Increasing vessels and earning trust is key to FE trade growth

A SHORTAGE of vessel capacity on the westbound route is restricting burgeoning trade growth with China. That’s the view of John Roodt, director of clearing and forwarding company Global Reach, which has over the past three years established a firm foothold in the market. “China’s ports appear to operate efficiently. They can handle the volumes but the problem is that there are not enough vessels to cope with the volumes.” And trade imbalance is the big challenge, says Roodt. “Imports by far outstrip exports from SA. In addition much of what comes out of the east is transported in containers while much of what China needs is raw materials. And this presents a conflict of availability in terms of the types of vessels required.” As a relative newcomer in the market, Roodt believes that gaining the trust of traders in the Far East is critical. “It’s not going to take one phone call to the Far East. You have to go where the business is and the business is in China,” says Roodt. For this reason, Global Reach has set up an office in Hong Kong and is able to coordinate exports from the Far East into SA. The company also assists local traders in South Africa to source products in China with multilingual staff on hand to assist. Director of CX Pallets, which manufactures heavy-duty recyclable cardboard pallets, Jan Vreken agrees that it’s important to visit the country in order to build relationships. His company has seen 150% growth in turnover year-on-year, with a 30-70 split in favour of seafreight over airfreight. “Clients in China especially have welcomed our products as they have restrictions on the disposal of wooden pallets and our pallets can be sold to recycling companies. We have received a bigthumbs- up from Hong Kong as well as China.”