West Africa market keeps CT container park buzzing ‘State-of-the-art facility in the making’

Ray Smuts CAPE TOWN’S former Freight City - once hailed as your ‘one-stop’ freight complex - has taken on a decidely smarter, more appealing, look in the hands of Uniroute Logistics which has so far committed R20 million to the Maitland site. Two years ago Durban businessman and Uniroute co-founder Raj Balmakhan told FTW the intention was to invest between R4 and R5million in the complex. But business considerations have no doubt changed somewhat since then as the combined cost of the complex’s two new, four-high, full container handlers is more than that. “We want to make Uniroute Lower Station Road a state-of-the-art container park and we are almost there,” says national marketing manager Chris Dyason. Starting out in February on the 6000 TEU site, existing warehouses were reclad, the entire area resurfaced and G-blocked to withstand the weight of full containers, and a modern Uniroute regional office complex built. The new warehouse has been allocated to Coca-Cola Canners while another major client, SAB Export, occupies Uniroute’s other warehouse a stone’s throw away in Rusper Road Maitland. The function that Uniroute fulfils for both is packing containers with product destined for West Africa Currently in peak season Dyason reckons about 100 TEU are being packed weekly for Coca-Cola and 120 TEU for SAB Export, mostly Castle beer. Ongoing imposition of the US$100/TEU surcharge in the Port of Durban has led to Coca-Cola Canners assigning the bulk of export production to its plant at Epping outside Cape Town. (It has a plant in Pinetown near Durban). Dyason believes that had the surcharge not been in force the likely scenario would have been a 50/50 production split between the plants. But as things now stand Epping is probably handling 90% of the load, most of it to Angola. With a vision of becoming Africa’s number one logistics service provider, Uniroute operates a wide range of services including FCL/LCL and groupage container packing and unpacking, general warehousing, full and empty container handling, cargo repair and re-unitising. Its transport fleet is equipped for container cartage. Apart from the new-look Uniroute Lower Station Road site the company also maintains container depots and warehousing operations at Kaserne in Johannesburg and at Bayhead and Maydon Wharf in Durban.