Juken New Zealand managing director Hisayuki Tsuboi is weighing employee and union feedback against bids from potential buyers, with the formal consultation period for the Kaitāia mills closed since 22 May and a decision on whether to sell or shut down both sites now weeks away. About 100 Far North residents packed Te Ahu Hall in Kaitāia on Saturday, with long-serving Juken workers, Workers First Union representatives, iwi, and politicians united behind the message that the Northland Mill and Triboard plant could survive under the right ownership, provided a credible buyer surfaces before the company makes its call.
“This is a deliberate process and no decisions have been made at this stage,” Tsuboi told the NZ Herald, with JNL set to spend several weeks assessing worker feedback and incoming bids before testing whether a viable pathway exists for continued mill operations.
Workers First union organiser Marcus Coverdale, who hosted the Saturday meeting, said losing the two mills would have a “devastating effect” on the Far North town, with the 200 direct jobs feeding dozens of contractors and the small-business economy across Kaitāia. The two-month sale and consultation process closed at 4pm NZST on 22 May, covering both the formal worker consultation and the buyer-interest window.
One delegate with 27 years at the mill, and a survivor of five rounds of redundancies, warned that an extended closure risked the permanent loss of decades of technical knowledge built up around Triboard — a world-class engineered wood panel that adds significant export value above raw log shipments. The worker argued that closing the operation would reduce New Zealand to exporting raw logs for value to be added offshore, a low-margin position any timber-producing country can occupy.
“This product is world-class,” the delegate said, with the meeting hearing that the financial gap between exporting raw radiata pine logs and exporting finished engineered panels was the single most consequential variable for the Kaitāia operation.
Several speakers expressed optimism that the Government would intervene if no commercial buyer materialised, building on Northland MP Grant McCallum’s earlier confirmation that a consortium of New Zealand-based investors was already in discussions with Juken. Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown also confirmed interest in a private bid in the days before the tender closed.
The meeting also surfaced the structural costs, including the mills’ use of around a third of Kaitāia’s town water supply alongside some of the country’s highest electricity prices, that shaped JNL’s earlier conclusion that the operation could not be made sustainable under existing ownership.
The Kaitāia mills opened 37 years ago and have been Japanese-owned since, manufacturing sawn timber at the Northland Mill and engineered wood panels at the adjacent Triboard plant for residential and commercial construction across New Zealand. Coverdale told the meeting that Aotearoa had already lost six major wood processing sites in the past two years, including Kinleith’s paper machine, Eves Valley, Karioi, and Tangiwai, and could not afford to lose two more.
Tsuboi has not set a public deadline for a final decision, with the future of one of the Far North’s largest private workforces — 200 timber jobs across 37 years of Triboard and sawn-timber manufacturing — now resting on the offers received before the 22 May close, while JNL’s third New Zealand operation in the Wairarapa continues unaffected.
