S. Africa industry upgrade needs bigger market of BRICS
June 10th 2013
South Africa's Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies on Sunday said the country came into BRICS at a fortunate time when it began to cooperate with economic agenda and the industrialization here needs a bigger market.
"BRICS (stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is the most significant grouping of developing countries in the world..We have to move into..from primary production to value-added production,"
the miniter said.
"That has to be driven by regional integration, because .. the domestic market of our country is too small to provide that," said Davies in his keynote address in the post-BRICS seminar at Wits Business School.
The minister also said South Africa takes BRICS as a platform to address challenges in intra-BRICS trade and to coordinate in WTO as a group.
The biggest economy in African continent will also gain advancing support from BRICS for Africa's development agenda, such as regional integration, industrial capacity and infrastructure development.
The bilateral trade between South Africa and other member countries grows steadily from 2005 to 2012, in which the trade volume with China is bigger than the volume with India, Brazil and Russia together, according to the ministry's data.
The minister said the investment from China had been diversified, as Beijing Automotive, the First Automobile(FAW), and some Chinese TV factory built in South Africa.
Many examples showed Chinese support was behind the South Africa's success in the whole continent, said Frontier Advisory CEO, Dr Martyn Davies.
He gave the example of Standard Bank, which is the biggest commercial bank in Africa, leveraging the Chinese bank, ICBC. The biggest mobile service provider of the continent is MTN, Mobile Telephone Network, sharing the partnerships with Huawei and ZTE, both Chinese companies.