Specialist valves manufacturer Gunric Valves will continue to focus on customer service, flexibility and short delivery times to maintain a significant market share and retain its clients on a long-term basis.
This is according to Gunric Valves marketing director Mark Wilson, who spoke at the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, in Johannesburg, earlier this month.
“Over the years, our loyal customers and suppliers have supported us tremendously and more recently government has come on board with the Department of Trade and Industry’s National Foundry Technology Network to assist us with our development,” he said.
As a South African-owned company, Gunric Valves has committed to government’s aim of job creation, skills devel- opment, transformation and export competitiveness. Wilson noted that the designation of the valves sector would assist the company in achieving success in these areas.
“Gunric has done extremely well. It is a new beginning for the company and South Africa and the platform is set for you to get yourself going,” said Capital Equipment Export Council CEO Sybil Rhomberg.
Meanwhile, Wilson noted that constantly increasing wages and raw material input pricing had made being competitive against imports difficult and added that complying with the broad- based black economic- empowerment (BBBEE) codes was a challenge for manufacturers.
It was particularly difficult to get a good score for the pro- curement and enterprise development sector of the BBBEE scorecard, as raw material suppliers were traditionally white-owned companies that scored low on BBBEE cards, which, in turn, affected companies’ ratings.
“We would like to grow as part of the valves manufacturing sector and hope to see the number of people, the number of artisans and the number of young black players entering the industry increasing conti- nually,” Wilson concluded.