Garment specialist plans to expand scope of Africa operations

ALAN PEAT
IN ITS three-year history in South Africa, Sri-Lankan-based Expolanka Freight has recorded “substantial growth”, according to SA director Shehan Seneviratne. It’s a highly-specialised forwarding operation with a focus on ready-made garments and textile products – a natural evolution from the Expolanka Group’s main line of business. “However, in a highly diversified market such as South Africa, it is only natural that the movement of textiles is not the only commodity in which we are involved,” says Seneviratne. With its head office in Sri Lanka, the group has 24 of its own offices in Asia, Africa and the Middle-East and is well represented in Europe, USA and the Far East. It African network includes branches in seven countries – Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania, Mauritius, Madagascar - and offices in Johannesburg and Durban. “With our significant presence in the Eastern and sub-Saharan regions of Africa, we are able to provide our customers with an ‘end to end’ logistics solution for their freight needs within Africa,” says Seneviratne. “We have grown to a staff of nine in Johannesburg,” Seneviratne told FTW, “and on September 1 we opened our own office in Durban. “Apart from our growing customer base in this country, we also do business, in Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland and Botswana. Evidence of our growth over the past three years in South Africa is the fact that we are now ranked amongst the largest textile shippers of MSC and Safmarine out of Southern Africa to the USA,” he added. While the USA and Europe are its main export destinations, the company’s imports originate mainly from Far Eastern countries such as China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. “We are also actively developing our business to and from India – and the 2005 IATA rankings placed Expolanka’s Indian office at No. 3 amongst 245 registered freight forwarders in India.” Seneviratne is upbeat about the future – with the company planning to open offices in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town and to diversify into the movement of other commodities.