Simplification and uniformity crucial

South Africa’s logistics industry, reportedly responsible for almost 14% of the country’s GDP, cries out for simplification, uniformity of procedures and processes and a massive upgrade to enable an ageing infrastructure to cope with the twenty-first-century demands being made of it. Bulk shippers, and perhaps coal terminals in particular, have suffered from the shortage of railway rolling stock. Most, if not all of the coal exported from the state-of-the-art bulk coal terminal at Richards Bay gets there by train. With a capacity of 91-million tons, Transnet’s coal lines currently struggle to deliver 70-million tons a year to the terminal, denying coal miners an outlet for some 21-million tons of product and leaving them unable to maintain market share abroad, let alone expand as they might wish to.