Tag: industry

Oil, shale, platinum, electric cars for SA

South Africa’s industrial policy will focus on platinum group metal (PGM) beneficiation, oil and gas from shale and neighbouring countries like Mozambique, and the manufacture of electric cars, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said on Thursday.

These key areas will be the focus for the next three years, he said at the launch of the seventh edition of the plan in Johannesburg, adding that such industrialisation was key to driving economic growth. He said South Africa aimed to achieve 5 percent growth by 2019.

Davies the mineral beneficiation plan for PGMs would be for use in fuel cell technology and for the manufacture of catalytic converters which are mostly used in European vehicles that have to comply with strict emission controls.

In the 84 quarters to the end of 2014, growth of 5 percent had been achieved in 16 of these quarters, he said. This growth was driven by high commodity prices and by consumption, which was import intensive.

But he added that times were changing, with demand for commodities from China falling as quantitative easing ceases and slows consumer demand.

Source: ANA

Sweden ends defence contract with Saudi Arabia

Sweden said on Tuesday it will cancel a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia worth billions of crowns to its industry after criticism of Riyadh’s human rights record sparked a diplomatic row.

Sweden’s Social Democrat-led government, which came to power in October last year, has focused its foreign policy on human rights. But its more vocal stance has put it at odds with industry — Sweden is the world’s 12th biggest arms exporter — and the coalition government itself has been divided on whether to renew the Saudi Arabia deal.

“The decision on the Saudi agreement had been made some time ago,” the newspaper Dagens Nyheter quoted Prime Minister Stefan Lofven as saying in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. “What has happened in recent days hasn’t been decisive.”

On Monday, Saudi Arabia blocked Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom from giving a speech to the League of Arab States in Cairo. A spokesman for Wallstrom said the decision stemmed from Sweden’s criticism of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

The Arab League later agreed a resolution denouncing remarks by Wallstrom to the Swedish parliament, the Saudi Press Agency reported.

The canceled agreement, which includes military systems, training and transfers of technology, netted 4.8 billion crowns ($561 million) in 2011-2014.

Swedish industry leaders have lobbied hard for an extension, arguing Sweden’s reputation as a trade partner was on the line.

Cancellation could affect not only defense firms but companies outside the military sector, 31 business leaders said in an open letter published on Friday in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. They included fashion retailer H&M’s main owner, Stefan Persson, and Investor Chairman Jacob Wallenberg.

Ulf Bjereld, a professor of political science at Gothenburg University, said the cancellation of the deal could lead to Sweden being isolated in world politics.

Source: yahoonews

Sasol stimulates growth in the US

Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies has given an excellent summary of benefits to both the US and Africa in general, and South Africa in particular in The BusinessDay.

The newspaper also reported $14bn worth of company investments into Africa, all emanating from the developed US as a global superpower.

As a proud South African, it gives me great pleasure to remind all that South Africa is the giant at the forefront of stimulating growth in the US. South Africa is re-industrialising the US!

A single former apartheid South African company is doing all of the above by finalising its commitment to invest up to $21bn into the “developed” US. This giant South African petrochemical investment into the US will reindustrialise the US, make the US less dependent on fuel imports, make it less vulnerable to competitive dollar depreciation, and make the politically strong US even stronger.

Thus, when it comes to trade and industry relations between small South Africa and the US superpower, we may be proudly South African and not be too humble: a single South African company invests more into the US economy, strategic industry, fuel independence and associated sovereign power, than a lot of US companies combined do in South Africa.

Thus, the South African investment into the US, via the previously state-owned Sasol (40% of shares are still owned by the Industrial Development Corporation, the Public Investment Corporation and the Government Employees Pension Fund) is gigantic relative to those of the US companies alluded to in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) saga.

I thus predict that Agoa will be extended, South Africa included, because South Africa, via Sasol, is actually the Goliath in the industrial redevelopment and 4% economic growth rate of the US, where unemployment is low.

By Jacob Mouw