PHOTO: NZ’s Most Secretive Billionaire Empire Isn’t About Toys Anymore – It’s Revolutionising Global Housing from a Factory in China. BLOOMBERG
🧸 ZURU: Not Just Toys Anymore…
ZURU – the Kiwi toy giant founded by siblings Nick, Mat, and Anna Mowbray – has spent years wowing kids worldwide with Bunch O Balloons and Robo Fish. But the company’s next chapter has absolutely nothing to do with toys.
Instead, it’s setting its sights on revolutionising global housing – and it’s doing it at scale, speed, and with full automation. The Mowbrays have just unveiled a massive automated prefab housing factory in China – and it could disrupt the way the world builds homes.
Watch the video that’s blowing minds across the property and tech sectors:
🏭 Inside the Robo-Factory for Houses
Forget construction sites swarming with tradies. ZURU’s housing facility looks more like a Tesla Gigafactory. Robotics, AI, and next-gen logistics combine to produce fully built, precision-engineered prefab houses – at a pace the traditional industry can’t even dream of.
The plant:
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Produces components for full homes in days.
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Uses robotic arms and conveyor systems to streamline every step.
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Runs with minimal human input.
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Is capable of producing a new house every 25 minutes once fully scaled.
It’s not just about faster builds. It’s about consistent quality, less waste, and lower costs. And all from a company better known for water balloons than weatherboards.
The owners of a toy company have been named NZ’s wealthiest people
🇳🇿 A Kiwi Legacy Built Abroad
While ZURU operates primarily out of Shenzhen, China, its core DNA remains proudly New Zealand-made. The Mowbray siblings hail from Cambridge, and their family legacy could now extend far beyond toys. The pivot to housing reveals a deeper ambition: to solve the global housing affordability crisis using tech and scale.
Imagine:
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Entire suburbs built in a fraction of the time.
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Housing costs slashed through automation.
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A serious contender to disrupt global property developers.
💬 “We’re Not a Toy Company Anymore”
ZURU co-founder Nick Mowbray has made it clear in interviews: the toy business was just the start. The housing division is now backed by years of R&D, massive capital investment, and a vision to reshape the world’s cities.
And let’s be real: if a toy company from New Zealand can industrialise housing production before the rest of the world – that’s one hell of a story.
Billionaires’ move – The Mowbray siblings now own Kim Dotcom’s former mansion.
🏘️ Is New Zealand Ready?
The big question: will we see ZURU’s housing system used in NZ anytime soon?
With the country battling a housing supply and affordability crisis, ZURU’s high-speed prefab technology could be the solution we’ve been waiting for. But bureaucratic red tape, building consent issues, and tall poppy syndrome may slow its rollout here.
Still, if the overseas model proves successful, the pressure to adopt these smarter, faster building methods in Aotearoa will only grow.
🔮 The Future of Housing Is Here – And It’s Not What You Think
ZURU’s pivot to prefab housing isn’t a gimmick. It’s a long-term bet that automation will do to building what it did to manufacturing and transport. And they’re not alone – the likes of Tesla, ICON, and Japanese prefab giants are already circling this space.
But ZURU’s fully autonomous facility might just leapfrog them all.
The legacy of ZURU might not be in kids’ toyboxes – but in the homes we live in.