Made Everywhere but Here: New Zealand's Quiet Billionaires

New Zealand likes to claim its successful people, but its very largest private fortunes were built almost entirely somewhere else. The country's richest man made his money in foreign packaging plants. The expatriate who once ranked just behind him made his in the wreckage of emerging markets and now lives in Singapore. A third made, lost and remade a fortune in post-Soviet Russia before turning to Africa. Almost none of it was built here and the two largest of these fortunes belong to men most New Zealanders would not recognise in the street. That combination, vast wealth made offshore and kept almost silent at home, is worth sitting with.

The empire built somewhere else

Graeme Hart is the wealthiest New Zealander, worth around twelve billion dollars and held the top of the Rich List for two decades until the Mowbray siblings of ZURU passed him in 2024. He is also among the country's most private. Hart built his fortune the same way throughout: borrowing heavily to buy underperforming companies, fixing their finances and holding them through his private vehicle, Rank Group. Apart from the 2006 purchase of Carter Holt Harvey, what he bought sits almost entirely outside New Zealand. His packaging empire has spanned the American giant Reynolds, the Hefty-bag maker Pactiv, the closures business Closure Systems and, until he sold it in 2014, the Swiss carton maker SIG, supplying the likes of Coca-Cola and Pepsi from plants on the other side of the world. He still lives in Auckland. He does not give interviews, does not court the press and once declined even to confirm his own net worth. The richest man in the country is, by design, the one you hear from least.

The ones who left

Richard Chandler went further. He left. With his brother Christopher he built Sovereign Global, an investment firm that made spectacular returns betting on countries in crisis, from South Korea after the Asian financial collapse to Russia and Brazil. The brothers parted ways in the 2000s and Richard now runs the Clermont Group from Singapore, where his roughly three-billion-dollar fortune places him among that city's richest residents rather than this country's. He grew up in Auckland. He built almost nothing here.

He is not alone in that. Stephen Jennings, born in Taranaki, co-founded the investment bank Renaissance Capital in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia in 1995, was estimated by Forbes in 2008 to be worth over five billion dollars and now builds entire satellite cities across Africa through his firm Rendeavour. Jennings is the exception that defines the pattern: he made his fortune about as far from New Zealand as it is possible to get, but unlike Hart and Chandler he says what he thinks, calling the country's record on housing and education a national shame. The wealth left. The opinions, occasionally, come back.

Triumph or quiet exit

So what does it mean that New Zealand's biggest fortunes were made everywhere except New Zealand? One reading is a quiet triumph. A country of five million produced capital allocators good enough to win in American packaging, Russian finance and African property, which says something flattering about the talent a small place can grow. The other reading is less comfortable. It is that New Zealand was never big enough to hold them, that its most ambitious financial minds found nothing here worth their scale and that the wealth they built flows back to the country as little more than a ranking on a list.

The silence

The silence of the two richest sharpens it. Hart and Chandler owe no one an explanation and their privacy may be nothing more than good manners. But a country learns something from the people who succeed in it and New Zealand's most successful have arranged their lives so that there is very little to learn. Whether that is modesty or a verdict is left, deliberately, to the reader.

Sources: NBR Rich List · Wikipedia (Hart) · Clermont Group · NZ Herald (Jennings) · Forbes