[141010.EN.SEA] Trades to Watch: South and West Africa (part 1)

IN view of the gloomy projections surrounding second half shipping demand on the major east-west trades, The Container Shipping Manager has in recent weeks been looking at some of the emerging markets, which may help to soften the blow of any serious slowdown in the major trades.
In the first of our Trades to Watch series, we looked at the East Coast South American market, which proved to be a potentially very profitable trade, as did the Persian Gulf market, which we looked at most recently.

Today in The Container Shipping Manager we will begin to look into the African market, with a focus on South Africa.

As we can see in the above graph, the African market is quite small, but it is growing nonetheless, according to one analyst we spoke to.

“The region has been hindered by a number of issues from inadequate infrastructure to security etc… But lately, with many nations hungry for raw materials they have started to look to the African region as a source.

As such, investments have started to pour in and trade is beginning to move,” he said.

South Africa is the most significant market on the African continent. It hosts both the largest and third largest ports in Africa and accounts for 82 per cent of all African throughput, as can be seen in the below graph.

The South African trade can be broken down into three segments:

1) North-South trade covering Europe/Mediterranean to and from South Africa.

                                                                                                                            - to be continued ---

Source : CSM, 04.10.10.