Volvo has announced that it would spend about R48 million opening a new truck assembly plant in South Africa in a move that has spawned further developments in the heavy commercial vehicle sector.
Volvo has announced that it would spend about R48 million opening a new truck assembly plant in South Africa in a move that has spawned further developments in the heavy commercial vehicle sector.
The manufacturer is currently closing its operations in Botswana, where 1 000 truck kits have been assembled each year since 2000. The trucks assembled at the Gabarone plant were mainly sold in South Africa, and assembling them locally would reduce the freight costs and cut delivery time.
“We will make substantial savings,” Glen Owen, general manager of Volvo’s industrical division in South Africa, said before adding that the cost of shipping truck parts from Port Elizabeth to Gaborone was about 60 percent of the cost of transport from Gothenburg, Sweden.
The new assembly plant is being established in Durban and the trucks should start rolling off the line in December. The local plant has the capacity to produce about 1 600 trucks a year and would create 82 jobs.
It will also be used to assemble the chassis for Volvo’s B7 R bus from the beginning of next year. That product would have a production capacity of about 60 to 100 units per year.
