24th March, 2020 — Dilley Naidoo, CEO of Madala & Associates, and Director of RSPH says, “Currently, South Africa has over 20% of its manufactured goods imported from China. This is one of the largest dependencies compared to other countries globally.” Given that China has until now been the hardware manufacturing capital globally and is no longer operating, this should highlight our over-dependency on imports. The outbreak of Covid-19 internationally should be a wake-up call on the impact of our dependency on imported products in general.

South African distributors and consumers in the supply chain have not escaped this over-reliance on Chinese imports of manufactured products, and in addition to the economic impact, the lack of materials is impacting operations, end customer delivery and overall satisfaction, which is why we should not ‘put all our manufacturing ‘eggs’ in the China basket.’