New Zealand’s exporters are diverting shipments originally bound for China into other markets as demand from the country’s biggest trading partner cools, an official from the antipodean country’s central bank said Thursday.

“We’ve certainly seen many of our exporters looking at, and actively diverting, product that they would have been looking to put into China, into other markets as well,” said Karen Silk, assistant governor at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. “It is not the only export market.”

Silk’s remarks reflect how the slowdown in China’s economy has rippled through to businesses elsewhere. Growth in the world’s second-largest economy slowed to multi-year lows in the second quarter, weighed down by tepid domestic demand and a prolonged real estate slump. She spoke to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday, a day after the central bank delivered its second consecutive interest rate hike to curb inflation.

China has been New Zealand’s largest trading partner and top market, buying roughly a quarter of New Zealand’s total exports over the 12 months ending in July. New Zealand’s China-bound goods in 2025 were close to double that of the next two biggest export markets — the U.S. and Australia — combined, according to the New Zealand China Council.

New Zealand supplies more than half of China’s dairy imports, a dominance built under a bilateral trade agreement since 2008, that later granted duty-free access for all its dairy products in 2024. Any sustained pullback in Chinese demand tests how quickly that trade can be diversified.

The Middle East war and the resulting shipping disruption through the Strait of Hormuz drove up global commodity costs, further squeezing Beijing’s own appetite for commodity imports.

Elevated global commodity prices, including for wheat, have handed New Zealand’s pasture-based farmers a relative cost advantage even as China-bound volumes soften, Silk said.

“In some ways, New Zealand actually benefits from a price perspective when we have those supply factors going on globally,” she said.

The RBNZ raised its key interest rate by a quarter percentage point to 2.75% on Wednesday to combat inflation, and signaled another increase could follow by year’s end.

The chief executive of drugmaker Zealand Pharma sought to calm investors about the latest trial results, which showed patients lost less weight than expected and prompted the stock to fall more than 35%.

Speaking to CNBC, CEO Adam Steensberg criticized what he called the “weight loss Olympics,” where markets and companies focus too heavily on the amount of weight lost, rather than on factors such as staying on the medicine long-term and dealing with side effects.

The world doesn’t need these products that amount to very high rates of weight loss, he said, referring to medicines developed by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. The latest trial had also not been optimized for maximum weight loss, he added.

“I need to focus on what the patients need, not what the current market like to see,” Steensberg said. “We have for a long time called to end the weight loss Olympics.”

Zealand is developing the drug petrelintide in partnership with Swiss pharma heavyweight Roche. Mid-stage trial results released after the closing bell on Thursday showed the drug led to an average weight reduction of 10.7% over 42 weeks. Analysts had largely expected between 13% and 20% weight loss.

Shares of Zealand were last seen trading 35% lower, on track for their worst day ever and the lowest close since August 2023. Shares of Roche fell 3%.

Addressing weight maintenance, rather than losing the most amount of weight quickly, has emerged as a way for companies to differentiate themselves as they try to enter the lucrative weight-loss drug market, which has been estimated to be worth as much as $150 billion by 2030.

Steensberg said he was “extremely certain” there would be a shift in the industry “towards tolerability,” referring to how well patients can cope with side effects of the medications.

“I think very, very soon, people start to realize that it’s not about that weight loss number, it’s about how you achieve that weight loss number.”

“If you then look into real world, you will actually discover that most patients who are on treatment today with the current products never get to those numbers that we see in clinical studies,” because “in a real-world setting, people cannot tolerate it,” he said, referring to Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s drugs already on the market.

Petrelintide is an amylin analog that targets a hormone produced in the pancreas that affects appetite and slows gastric emptying, rather than the GLP-1 or GIP gut hormones targeted by weight-loss treatments currently on the market, such as Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound.

A majority of patients on Novo’s Wegovy experience some form of side effects, most commonly gastrointestinal, such as nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. Most are mild to moderate and…

India and New Zealand on Monday announced a free trade deal that will make a majority of the goods trade between the two countries duty free.

The trade pact, which will be reviewed after one year, will be signed in the first half of next year.

“This historic agreement eliminates and reduces tariffs on 95% of New Zealand’s exports,” New Zealand Trade and Investment Minister Todd McClay said in a statement, adding that nearly 57% of exports from the country will become duty-free in India “from day one.”

The pacific island nation will also invest $20 billion in India over next 15 years and allow mobility of professionals, skilled labor and students from India to New Zealand, according to a statement from India.

India has also secured a “zero duty market” on all its exports to New Zealand that includes textiles, apparel, leather, footwear, marine products, gems and jewelry, handicrafts, engineering goods and automobiles.

 “Today this Free Trade Agreement is about building trade around people and launching opportunities,” India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said.

The deal will give Indian businesses and youth an opportunity to “learn, work and grow on a global stage,” he added.

India will eliminate tariff on sheep meat, wool, coal and nearly all of forestry and wood exports. New Delhi will also allow duty-free access for dairy and other food ingredients for re-exports.

However, to ensure protection to farmers and the domestic industry, New Delhi has said the market access excludes dairy, coffee, milk, cream, cheese, yoghurts, whey, caseins, onions, sugar, spices, edible oils, rubber.

India’s trade pact with New Zealand “provides policy certainty and lowers input costs for manufacturing, creating a vision for long-term economic resilience,” said Ranjeet Mehta, chief executive officer and secretary general, of Indian industry body PHDCCI.

Bilateral merchandise trade between the two countries stood at $1.3 billion in 2024–25 while total trade in goods and services was $2.4 billion in 2024. “The FTA provides a stable and predictable framework to unlock the full potential of this relationship,” India’s commerce ministry said.

The FTA marks India’s third deal this year following a free trade agreement with the UK in July and another pact with Oman earlier this month.

The deals comes at a time when the U.S., New Delhi’s largest trading partner, has levied 50% tariffs on its goods exports, that includes 25% duties for India’s purchases of Russian oil.

India, which has ambitions to become an export powerhouse, has been looking to diversify its exports to make up for the impact of U.S. tariffs.

After steep tariffs came into force in August, India’s exports to the…

Zealand Pharma on Thursday outlined an ambitious five-year strategy for its anti-obesity portfolio Thursday, spotlighting how growing competition from smaller players is tightening the race for market leaders Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly as more of these medicines near market entry.

The new strategy, “Metabolic Frontier 2030,” comes as Zealand shares have dropped 29% year to date as investors are betting the market will fragment, with fewer singular winners than they were 18 months ago at the peak of the weight loss drug frenzy.

Ahead of its Capital Markets Day on Thursday, the Danish drugmaker said it now targets five drug launches, at least 10 clinical pipeline programs and industry-leading cycle times by 2030.

The strategy will combine strategic partnerships, accelerated drug development, and expanded research capabilities to build the world’s most valuable metabolic health pipeline, Zealand Pharma said in a statement. 

One of Zealand’s most promising drugs under development is petrelintide which targets the pancreatic amylin hormone — different from the GLP-1 gut hormone targeted by Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound. The drug, developed in partnership with Roche, has shown more moderate side effects than current injectables in early-stage clinical trials.

Mid-stage data on petrelintide are due early next year, while data on its dual GLP-1 agonist called survodutide will read out throughout 2026.

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly currently dominate the market for weight loss drugs and have a head-start on their competition, having developed the only Food and Drug Administration approved anti-obesity drugs to date. But as the the market takes shape, more players are wanting in on the lucrative business which analysts predict could be worth as much as $150 billion annually by the start of next decade.

While Novo Nordisk shares are having their worst year ever in 2025, down 50% year to date, Eli Lilly has become an investor-favorite as the Indiana-based company’s Zepbound and Mounjaro has shown more pronounced weight loss than Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy. Lilly has also taken the lead on U.S. new prescriptions.

On Thursday, Lilly released the first late-stage data on its next generation weight loss drug retatrutide. It works differently from existing injections and appears to be more effective as it targets three different appetite-regulating hormones, as opposed to one or two like Wegovy and Zepbound.

Lilly’s stock has held up better as investor see its pipeline as more likely to translate to financial returns, and the company also has a diverse porfolio that goes beyond diabetes and weight loss treatments.

Meanwhile, Zealand shares, like Novo’s peaked in mid-2024 but gains moderated as bets are also placed elsewhere. Only last month, it paused development of an GLP-1/GLP-2 dual agonist called dapiglutide, citing a crowded market for obesity drugs. Instead, Zealand indicated that it would focus…