Nissan has announced a SAR1bn (US$120m) investment in its South African plant in Rosslyn, Pretoria to double production to about 100,000 units a year.
The Japanese carmaker’s chief operating officer Toshiyuki Shiga said the increase in production would begin from the 2014 financial year.
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The move is in response to the long-awaited new South African industry plan — the Automotive Production and Development Programme (APDP) which will be implemented next year. It will allow vehicle manufacturers with a plant volume of at least 50,000 units a year, to import a percentage of their components duty free.
The plan seeks to encourage the industry to ramp up total South African vehicle production to 1.2m units annually by 2020. Shiga said that Nissan’s Pretoria plant would be able to export more vehicles to other African countries.
The investment will add around 800 jobs at the plant and a further 4,000 throughout the supplier community. The National Association of Automobile Manufacturers’s Nico Vermeulen, said: “This is excellent news. It shows confidence in our industry …. BMW launched its new 3-series, Ford its new Ranger, VW its Polo Vivo and so on, all recently. Toyota made a big investment in 2006. We can see that major automotive manufacturers are on course to work with the APDP, which shows the industry is on a good track.”
Nissan’s Rosslyn plant last year produced 54,000 vehicles, up from 25,000 in 2008.
