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Auckland Council The Auckland Plan

Focus area 4: Leverage Auckland’s position to support growth in exports

​Auckland has an important role as New Zealand's main connection point for international and domestic markets. We need to use this role to increase exports.

Opportunities available in Auckland due to its scale, facilities and diverse population include:

  • diverse and more specialised labour markets
  • scope for specialised production, which increases trade between firms
  • access to international markets which provides more scope for firms to benefit from scale economies
  • opportunities to stimulate the development and spread of new ideas, technologies and ways of doing business
  • business contacts in migrants' countries of origin
  • a variety of specialised cultural and recreation opportunities.

Auckland however still has a primarily inwardly-focused economy driven by consumption, real estate, and domestically-focused services.

The image below shows the top five New Zealand export markets in 2017.

How this can be done

We need to move into creating and exporting a wide range of sustainably developed products, and more knowledge-intensive goods and services based on innovation and productivity growth.

Focusing on a broader mix of exports will mean a wider spread of innovation opportunities, and will require a wider range of skills.

There are a number of emerging and evolving economic sectors including:

  • tourism - for more information read Auckland 2025 (PDF 8.1 MB)
  • food and beverage
  • high technology
  • marine
  • screen and creative industries
  • finance
  • tertiary education and training.

Encouraging these export-linked new sectors will increase the resilience of Auckland's economy and also make New Zealand less vulnerable to fluctuations in commodity prices.

We also need to ensure the ongoing sustainable growth of sectors that are already internationally competitive, as described on The Tripartite Economic Alliance page.

Related information