The growth of the port of Walvis Bay and its corridors has attracted one of the biggest logistics networks in Africa – Bolloré Africa Logistics. SDV, which is part of the Bolloré Africa Logistics network, recently opened its office in Namibia. Based in Paris, the Bolloré group is present in 42 African countries, with over 200 agencies on the continent. It has a fleet of more than 5 800 vehicles, and five million square metres of warehouses, container yards, workshops and offices. Its Southern African regional offices are in Johannesburg, and are headed by Philippe Deneve. Willy van Meenen, who ran SDV’s operations in Gabon, is responsible for setting up the Namibian operations. The new offices in Walvis Bay are open and operating, with the first staff joining the company at the beginning of April this year. The main focus at the start will be on shipping, ship’s agency, freight forwarding and logistics. These are the services for which there is the biggest demand. “We believe in the development of Namibia as a gateway, and we are here because our clients want us here.” Van Meenen says there has been a constant stream of enquiries since news first broke that SDV was opening up in Namibia. This is heartening, as the decision to open in Walvis Bay was made “before the economic crisis”, which has brought with it the closure of Namdeb’s diamond mines for three months, an expected fall-off of copper exports from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the suspension of expansion plans by some mines. “We are still confident. There are a lot of uranium projects in the pipe-line and we are aiming at becoming their service provider,” he says. The fact that one of the new uranium mines also has a French origin will work in SDV’s favour, he believes. Moving from an operation with 250 staff in Gabon to an empty office in Walvis Bay with his wife and young daughter is proving to be an interesting challenge for the highly experienced Belgian Van Meenen. He has also worked in the Ivory Coast, Kinshasa, and Miami in the United States, where he established a branch of a shipping company. “Setting up a company is a special experience. Normally, when you arrive at a new job, the structures are already in place. This is very different,” he says. Not least of the challenges is the language and he has both Afrikaans and German phrase books on his desk. It’s all part of the high levels of service that he says SDV will provide. With the African network already in place through Bolloré Africa Logistics, the focus will be “on the quality of the service that we give to clients. We will do more than we have to do,” he promises.
