The Todd Family: How a Quiet Dynasty Turned Cars and Gas Into Billions

The Todd family’s achievement is less any single business than the fact that one privately held company has survived five generations and three complete changes of industry without breaking up. This article explains how the family made its money, how Todd Corporation earns it today, how ownership and governance work when shareholders number in the hundreds, what went wrong in the past decade and what the decline of Taranaki gas means for the dynasty. It is part of the New Zealand Company Stories hub.

Where did the Todd family fortune begin?

The fortune began in 1884, when Scottish immigrant Charles Todd set up a fellmongery and wool scour at Heriot in rural Otago. From there the family moved into stock and station trading, meat exporting and grain, building a regional merchant business before the motor car changed its direction.

The decisive figure was the founder’s son, also Charles, who saw earlier than most that vehicles would replace horses on New Zealand farms. The family began importing cars in about 1912 and established the Todd Motor Company in 1923, with a head office in Wellington. Assembly followed in 1935 at Petone, and after the Second World War the firm became one of the country’s largest car makers, building Chrysler, Hillman and later Mitsubishi models behind the tariff walls that protected local assembly.

Cars led to fuel. In 1929 the Todds began importing petroleum, and in the early 1930s they launched the Europa brand as a locally owned challenger to the international oil majors, at one stage sourcing petrol from the Soviet Union to undercut them. Europa gave the family a distribution network, a taste for the energy trade and a reputation for independence that shaped what came next.

How did the Todds get into oil and gas?

The Todds entered oil and gas through a partnership with Shell and BP formed in the 1950s. The consortium discovered the Kapuni field in Taranaki in 1959 and the giant offshore Maui field in 1969, giving a family firm a minority share of the resources that would power New Zealand for half a century.

The structure was the shrewd part. Exploration is expensive and usually fails, and a family company could not have funded it alone. By taking a minority position beside two of the world’s largest oil companies, the Todds shared the upside of discovery while relying on partners for capital and technical capability. Kapuni began producing in about 1970 and Maui in 1979, and for decades Maui alone supplied the bulk of the country’s gas.

Later fields extended the position. Todd held all of McKee and Mangahewa, the latter now the country’s largest onshore gas field, a 26 per cent share of Pohokura and a small share of Maui. When Shell withdrew from New Zealand in the second half of the 2010s, the long joint venture ended and Todd took full ownership of Kapuni. A family that had started as a junior partner finished as the largest locally owned petroleum company in the country. The broader supply picture is covered in the article on New Zealand’s gas shortage and Methanex.

Why did the family sell Todd Motors?

The family sold Todd Motors to Mitsubishi in 1987 because it could see that government deregulation would end the protected car-assembly industry. Exiting before tariffs fell preserved capital that later assemblers lost, and it is the clearest example of the Todd habit of leaving a business while it still has a buyer.

The timing looks obvious in hindsight and was not at the time. Todd Motors was a household name, a major employer in Porirua and the origin of the family’s modern wealth. The reforming government elected in 1984 was dismantling import licensing, and within about a decade every car assembly plant in New Zealand had closed. The Todds sold to their own technology partner while the plant was still valuable to it.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. The Europa petrol business was sold to BP in the 1970s once the economics of small-scale fuel retailing turned. In 2017 the retail LPG arm of Nova Energy was sold for NZ$192m. Sentiment about a founding business has repeatedly given way to a judgement about where returns would come from over the next thirty years.

How does Todd Corporation make money today?

Todd Corporation makes most of its money from producing natural gas and associated liquids in Taranaki through Todd Energy, and from generating and retailing electricity and gas through Nova Energy. Property development and a portfolio of investments contribute smaller, more variable returns.

According to the group’s 2025 sustainability reporting, the energy businesses look like this:

• Gas production of roughly 35 petajoules a year, about a third of national output, from interests in the Kapuni, Mangahewa, McKee and Pohokura fields.
• About one million barrels of liquids and 40,000 tonnes of LPG a year.
• Around 700 gigawatt-hours of electricity generated, including gas-fired peaking plants at McKee and Junction Road in Taranaki.
• More than 90,000 retail electricity customers and about 30,000 gas customers, making Nova the fifth-largest energy retailer.
• Approximately 580 employees across the group.

The model is vertically integrated in a way few private companies manage. Todd produces gas, burns some of it in its own power stations when wholesale prices are high, sells some to industrial users and retails energy to households under the Nova, Megatel and Wise Prepay brands. When gas is scarce, as it has been since 2024, the producer’s margin rises even as volumes fall, which partly offsets the pressure on the retail side. The mechanics of that squeeze are explained in the piece on the gentailers and the 2024 dry-year crisis.

Who owns and governs Todd Corporation?

Todd Corporation is owned by descendants of Charles Todd, estimated at about 200 family members, and governed by a board that mixes family directors with independent professionals. The chair, David Flacks, and the chief executive, Evan Davies, are both non-family appointments.

For most of the twentieth century the company was run by Todds: the founder’s sons, including Sir Desmond and Sir Bryan Todd, and then Sir John Todd, who chaired the group until he retired in 2011 and who died in 2015 aged 88. Since then the family has moved towards a model common in old European dynasties. Family members such as Mike Todd, a great-grandson of the founder who joined the board in 1996 and became deputy chairman in 2016, represent the shareholders, while executive management is hired from outside.

This arrangement solves one problem and creates another. It removes the risk that the best available Todd is not good enough to run a complex energy company. It also separates a growing, dispersed group of owners from the people making decisions, and those owners have differing needs for dividends, liquidity and risk. With 200 shareholders and no public market for the shares, the company has to manage exits and distributions internally, and it publishes almost nothing about how it does so. The Todd Foundation, established in 1972, is the family’s philanthropic arm, and the group says it has contributed about NZ$20m to community initiatives since 2003.

What were the key strategic turning points?

Four decisions define the family’s history: moving from farming trade into cars before 1920, partnering with Shell and BP for exploration in the 1950s, selling Todd Motors in 1987, and buying out Shell’s Kapuni interest when the major left New Zealand. Each one changed what kind of company Todd was.

The first three were moves into growth or out of decline. The fourth was different in character: a decision to double down on a mature domestic gas business at the moment an international major judged it no longer worth the effort. Todd followed it with heavy investment in Mangahewa, where successive drilling campaigns and an expanded processing plant lifted output, and with gas-fired peaking generation that turned its own gas into higher-value electricity.

A fifth turning point is under way. Nova Energy has moved into renewable generation, including the Te Rāhui solar farm near Taupō, developed with Meridian Energy, whose first stage is 200 megawatts. Todd also operates a small solar plant at Kapuni and has interests in further solar and wind projects, and the group puts its renewable investment at about NZ$125m over five years. That is small beside the gas business, though it shows where the family expects the next era to lie. Meridian’s own position is described in the article on Meridian Energy and the Tiwai Point smelter.

What do the latest numbers show?

The NBR Rich List has valued the Todd family at NZ$3.5bn in both 2025 and 2026, ranking it fifth in 2026 behind the Mowbray brothers, Graeme Hart, Sir Peter Beck and the Goodman family. The figure has been broadly flat for years while other fortunes have grown.

That stagnation is the story. The family was at or near the top of the list from its first edition in 1986 and was long described as the richest in the country. It has since been overtaken by a toy maker, a leveraged-buyout investor and a rocket engineer. Todd Corporation does not publish full accounts for a general audience, so precise profit figures are not reliably available, but business media have reported significant write-downs and losses on some non-core investments in recent years.

Operationally, the group reported total emissions of about 2.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025, down 8 per cent on the year before, a decline that largely reflects lower gas throughput. It has set targets of a 41 per cent cut in emissions by 2030 and net zero across all scopes by 2050. Lower production with higher prices has been the pattern across the Taranaki basin, and Todd, as the largest domestic producer, is both a beneficiary of scarcity pricing and the company most exposed to the basin’s decline.

What went wrong in the past decade?

The past decade brought disappointing diversification and turnover at the top. Several ventures outside energy lost money, the group cycled through senior executives, and the gas reserves underpinning the family’s wealth were revised down across the industry. A 2020s BusinessDesk analysis asked bluntly what had gone wrong.

Todd had used its gas income to diversify into minerals, including resource projects overseas, into healthcare and technology investments, and into property through Todd Property, which developed large residential communities such as Long Bay and Stonefields in Auckland. Property delivered. Some of the resource bets did not, and they consumed capital over many years without reaching production. Since 2022 several senior executives have left, among them Jon Young, Henry Tait and Paul Moore, and the group is now led by Evan Davies, a long-serving executive best known for building its property arm.

The policy environment added to the difficulty. A ban on new offshore exploration permits introduced in 2018 reduced the incentive to look for new fields, and although the present government legislated to reverse it, a discovery made today would take many years to produce. Meanwhile existing fields have underperformed forecasts, leaving industrial customers short and wholesale prices volatile.

Who are the Todds’ competitors and peers?

In gas production Todd competes with OMV, the Austrian group that bought Shell’s New Zealand assets, and with privately owned Greymouth Petroleum. In electricity retail Nova is a small challenger to the four large gentailers. As a dynasty, its peers are other long-lived family and private groups.

The comparison with other owners in this series is instructive. Graeme Hart’s Rank Group is one man’s creation, built with debt in a single career and without a succession structure in public view. The Todds are the opposite: modest leverage, slow accumulation and a diffuse ownership that outlives any individual. Sir Stephen Tindall offers a third route, in which a founder moves much of his holding into a foundation and so decides the succession question himself.

Among New Zealand family firms, a closer cousin is the chocolate maker profiled in the Whittaker’s family brand story, which has also stayed private across generations, though it is far smaller and built on a consumer brand instead of a resource. Across the Tasman, several comparable dynasties appear in the Australia Company Stories hub.

What can founders and CFOs learn from the Todd family?

The Todds show that longevity comes from treating the family company as a pool of capital and not as a particular business. The practical lessons concern partnership, timing of exits and governance once owners outnumber managers.

1. Hold the capital, not the industry. Wool, cars, petrol retailing and gas were each abandoned or reduced when their prospects faded. Loyalty went to the company, never to the product.
2. Take a minority stake beside a stronger partner. The Shell and BP consortium gave a family firm access to discoveries it could never have funded. A small share of something large and well run beat control of something marginal.
3. Sell before the regulation changes. The 1987 exit from car assembly was made while buyers existed. CFOs should ask which current profits depend on a policy that may not last.
4. Separate ownership from management deliberately. Professional executives and independent chairs can coexist with family control if the board roles are clear.
5. Be honest about diversification. New ventures should be judged against simply returning cash to shareholders. Several Todd investments would have failed that test.
6. Plan for liquidity. With hundreds of owners, some will always want out. A private company needs an orderly internal market for its shares.

What happens next for the Todd family?

The next decade will decide whether Todd Corporation becomes an electricity and renewables company with a legacy gas arm, or a shrinking gas producer distributing its remaining cash. The answer depends on Taranaki geology, government energy policy and the patience of the family’s shareholders.

In the near term, scarcity favours Todd. New Zealand needs gas to firm its hydro-dominated grid in dry years, industrial users are competing for a falling supply, and the government has been considering importing liquefied natural gas as a backstop. Each additional well at Mangahewa or Kapuni is valuable in that market, and Todd’s peaking plants earn most when the system is tight. Whether the company commits large sums to new drilling will signal how long it believes the gas era has left.

Beyond that, the solar projects with Meridian and the growth of Nova’s retail base point to a company gradually replacing molecules with electrons. The harder question is internal. A fifth generation of owners, many with no working connection to the business, will have to decide whether to keep their wealth pooled in one unlisted company. Every earlier generation chose to stay together, and the family’s record suggests it will again, although it has never faced the choice with its main asset in structural decline.

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