Bioscience gives a healthy injection to New Zealand's Economy

Embargoed until 10:45am – 17 February 2012

Human health and natural products are an important focus of this country's bioscience sector, Statistics New Zealand said today. This result comes from the Bioscience Survey 2011, which found that of 474 organisations using bioscience, just over half were applying bioscience in these ways. “Human health and natural products include goods such as dietary supplements, skin care products, and natural foods with health claims. The bioscience sector supports a variety of New Zealand’s important industries,” science and technology manager Hamish Hill said.

“Lots of organisations have bioscience as only a part of their business so it’s hard to say exactly how much the country is earning from it. But what we do know is that purely bioscience-based organisations earned $677 million last year, over half of that from exports.”

Around 150 organisations identified bioscience as their primary focus. They generated an average profit of $640,000 from bioscience work. This compares with an average profit of $117,000 for all organisations in New Zealand.

These ‘core’ bioscience organisations employed nearly 2,000 people for bioscience work. They tend to be small organisations, with over two-thirds having less than 10 employees. Mr Hill said the economic impact of bioscience also includes 330 other organisations that don’t have bioscience as their primary focus, but do use it in research or manufacturing.

“If we take a broad view of all the organisations using bioscience in some way, they earned $40 billion last year. Clearly that’s not all attributable to bioscience, but it does demonstrate that a large section of the economy is involved in the sector. And two-thirds of the organisations are planning to release new products in the next two years.”

This data is from the Bioscience Survey 2011, which provides information on the bioscience sector. It covers areas such as aquaculture, medical testing, microbes, and horticulture, which have applications in diverse fields including health foods, wine and beer manufacturing, animal and plant breeding, as well as in biotechnology.

Geoff Bascand

Government Statistician

17 February 2012

END

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