Some ‘courageous’ decisions will need to be made for South Africa’s automotive industry to ‘flourish’ and leverage the opportunities in Africa. Image: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg
Speaking on the sidelines of the seminar, Kirby said this deindustrialisation essentially means that South Africa’s automotive sector is going backwards in terms of the objectives of the South Africa Automotive Masterplan because it does not have the environment where it is building any of the six pillars of the masterplan, particularly the first pillar of South African market optimisation.
He stressed that a lot has changed since the policy was developed in 2018, and while the consistency of the policy is important, there is a need to add to it as Thailand has done with its automotive policy.Grow South Africa’s vehicle production to 1% of global output, resulting in completely built-up production increasing to 1.
Moothilal referred to the smart linkages in Thailand between the domestic market incentivisation and production and subsidies. “We need to start thinking about how do you use that domestic market in a way that benefits those that have invested into the country and those that have committed to levels of procurement to make that domestic market more attractive and then build on that and the regional context,” he said.