Isuzu Motors SA CEO Billy Tom has mooted the idea of a combined assembly plant that could be shared by different motoring brands to help protect and grow the local vehicle manufacturing industry.
There is an opportunity for a shared plant for brands that import cars to SA but don’t yet have the sales volumes to justify local manufacture. They could share the costs of setting up a plant and potentially start with semi knocked-down (SKD) production which requires less investment, then move to full-scale completely knocked-down (CKD) production once they grow their volumes.