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.”