New Zealand manufacturing sales activity rose in the June quarter as meat and dairy product processing recovered from a sharp decline at the start of the year.

Total seasonally and price adjusted sales rose 2.8 per cent in the three months ended June 30, turning around a 0.7 per cent decline in the March period, Statistics New Zealand said.

That was led by an 8.6 per cent jump in the volume of meat and dairy product sales, recovering from a 6.7 per cent drop in March.

"This quarter's large rise in meat and dairy manufacturing sales followed a sizeable fall in the March 2016 quarter," business indicators manager Tehseen Islam said.

"Despite some large movements in recent quarters, the sales volumes for meat and dairy have increased just slightly from where they were in early 2014."

These new statistics show non-metallic mineral product sales, which spans glass, cement and concrete manufacturing, climbed 9.5 per cent on a price-adjusted basis and was up 9 per cent in value terms.

In unadjusted terms, non-metallic mineral product sales rose 8.6 per cent to $896 million in the June quarter from a year earlier, an increase of 8.2 per cent in volume terms.

Across all sectors, manufacturing sales rose 1.2 per cent to $24.38 billion in the three months ended June 30 from the same period a year earlier, and was up 6 per cent in volume terms.

Closing stocks of raw materials shrank 2.1 per cent to $3.9b from June 2015, while finished good inventories were down 8.4 per cent to $8.51b.

Seasonally and inflation adjusted petroleum and coal products sales fell 3.8 per cent in the quarter and were down 2.2 per cent including price changes.

The value sales sank 16 per cent to $1.71b from June 2015, though the volume of sales rose 13 per cent, due to cheap international energy prices.