This year marks a landmark moment for UD Trucks Southern Africa (UDTSA) as the brand expands its network footprint in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in its quest to becoming the continent’s leading Japanese commercial vehicle manufacturer.
This serves as a major milestone for UDTSA as it aims to strengthen its presence in the existing markets by offering a comprehensive range of quality commercial vehicles, including heavy, medium, and light trucks - in addition to expanding into new markets in line with the company’s sales growth strategy in Africa.
We sat down with Graham Kolm, General Manager: Sub-Saharan Africa: New Markets to hear all about the robust plans to reinforce UDTSA’s product and service offering in the current markets, and the growth strategy in the new markets.
What does a productive day in the life of Graham look like?
For me, a productive day starts with daily planning, clear objectives, monitoring progress, and constant follow-up plan. A critical lesson I have learned over the years “don’t be the bottleneck”.
What is the driving force behind your success?
I attribute my success to ingredients such as passion, humbleness, relationships, and a competent team.
In your current role as General Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, what are the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome in efforts to meet the demands of a changing market?
The African continent is riddled with challenges in many forms, whether it is logistics, foreign currency, deteriorating road infrastructure, skill shortages etc. For me personally, the biggest challenge was during Covid, navigating restrictions, working from home, border controls and no flights. These affected importers and created an inability to see customers. This has, however, sparked new innovations in terms of how we operate and out-of-the-box thinking. As a result, we were able to achieve the No.1 spot in Africa, 2021 (Note: Exports from SA only).
Take us through the company’s new developments following the expansion to Sub-Saharan Africa and what does this portfolio entail?
UD Trucks Southern Africa proudly boasts a dealer network footprint in 9 countries, where we support sales, service, and parts. SSA currently has a 15% market share overall and we are very excited about the recently announced developments to broaden our portfolio to support customers in 42 countries, with a secure footprint across the continent.
What factors drove the decision to enter new markets?
A very clear and ambitious vision towards 2030 to grow Sub-Saharan Africa to new heights and establish a solid foundation for “cross border business” for the next generation, supporting our valued customers into the future with transport solutions.
What criteria do you use to identify new markets for expansion?
We utilise a couple of key factors in identifying the right markets for entry, such as market size, potential segmentation, industry development, lateral and horizontal corridor support, as well as country location for possible assembly, e.g. Kenya, to name a few.
Have economic or regulatory challenges impacted expansion plans? If so, how did you navigate them?
Economically, from an expansion perspective in SSA, it has its downsides in some areas, such as currency liquidity and unrest in a country or at borders. From a regulatory perspective, it is not of great concern pertaining to trucks, however, duties, tax, excise duty, and CO2 tax all play a major role delivering the final product to our customers.
How do you plan to ensure that the new dealers/importers align with the company’s culture and customer experience standards?
We pride ourselves on having a great dealer operating system with qualitative audits to ensure ongoing improvement to ‘Gemba’ with ‘Kaizen’.
9.How does UD Trucks adapt its product offering to meet the specific demands of the Sub-Saharan market?
We looked at 5 key elements to ensure that our product offering meet the growing demands of the region: Productivity, Fuel Efficiency, Drivability, Safety and Uptime to help our customers achieve lowest Total cost of Ownership possible over the life of a vehicle.
What strategies are in place to enhance after-sales support and service excellence?
Our plan is to maximise uptime through ensuring availability of parts at dealer level, competent technicians, service personnel, and providing customers with fleet management solution systems to keep their trucks on the road
11. Are there any emerging trends or innovations that will shape the future of expansion?
Our plan is to maximise uptime through ensuring availability of parts at dealer level, competent technicians, service personnel, and providing customers with fleet management solution systems to keep their trucks on the road.
We see the rapid shift in the commercial vehicle industry to electrification, connectivity and automation as innovations that will shape the future expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa.
What is the long-term vision of further expanding the dealer footprint in Sub-Saharan Africa?
Our long-term vision is to have UD Trucks in every African country by 2030.
