The search for a buyer for Kaitāia’s Northland Mill has ended in closure, with Juken New Zealand confirming the veneer operation will shut on 21 August, and that 60 workers will lose their jobs. That is according to JNL director Yasufumi Tsuchiya, who said the decision followed months of work to find a purchaser or an arrangement that would let the mill run on a financially sustainable footing.
“Despite those efforts, we were unable to identify a viable pathway forward,” Tsuchiya said, closing a process that began when the Japanese-owned company listed both Kaitāia mills in March and ran its sale window through late May without securing a deal.
Days before the decision, Northland Regional Council, Far North District Council, and Northland NZ had urged the Government to back a consortium of investors ready to modernise the site, converting it into an upgraded timber processing operation alongside a woody biomass fuel plant that would employ part of the existing workforce.
“That model would require investment by the Government,” Northland Regional Council chairman Pita Tipene said of the proposal, which Acting Prime Minister David Seymour rejected, with JNL confirming the closure the following day.
“Sending the other raw two-thirds overseas without any value added,” is how Workers First Union organiser Marcus Coverdale describes the future of every log entering the site, with the closure breaking an integrated chain in which the top of each log is refined into Triboard and the middle peeled for veneer.
The union counts the Northland Mill as the seventh wood processing facility to close during the current Government’s term, describing a feeling of “abandonment and disbelief” among members who will attend individual consultations before redundancy letters are issued.
“I think Kaitāia itself is slowly going to shut down,” one worker of more than 20 years’ service told the Northland Age, warning of a domino effect of job and business losses across a town of 6,000 people.
The neighbouring Triboard mill, which employs 140 people and generates its own energy from an on-site biomass plant fuelled by wood residues, continues operating, with the sale of that business as a going concern still in process. The outcome ends a search that drew interest from Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, who confirmed in May he was weighing a private bid for the mills, although no offer proved viable.
The Kaitāia closure extends a run of shutdowns across regional New Zealand’s wood processing sector, with the paper line at Kinleith, the Eves Valley Sawmill in Tasman, and the Karioi Pulpmill and Tangiwai Sawmill in Ruapehu all closing amid rising energy costs.
Owned by Japan’s WoodOne, JNL has operated in New Zealand since 1990, investing more than NZ$720 million across forestry and processing and managing 30,000 hectares of certified plantation forest, and the last logs have already run through the Northland Mill line ahead of its 21 August close.
