Top exporter grew from garage to global player
Jendamark Automation wins EC award
A COMPANY that started out in a garage and is now a global player in the automotive industry last night took high honours as the top exporter in the Eastern Cape.
Jendamark Automation was named the overall winner at a glittering event at the Boardwalk Convention Centre. The theme for the evening at the Eastern Cape Exporters Club’s Exporter of the Year Awards banquet was fire and ice, with top Johannesburg electrical string quartet The Muses entertaining the cream of the province’s business crop.
Absa Barclays head of Africa trade Jason Barrass, who was the keynote speaker, said it was rewarding to honour exporters in a challenging year where the labour challenges in the country were estimated to have cost the economy R9-billion, with most of this revenue being lost in export contracts.
He invited exporters, particularly the automotive and manufacturing sectors in the province, to take advantage of the untapped opportunity that exports to Nigeria offered. “Nigeria has a throbbing consumer economy hungry for imports. It offers untapped opportunities for those South African companies bold enough to go into the market,” Barrass said.
Announcing the overall winner of the Exporter of the Year awards, Eastern Cape Exporters Club chairman Quintin Levey said Jendamark Automation was established in Port Elizabeth out of a garage in 1989.
And, since starting to export in 2002, it has grown into a global player, opening offices in Germany and India to assist the company’s growth in those markets.
The company had over the last 12 months increased its profitability by 130%.
“The Volkswagen Group concluded a global study on all their engine lines, comparing efficiency versus cost, and the line this company commissioned for Volkswagen Group South Africa (VWSA) was found to be the best in the world. They recently received an order to design, manufacture, install and commission an engine assembly line for the 1.5TDI Polo for Volkswagen India, it being their largest export project to date.
“They received 28 new orders over the last year, spanning eight different countries, resulting in the value of their Euro exports increasing by 200%, and their total exports increasing by 188%,” Levey said.
Jendamark Automation also won the Best Exporter award in the category Medium Enterprise (for companies with an export turnover of between R25-million and R100-million) for their export assembly lines to the US, India, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Spain and Mexico.
VWSA was also recognised in two categories as overall winner of the Best Exporter in the Original Equipment Manufacturer category as well as the SJM Flex Environmental Award winner. Not only had VWSA reduced the carbon footprint of its factory, but it also reduced the carbon footprint of the products it produced in the past year.
Another company that won in two categories was Shatterprufe, which won the IDC Job Creation Award for increasing its workforce by 55 jobs over the past year. Shatterprufe also claimed the category for Best Exporter in the Corporate category for exporters with a turnover greater than R100-million.
The Best Exporter in the Small Business category (turnover up to R25-million) was Howden Donkin, a manufacturer and supplier of fans and accessories for the local and international markets.
In the category for the best provider of services to exporters, the Coega Development Corporation was named overall winner.