Planned expansions to SA harbours should ease the frustration of motor companies complaining about their poor service, Transnet CEO Portia Derby said on Wednesday.
However, she said efforts to improve freight rail services between Johannesburg and Durban, which handles most of SA’s automotive trade, continued to be undone by uncontrolled electric-cable theft.
Derby said deepening and expanding the Durban and East London harbours would allow more and bigger ships to dock, and greatly reduce the time it took them to load and offload vehicles and components. For example, the increased docking space would allow ships to discharge their vehicles through two doors instead of one.
She said Durban would remain the main hub for automotive trade. Deepening of the harbour would double the size of ships able to dock there. In the 2022/23 financial year, the harbour had capacity to handle 460,000 vehicles annually. By next year, this would increase to 585,000, with a 1-million target by 2025.
Further capacity could be released by halting the import of used vehicles through the harbour. It is estimated that up to 55,000 used vehicles are imported annually, mainly through Durban. Officially, they are destined for neighbouring countries but most remain illegally in SA, where used imports are banned.
Between 2022 and 2025, Derby said East London port, where Mercedes-Benz has a dockside vehicle assembly plant, would grow annual vehicle capacity from 136,000 to 250,000, and Gqeberha port, which will also undergo modernisation, from 150,000 to 450,000.
To meet their potential, however, these ports need reliable freight rail services. Derby said the Gauteng-Durban rail corridor could handle 47 trains daily in each direction. Because of cable theft, she said this number was sometimes down to single figures.
On some parts of the line in KwaZulu-Natal, new cables would sometimes be gone within an hour of being laid to replace stolen cables. One answer, she said, was to use diesel trains instead of electric ones — though environmentalists might have something to say about that.
Last year, Ford SA completed a R16bn investment to build the new Ford Ranger bakkie at its Silverton assembly plant in Tshwane. As part of the deal, Transnet undertook to provide a direct freight link from the nearby Waltloo station to Gqeberha port, through which Ford also exports engines manufactured near the port.
Derby said she hoped the link, with a planned annual capacity of 150,000 vehicles, would be completed in 2026.
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