New Zealand Mint/Agoro Mint vs. Issuing entity

Good Morning everyone,

I had a thought when looking at all the new coins produced by New Zealand Mint (Agoro now). I'm not trying to start another long thread about Niue, lol, but that is only country they really make Collector coins for. 

I notice that on every single new coin being added, they are listed as the mint: New Zealand Mint (Te Kamupene Whakanao o Aotearoa), Auckland, New Zealand, which I feel is slightly misleading. I know on the Agoro website, everything on there says made in China, so I am fairly certain they have everything minted at some mint in China and then package them and sell them, as distributors/retailers not an actual mint like Scottsdale Mint for example. 

Now a similar company, CIT based in Liechtenstein also doesn't mint coins themselves there in Liechtenstein, but they are designers/distributors for their products made for Palau, Mongolia, Cook Islands, etc. Now CIT is listed here on Numista as an “Issuing Entity”, not an actual mint itself, and often no mint is listed as it isn't publicly known. 

Based on this logic, I feel like NZ Mint is in the same situation as CIT, and should therefore be classified as an issuing entity/company rather than a mint itself, thus changing the thousands of Niue coins out there released by them. I don't know for sure if NZ mint ever did mint coins in New Zealand in the past a long time ago, as it is not very clear and there is no mention of them having a mint or any images that would prove it in the history section of both Agoro and NZ mint's websites. 

I went ahead and asked the referee for Niue, al-Bakuvi about this and he said he agrees and thinks we should get the administration and fellow referees' thoughts on this as well. He also said that on some coins/medals the country of manufacture is Singapore as well. 

Anyways, I just figured I'd make a post here about it and see what other people think, and if so get this corrected in the catalogue. 

Best,

Parker

Hello,

I can do that using the robot, but let's wait for other opinions, I do not want to go back and forth with such big change.

If a mint doesn't mint it's not a mint. A mint being a place where predominantly money (coins for circulation) is made.

Have you send them an e-mail asking about where they make their products (precisely or at least roughly) or if they ever made them locally?

From their site discussing US tariffs:

Moving forward:

• Products made in China and shipped to a U.S. address will be subject to import duties, no matter their value or purchase date. 
• Effigised products (such as trading coins, standard coins, and foils) made in China will now incur a 27.5% tariff under the bullion exemption. 
• Effigised products made outside China will remain tariff-free. 
• Non-effigised products (like medallions and miniatures) made in China may face tariffs of up to 173% (Update: This has been reduced to 58% as of May 14th 2025), depending on classification. 
• Non-effigised products made in Singapore, the EU, and New Zealand will incur a 10% baseline tariff. 

So China, EU countries, Singapore and New Zealand, maybe others.

Yes, ok, I agree we should definitely wait until we know for sure to make such a big change to the site.

No, I have not yet sent them an email asking, but I can certainly do (or one of you guys can as well) to ask them about where they make their products (if any in NZ), and we can see how much information they even give us.

I know they say: “Effigised products (such as trading coins, standard coins, and foils) made in China” which refers to everything with the Niue effigy on the obverse, and “Non-effigised products made in Singapore, the EU, and New Zealand” so products that are not coins. They don't mention where a small bit of “Effigised products made outside China" will be made at, but I would assume mostly Singapore. They have this baseline chart here, which I assume covers 99% of their products, including only China and Singapore, so either way we know for sure that either all or a VAST majority are produced outside of NZ. 

Still not sure about the older coins and products made decades ago, since they've been releasing coins since 2001, but we can at least be sure that anything recent/newly released is NOT minted in New Zealand.

freeze_coins

, but we can at least be sure that anything recent/newly released is NOT minted in New Zealand.

Can we? How?

You're right, we don't know for sure. I just looked through their entire new releases page and everything is made in China (a couple in Singapore). 

I was incorrect though, as I did find at least one on their website that says manufactured in New Zealand: 

This solid gold coin. Looking through then, I think a common theme is specialty products that are either irregularly shaped, colorized, etc. they have minted in China (or Singapore), which is the majority of their products now, but the few small pure gold items they do actually mint in New Zealand. I guess the original New Zealand mint was just for stuff like that, however now they have grown so much they expanded everything that's not a small, round,  non-colorized coin they've outsourced to other countries. 

As we can see on their original website, it is just their pure bullion products (which they have just a few still on there) that is made by the NZ mint IN New Zealand, everything else is not. 

I don't know at this point in their history if they have made more stuff in or outside of NZ, with the rate their making all their collector coins today, it might very well be that more have been made abroad than in NZ. I don't know then how we would go about changing the categorization on Numista, other than going by hand for each coin and checking where it was made, since I still believe we shouldn't put the mint as Auckland when it was minted in Singapore or China. 

I don't know exactly what we should do, let me know if anyone has any ideas, since I know it would take a LONG time to go through every NZ mint Niue coin on here and see where it was actually made.

It's very complicated and probably impossible to figure out but we no longer believe the New Zealand Mint isn't a Mint?

Just a thought, I'm sure the government of Niue knows exactly where all 7,690+ Niue “coins” were made. Maybe they could give us a list of those made at the New Zealand mint.  😇