China cleaning up Botswana market

“Our biggest opportunity for growth is the Chinese market,” says Gareth Lendrum, general manager of SDV Botswana. “Initially a lot of Botswana’s construction contracts were broadly distributed among countries such as China, India, Arabia and the like. But China is now cleaning up as they come in at least 20% cheaper than anyone else. Some of these Chinese companies will not buy anything locally, but import everything, even a simple commodity such as a screw from China. This is benefiting freight forwarders but not the local economy,” he explains. An additional problem is that local Botswana companies are not represented on other continents and therefore are unable to handle global business. They also are unable to handle the volumes, due to a lack of resources and skills. SDV Botswana often has to arrange to fly in emergency goods such as medicines and anti-retrovirals, which increases costs. Lendrum also says that Botswana Railways has been a problem, due to the lack of infrastructure: “Botswana Railways didn’t have enough equipment and has now started a joint venture, Gabcon, with Transnet and are to trying to resolve this problem. But they need to investigate their charges, as they have a detrimental effect on imports due to delays in delivery, causing importers headaches when trying to plan. “The result of this is more cargo being moved by road, which increases costs to our clients, but it offers a more reliable delivery time and more efficient planning can be implemented. “There is a very strong call in Botswana to privatise the container depot, to enable the delivery of containers to be handled more efficiently. SDV participates with governments in many countries in West and East Africa to manage its depots and has been very successful in this area,” Lendrum notes.