The Population is Growing, But Not Evenly

When considering your store network planning and town planning projects, you might like to keep in mind ...

The New Zealand population is growing, but not evenly across all age groups

During the 2006 – 2013 inter-census period, the New Zealand population increased by +214,000 people, a +5.3%increase over 2006. Given this inter-census period spanned 7-years due to a delay arising from the Christchurch earthquakes (usually every 5-years), the latest growth factor is well under <1%pa ... this is relatively slow compared to a more usual growth factor of 1%-1.5%pa in past years.

Growth that did occur has favoured older age-groups. The breakdown by 5-yearly age groups shows where the growth occurred:

Clearly in recent years the strong majority of new growth occurred in 45+year groups, and especially in the 65+yrs group. This is not so much growth as redistribution of the population, reflecting the underlying trend in an aging population common to many western world countries.

And looking forward 20-years, there are some broad trends identifiable:

• You can see that the 65+ yr group is going to continue to grow substantially – look at all of the growth in the current 45-64yrs groups that is going to move into the 65+ group in the next 20-years... worth well over half of all expected growth.
• On the other hand, "mature adults in the 40-64yr groups, and "young adults" in the 15-39yrs groups, are going to have lower levels of increase – look at the mixed levels of increases and decreases occurring throughout the current 0-39yrs groups.
• And children <15 years are expected to achieve limited growth – the New Zealand trend for births is a slow decline in absolute numbers progressively lowering the growth factor in children... worth just 4% of all expected growth.

The following chart from Statistics NZ illustrates this long-term aging trend.

If you are selling product/services into these age groups, you can see which ones to target for size and growth.