Toyota SA’s new plant creates more than 400 jobs

MORE than 400 new jobs have been created by a more than R550 million investment by Toyota South Africa in its new Quantum/Ses’fikile minibus taxi vehicle plant in Prospecton in Durban.

Johan van Zyl, the chief executive of Toyota Europe and Africa region, said yesterday the investment included R24m that was invested with suppliers for the development of parts and tooling, and the R74m investment in the first phase of the project to assemble Quantum/Ses’fikile models on a semi-knocked down (SKD) basis.

He was speaking at the official opening of the plant, which now employs 300 people and produces one Quantum mini bus vehicle every 20 minutes.

Van Zyl said South Africa was a very important market to Toyota globally in terms of supply to the rest of the world and it served as a gateway to the African continent.

“With over R550m invested in the Quantum plant to date, it certainly underlines Toyota’s confidence in this country.

“This sizeable investment shows that Toyota is committed to development in the taxi industry and to continue its contribution to the country as a whole,” he said.

Bruce Avern Taplin, the vicepresident for Quantum, said with SKD assembly, the body of the vehicle was imported to South Africa fully assembled and painted with many other fitting parts partially assembled.

Taplin said transition to completely knocked down (CKD) production involved the importation of the body panels, which were then welded together in the plant, painted and assembled to the fitting parts.

To achieve this, Toyota South Africa needed to construct a new facility and had at the same time chosen to increase the number of local parts it used to produce the Quantum/Ses’fikile, he said.

Taplin added that Quantum and Hino truck production shared the same building during the SKD phase but Hino production had to be relocated to make space for the new Quantum weld, paint, assembly and logistics facilities when it moved to CKD production of the Quantum/Ses’fikile.

He said the change from SKD to CKD production and the manual nature of the plant operation had resulted in the creation of an additional 260 jobs, with 45 percent of the new recruits being young people.

Taplin said increasing the localisation of parts in the Quantum/Ses’fikile resulted in Toyota South Africa engaging the services of 25 South African suppliers, who together supplied an additional 61 parts.

These included seats, glass, wire harnesses, batteries, roof linings, instrument panels, exhausts and starters, he said.

“This in turn has created an additional 165 jobs in the supply chain and the suppliers invested a total of R95m in their own facilities. It is also our intention to further increase the local content at a later stage,” Taplin said.

He added that the new processes and new people recruited in the plant required a very comprehensive training programme, and R11m was invested in training their own employees, with 22 of them exposed to international standards and benchmarking through further training conducted in Thailand and Japan over a period of three months.

Rob Davies, the Department of Trade and Industry Minister, said this event was taking place at a time when, contrary to what might be read in some newspapers, foreign direct investment across a range of manufacturing sectors continued to be very buoyant.

“In the automotive sector alone, our industrial policies have supported investments of about R24.5 billion in the period since the launch of the Automotive Production and Development Programme in January 2013,” he said.