Seafreight major Maersk Line has forecast a small but steady growth in exports in the southern African container trade for the year ahead – based largely on an increase in reefer products and mining commodities. Imports, on the other hand, will remain sluggish. “The markets to Asia and Middle East are growing at the fastest rate (more than 15%) because of higher demand for mining commodities in India and China, whereas manufactured exports are stagnating,” said Matthew Conroy, trade manager of Maersk Line Southern Africa. He further highlighted that year-to-date (YTD) figures for the first three quarters of 2017 had shown that 45.3% of the container trade was a result of exports (54.7% imports), which is slightly up from a year ago (44.7%) but well above the 2012 figure of 42.3%. “So there has been a continuing ‘balancing of trade’, which is largely due to the increase in export mining commodities, especially chrome and manganese,” he said. Conroy added that refrigerated exports had grown by 14% in the third quarter, which was mostly due to a strong citrus crop, coupled with strong demand overseas for South African fruit. The import market has grown by 9% YTD, with the majority of this growth coming from Asia (13%) – which represents 53% of imports into South Africa. “Compared to 2015 however, 2017 saw no market growth.” He said the main reason for this was that in 2016 inventory stocks had run very low, whereas in 2017 stocks had been replenished to a higher degree. “Considering the sluggish consumer spending seen in the current market, I suspect that there will be a future slowdown in import market growth. It is likely that 2018 will probably see a slowdown to low single digit growth,” he said.
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The markets to Asia and Middle East are growing at the fastest rate. – matthew conroy
