as a footnote in trade negotiations, R&D tax credit design and skilled visa settings. The industry figures suggest it should be near the front of the queue. TIN’s September preview noted the 2025 cohort earned 77% of its revenue offshore, and NZTE chief executive Sanchia Yonge describes tech companies as key drivers of economic growth.

Growth is also concentrating among the bigger players. In 2025, the ten fastest-growing TIN200 firms added $1.4 billion in combined revenue, more than triple the $400 million their counterparts managed a decade earlier. Scaling firms need capital, talent and market access, and those are precisely the levers policy pulls.

The optics are not great. No politicians were scheduled to attend this week’s TIN200 launch in Auckland, for a sector its backers say is second only to dairy.

The ownership question nobody is counting

The deeper risk is that value leaks offshore while the official numbers look the other way. Rocket Lab’s move to buy US satellite operator Iridium, and Halter’s Delaware incorporation, show where ambitious firms go to find capital. TIN chief executive Greg Shanahan wants that reversed: “One of the things that we have to achieve is to get New Zealanders to invest more in New Zealand companies, so the ownership and the growth and the benefits are retained within New Zealand,” he told the Herald.

KiwiSaver funds and private investors make allocation decisions partly on perceived scale. A sector officially sized at under $2 billion is an easy one to underweight.

Count it properly, then argue about it

The fix is not glamorous. Stats NZ, MBIE and the industry bodies need one agreed definition of tech exports that captures goods and services, flags foreign ownership and reports offshore employment separately. Then ministers can argue about support on the basis of a number everyone trusts.

Until then, the sector will keep posting records that Wellington’s spreadsheets barely register. A country hunting for productivity-led growth cannot afford to miscount its best candidate.

Sources

• NZ Herald: TIN200 2026: New Zealand’s tech exports hit a new high – but why are the industry’s official stats so much lower? (2026-11-05)
• TIN: 2025 TIN Report Press Release (2025-11-07)
• NZ Herald: $20b milestone: Kiwi tech firms enjoy another boom year, but local jobs fall sharply – Tin200 report (2025-11-05)
• NZTech: Annual Report 2024 (2024-08)
• TIN: 2026 TIN Report Press Release (2026-09-05)
• RNZ: Bumper year of profits for NZ’s top tech companies (2025-09-02)