Southland-based Niagara Sawmilling Company has tapped Quebec-based Comact to supply a NZ $115 million sawmill at its Kennington site on the outskirts of Invercargill, the largest capital commitment in its 91-year history. That is according to managing director Ross Richardson, who said the new mill will more than double Niagara’s output and lift log intake to more than 500,000 tonnes a year when it comes online in 2027.
Wood Central understands that the brownfield project will see Comact supply a new log infeed with a Versa ring debarker, a Hybrid Sawline combining triple profiling, circular saws, a splitting module, and a 7-foot CETEC bandsaw, alongside a full trimmer line with an AI-powered TrimExpert optimiser and Smart Vision systems integrated into the OPER8 industrial IoT platform. Comact’s Rotorua-based fabrication partner, Lakeland Steel, handles engineering, fabrication, and installation locally, with equipment delivery scheduled for late 2026 and commissioning in 2027.
Comact first announced the Niagara contract in December, with Richardson at the time describing it as a long-term strengthening of the mill’s reliability and fibre optimisation. Comact CEO Simon Potvin said the Canadian group was “fully committed to delivering this project on time and on budget, with the highest standards of engineering, execution, and customer support.”
Lakeland Steel general manager Cory Leatherland described the Comact-Lakeland split as delivering “world-class technologies backed by local execution,” drawing on Lakeland’s nearly 50-year track record in custom machinery for wood processing and material handling. The Rotorua fabricator runs projects across New Zealand and Australia with a team of more than 70 skilled staff.
Alongside the Kennington build, Niagara has acquired 94-year-old Waikato processor Ōtorohanga Timber Company, adding a North Island production base and a wider product range for domestic and export customers. The OTC deal is the Richardson group’s second acquisition in five years, following the 2020 absorption of Winton-based Craigpine in Southland.
Group sales manager Jamie Barton said the combined Niagara-OTC offer would strengthen the group’s market position in New Zealand and Australia, with a deeper product range for both domestic and export customers. “With OTC’s product mix complementing that of Niagara’s, we are now able to offer an even wider range of quality timber products to both our domestic and export customers,” Barton said.
Niagara has been wholly owned by the Richardson family since 1954, and the Kennington and Ōtorohanga moves represent the next step in the group’s long-term strategy to extract more value from every log it processes. Richardson said the rebuild would let Niagara “remanufacture more premium timber products in Southland and add value to logs locally, rather than seeing them exported and processed overseas.”
The expansion comes as New Zealand’s log export trade runs through a fifth year of Chinese property-sector headwinds, with China absorbing 61 per cent of New Zealand’s timber exports and softwood demand across the region eroding against falling real-estate investment and stiffer competition from Canadian, Swedish and Finnish supply, as Wood Central reported.
NZ log exporters themselves have been scaling back volumes amid rising diesel prices and Singapore bunker fuel trading above US$1,100 per tonne through Q1 2026, as Wood Central reported. Niagara’s $115 million Comact commitment is the largest capital bet yet by a South Island sawmiller to route that volume through domestic mills rather than shipping raw logs to China’s mega ports, even as New Zealand simultaneously leans harder into its fast-growing radiata pine trade with India.
