By JW organization’s own numbers, there were more active JWs in New Zealand in 2011 than five years later (2017).
Time was in this country when average numbers of publishers would surpass the numbers of peak publishers within two to three years tops - a growth trend the organization never failed to highlight.
I am not surprised that, with the stopping of Yearbooks this year ( no 2018 Yearbook), jw.org has taken the opportunity to now provide only truncated worldwide coverage of JW number-crunching activities.
Hence, each country’s peak publisher numbers is provided but average publisher numbers are absent.
Moreover, each country’s peak publisher numbers sits in isolation from previous years - so the only way you learn that the current peak in New Zealand is less than earlier years is by manually checking back through previous hard copies of the organization’s service reports.
This is not what an organization does when membership is flourishing. It is what an organization does when it needs to stall the release of more obvious signs that growth is not occurring. Put another way, it is a sign that in many countries, especially in the West, JWs are simply not growing and in fact, are losing active publishers.