Ford Motor Company Africa president Neale Hill has taken over the reins at Naamsa | The Automotive Business Council until 2023. He succeeds Toyota South Africa Motors president and CEO Andrew Kirby.
The new manufacturing original- equipment manufacturers (OEMs) VP at the automotive industry body is Isuzu Motors South Africa president and CEO Billy Tom, with Kia South Africa CEO Gary Scott as the incoming retailing OEMs VP.
UD Trucks Southern Africa MD Filip van den Heede has been elected as the VP for heavy commercial vehicle OEMs.
In his yearly presidential report, Kirby noted that the sharp drop in global and domestic market demand through the early part of last year, caused by the abrupt and widespread stoppage of trade and economic activity, owing to Covid-19, had “severely impacted” on the globally integrated South African automotive value chain.
As a result, the automotive industry’s contribution to the fiscus declined by 23.4%, to 4.9%, in 2020, compared with the 6.4% contribution to gross domestic product in 2019.
Measuring the industry’s progress for the year-to-date September shows that new- vehicle sales have increased by 30.3% in the first nine months of the year, with exports up 19.6%, vehicle production up 21.7% and imports up 34.4%, compared with the corresponding period last year.
“While we welcome this progression for the year under review, compared to 2020, we are still not out of the woods yet, because our year-to-date domestic new-vehicle sales numbers are still 13.3% below the recorded numbers for 2019 year-to-date [pre-Covid],” said Kirby.
“Export and import sales also reflect a decline of 25.4% and 8.8% respectively, compared with 2019 year-to-date.
“Our domestic production numbers also show a 22.8% drop, compared with the same period in 2019.
“Our Naamsa team predicts that a full market recovery is likely to be protracted until around 2023.”
Kirby added that year-to-date domestic sales of electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and traditional hybrids had grown by 28.8%, compared with the same period last year, and have also increased by 13.4%, compared with the 2019 pre-Covid-19 statistics.