Johannesburg - Iveco South Africa, in a joint venture with the Larimar Group, is on track to commence semi-knocked-down (SKD) assembly of trucks and buses from the middle of next year at a R600 million facility being built in Rosslyn near Pretoria.
Bob Lowden, Iveco SA’s chief executive, said this week that the plant would assemble its full South African product line-up, except vans, with a capacity of about 5 000 units a year.
The plant would produce right- and left-hand drive vehicles, with the left-hand drive models exported to markets in sub-Saharan Africa.
Lowden said the plant would create about 1 000 jobs. Recruitment of top management was under way and would percolate down to blue collar workers, the last to be employed.
Iveco has a 60 percent stake in the assembly plant and the Larimar Group holds the rest.
Larimar Group is 42.6 percent black-owned. Its businesses include Putco bus transport services, bus manufacturing company Dubigeon Body and Coach, and component refurbishment firm Voms Industrial.
Lowden said Italy’s Iveco was one of the few major manufacturers with no local production. Assembling vehicles locally would save it 14 percent import duty, provided SKD production commenced with a bare chassis.
He said Iveco had raised its share of the extra heavy commercial vehicle market to about 4 percent last year, from 0.7 percent, and expected to grow it to 7 percent by the end of 2014.
Lowden lived through the industrial unrest in the UK in the late 1970s and said the labour environment in South Africa was “a bit of déjà vu for me”.
The industrial unrest in South Africa was not as extreme as it had been in the UK but “the end game” was that manufacturing in the UK was almost wiped out.
